Is Recycling Supplemental Essays Smart?

So you’ve written your Common App Personal Statement. Now you have to crank out more essays?  It’s true: supplemental essays are often the hidden workload of the application process. But the good news is that you don’t always have to start from scratch. There are ways to use existing supplemental essays to simplify what can sometimes feel like a daunting task. With careful planning, you can recycle these essays to save time and reduce stress.

When Recycling Works

Many colleges ask similar questions, just worded differently. Some common ones are:

• “Why Us? (“Why do you want to attend our school?”)
• “Describe one of your extracurricular activities.”
• “What is your major choice?” (Describe your academic interests and goals.”)
• “How will you contribute to our campus?”

These prompts center around the same themes: academic passions, values, and how you’ll contribute to a campus community. If you’ve already written a solid essay for one school, it can often be adapted for another one. This also applies to scholarship essays. When there are similar questions across various applications, it can make sense to adapt an existing essay to fit more than one.

How to Reuse Essays Effectively

1. Identify Common Themes
   To identify where overlap exists, try grouping questions that seem similar. Organize your supplemental prompts by type—such as “Why us?”, extracurricular reflections, community impact, or intellectual curiosity. Then list the parts of essays you’ve already written that you could potentially recycle.
2. Customize Details
   It’s ok to reuse your central story or idea, but you need to tailor the specifics. For example, if you’re reusing a “Why major?” essay, include references to specific courses, professors, or programs offered by each additional school.
3. Be Authentic
   Don’t force an essay to fit a school if it doesn’t truly align with what that college offers. You don’t want your essay to be flagged as being too generic. Remember, the whole purpose of supplemental essays is to help colleges get to know you as an individual, and to assess how you would fit in on their campuses.
4. Watch the Word Count
   A 400-word limit for one essay may be 250 for a similar essay at a different school. Pay close attention to the exact wording of the prompt, include the strongest parts of your original essay, then trim the second one down as necessary.
5. Proofread Carefully
   Recycling can come with risks. One of them is that you could mistakenly leave another college’s name in your essay. An error like this could undermine your entire application, so be sure to proofread all essays carefully.

When Not to Recycle

There are some cases when you should obviously avoid recycling essays. These include:

• Unique or highly specific prompts (e.g., The University of Vermont: “Established in Burlington, VT, Ben & Jerry’s is synonymous with both ice cream and social change. The ‘Save Our Swirled’ flavor raises awareness of climate change, and ‘I Dough, I Dough’ celebrates marriage equality. If you worked alongside Ben & Jerry, what charitable flavor would you develop and why?”)  
• Highly personal school-specific essays (check out UChicago’s quirky prompts or Wake Forest’s Maya Angelou question: “Choose one of Dr. Angelou’s powerful quotes. How does this quote relate to your lived experience or reflect how you plan to contribute to the Wake Forest community?”) These should be approached from scratch.

Don’t look at recycling supplemental essays as a way to cut corners. It’s all about working smarter. By reusing core ideas and thoughtfully tailoring them to each school, you’ll save time while still showing genuine interest. But don’t let college essay fatigue guide you. When you need to write a new essay, do it. If you have to convince yourself that a particular essay could be recycled, it probably can’t. Every essay you write — whether recycled or not — should specifically address the prompt and tell your own story in a way that is unique to you.

At Moxie College Counseling, we help students navigate the various components of college admissions. Our experienced counselors and essay specialists will guide you through the process to make this a meaningful, stress-free journey. For more information, contact us.