The COVID Essay - Is your Student Missing Out?
You may have heard about the new optional essay of the 2020-21 Common App:
“Community disruptions such as COVID-19 and natural disasters can have deep and long-lasting impacts. If you need it, this space is yours to describe those impacts. Colleges care about the effects on your health and well-being, safety, family circumstances, future plans, and education, including access to reliable technology and quiet study spaces. Do you wish to share anything on this topic? Y/N. Please use this space to describe how these events have impacted you.”
Like with all optional components of this years admissions cycle ( click here to read if your student should still be sending in SAT/ACT test scores this year), how does your student know what option is best for them?
Options are opportunities.
The Wall Street Journal recently published an article with several quotes from the respective deans of admissions at schools like University of Pennsylvania and Dickinson College, to name a few, explaining how unique this opportunity is. Eric Furda, from UPenn, says that colleges are looking to read about the context of students’ lives during Covid, which means “hunting deep for insight about how Covid affected them, how they were able to derive meaning from it, how it will impact them moving forward.'” In other words, students have an opportunity to demonstrate individual adaptability, determination, and self-motivation, on an unprecedented, global scale.
Optional doesn’t mean irrelevant.
Anyone who has applied to highly selective colleges in the last several decades knows that most of their application was filled with things that were technically optional, but still expected. It’s never been required to take as many AP classes as possible, be president of the French club, or become a National Merit Scholar, but in order to be viewed as a competitive applicant by an elite college, your student has to go the extra mile. In other words, what is “optional” is actually still expected.
Everyone has been affected.
Regardless of the scale, every student has been affected by the pandemic. Everyone has had to make sacrifices both on a long term and short term basis, including this year’s applicants who endured a massive interruption to the ending of their high school careers. It’s impossible to ignore the global crisis and all of its effects on our everyday activities and resources, which means everyone has been forced to grow and change in some way. As Catherine Davenport, dean of admissions at Dickinson College says, “That’s a unique story.”
The point of a college application is to show the school of your student’s choosing why they would be a great fit there. Omitting a part of their application, even though it’s optional, is limiting their opportunities to demonstrate that potential.
For more information on how to answer this essay, read our posts about the “Ideal” College Applicant during Covid – part one & part two. And for deciding how exactly to tell your student’s Covid story, reach out to one of our Ivy Link experts here.
