Williams is an extremely selective and well-respected liberal arts college in Williamstown, Massachusetts. The school is small, tight-knit, and offers both an exceptional education and outstanding community. This attracts many top high school applicants, often with the fallacy that it’ll be easier to get into than the Ivy League — but that isn’t really the case anymore. Williams isn’t a member of the Ivy League, but it is like getting into the Ivy League. The acceptance rate for the class of 2028 was only 7.5%.
Before you start your application for Williams, you need to get to know the school. Chances are you won’t be able to visit before applying — most students don’t — but that isn’t an excuse to just make assumptions around how you’ll fit into Williams academically or socially. Williams has only about 2,000 students, so it’s important to really explore what it would be like to be one of them, from the classroom to the residence hall to the dining options. If you absolutely need a grain bowl with garlic soy tofu and baby spinach, for example, they’ve got you. If all this has you super excited, don’t worry too much about taking notes, though. Williams doesn’t have a “why us?” supplement as part of their application, so you won’t need to prove through your writing that you know the school.
Williams does have a supplement, albeit an untraditional one. So, in this post we’ll tell you what you do need to take notes on to write the strongest application possible.
Applying to highly-selective colleges requires preparation and strategy. Contact us for a personal approach with a proven track record.
Most colleges with supplements ask you to write original work that specifically connects to the school and helps them see how you are a perfect fit. Williams doesn’t do this. At all. Instead, Williams invites you to submit a piece of writing you’ve done outside of the college application process. We say “invites” because it is technically optional. You don’t have to submit anything in addition to your standard Common App. However, if you’ve read any of our posts about college application supplements before, you know that ‘optional’ doesn’t actually mean optional.
Not submitting an ‘optional’ supplement is like handing the application readers an excuse to reject you. You may as well wave a flag in the air that says, “I’m not that into you.” Which is all to say, you must do this supplement. But how?
This is what Williams says,
“If you are interested in submitting an example of your academic writing, you may share a 3-5 page paper written in the last year. The paper may be creative or analytical, can cover any topic, and need not be graded. Please include a description of the assignment or prompt and do not submit lab reports.”
Now let’s break this down.
Length
Some students see that you can upload the document and decide that this is permission to completely ignore the page restrictions. We entreat these students to please, please, cease and desist. You absolutely must follow directions. You may not make the margins tiny to squeeze more words in. You may not decrease the font size till it’s nearly illegible, either. You must choose a piece that is actually, genuinely, 3-5 pages.
Topic & Style
Now that we’ve squared away the length issue, it’s time to pick a piece of writing. Don’t start by simply choosing the work you got the best grade on. Instead, we need to apply some filters. First, filter by potential major or, if you major doesn’t incorporate writing, minor. If you are into history, this may be easy. If you are looking to major in math, though, you may want to consider listing a secondary interest in whatever subject you’ve performed well in writing-wise. Maybe you did really well in junior year English, and so you could pick an essay from that class and include English as a secondary interest to make everything link together.
What we don’t recommend, though, is picking a piece of writing from a subject that you don’t show any interest in anywhere else in your application. Everything should link together.
But What if I Don’t Have Anything?
It’s very possible that you don’t have a piece of writing immediately in mind for this prompt, and you may want to use that as an excuse to skip over this supplement entirely. We think that’s a bad call. But starting on this application early can be your solution. Since you don’t need a grade, you could ask a teacher to assign you writing such that you can have something to submit. Yes, this is a little backwards. However, if your school system doesn’t assign writing that fits the bill, this is sort of simply what you have to do. And it’s not bending the rules because you are writing to an assignment and your teacher will see it, and they may even give you a grade.
This is actually the reason we hate this supplement. We work with a ton of students who don’t have assignments that would fit this bill. We think asking students to write original pieces of writing (classic supplements) is more of an equalizing exercise than this. It also allows schools to get to know why students want to attend the school. We would love for Williams to make a tiktok/youtube video/long-form blog post explaining why they decided to have students submit previously written papers. If you want our suggestion, @Williams, just ask the kids “why do you want to go here (250 words)?”
When we get panicked emails from rejected or waitlisted students (not our clients, to be clear) wondering why they weren’t let in, the most common similarity is that they didn’t submit an optional supplement. They saw “optional,” and they took it seriously. This can be true for test scores too, by the way. Williams is currently test optional, meaning you don’t have to submit an ACT or SAT score, but that doesn’t mean that not submitting couldn’t damage your chances of admission. Don’t fall into either trap.
If you want to go to Williams, you need to step up to the challenge Williams has set before you and knock it out of the park.
If you want to get into an exceptional school, it takes a team. Email us.