How to use your Common App for Ivy League supplementals: Yale

With roughly 6400 students (5500 undergraduates/900 graduates), Yale is an hour away from big cities. It will give students a very different environment from Harvard's 20k+, with the same level of tradition and education, having produced the most Rhodes Scholars in the last decade.

Below is a match-up for Yale’s supplementals and your Common App essay.

Yale supplementals (2022-2023)

TOPIC	PROMPT
Yale’s residential colleges regularly host conversations with guests representing a wide range of experiences and accomplishments. What person, past or present, would you invite to speak? What would you ask them to discuss? (200 characters or fewer)	1, 4, 6
You could talk about your background, respected people, or just a topic you feel is relevant to everyone. If you’ve prepared Common App 1, 4, and 6, you’ll find that you have a variety of choices for content selection.
You are teaching a new Yale course. What is it called? (200 characters or fewer)	1, 6
Imagine you’ve finished all of your education and now you’re doing your job. Whatever it is, imagine you are a respected leader in that field and now you’ve been asked to teach the thing that you know. What would you want that to be? What is the topic that presents an ambiguity that you cannot leave alone? Name the course, be clever, but keep the character count in mind.
What is something about you that is not included anywhere else in your application? (200 characters or fewer)	1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Keeping in mind that all of the biggest, most visible accomplishments are going to be in your application package somewhere, this is going to be a thoughtful opportunity to put in a statement that stays with the admissions committee. Talk about a goal, a dream, a quote from your grandmother -- something that doesn’t need a lot of words to carry a lot of weight.
What inspires you? (200 characters or fewer)	1, 6
Big connections, small word count. “The possibility of contributing to the solution of large-scale problems that impact the entire world, including people I love very much, is what drives me to dig deeper into the field of nanotechnology as I grow in experience. (188 characters)” “Improving the perception of art through the application of scientific methods that increase awareness of the underlying discrepancies in global resource procurement is the source of my passion in this field.” (179 words) You won’t be able to say much more than this. Keep it short, don’t make it vague.
What is it about Yale that has led you to apply? (125 words or fewer)	1, 3, 6
Don’t talk about the brand, talk about the features: go into a specific department or professor. Tell the admissions people why you want to go here SPECIFICALLY. “I want to go listen to THIS professor because they wrote THIS paper that I really like, and it helped me win THESE projects and awards.” Show that this essay is not some template essay you send off to all of the schools. Make “Yale” details so they know you put some time into it.
Tell us about a topic or idea that excites you and is related to one or more academic areas you selected above. Why are you drawn to it? (200 words or fewer)	1, 6
We already did “what inspires you?” and in case you said “jelly beans” and stated no clear interest in your Common App, this topic confirms this school will not let you avoid answering what essentially amounts to “what do you want to major in later?” Having this prepped during Common App (by doing full outlines for all topics) will make all of these supplementals so much easier later. And, as you can see, you really can’t avoid them later on if you are applying to tier 1 schools.
Reflect on a time when you have worked to enhance a community to which you feel connected. Why have these efforts been meaningful to you? You may define community however you like. (400 words or fewer	1, 4, 5
One of the biggest reasons for having outreach activities on your application is because many of the best schools want students who display empathy and compassion. If you have already used up the activity in your Common App, there may be aspects of that activity that you haven’t quite covered. Specifically, make sure you talk about the emotional experience of being connected together, working towards the same goal. This could be a club, a charity, a competition – anything where there was “community,” however you define it.
Yale carries out its mission “through the free exchange of ideas in an ethical, interdependent, and diverse community.” Reflect on a time when you exchanged ideas about an important issue with someone holding an opposing view. How did the experience lead you either to change your opinion or to sharpen your reasons for holding onto it? (400 words or fewer)	2, 3
You could more or less just drop the full outline from topic 2 or 3 and build it out to a 400 word essay immediately. Again, it saves time to prep all of the common app topics in advance; you will have to do this anyway if you’re submitting applications to any of the Ivy League schools.