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Early Action:
The Requirements: 3 essays of 250-400 words each
Supplemental Essay Type(s): Community, Activity, Oddball
In addition to the personal essay in the Common Application or the Coalition Application, applicants to Caltech must complete required supplemental short-answer essays. These are questions that the Admissions Committee has devised to get to know you better as a student, scientist, and person, and ascertain who you’ll be on our campus.
There’s only one trick to selecting a major or generating a straightforward list of your academic interests: be honest. If you already know what you want to major in or have it narrowed down to two choices, you’re set! Don’t waste time trying to strategize because choosing anything other than your true interests would be a misrepresentation of who you are and a disservice to yourself and the admissions office. This assignment will, no doubt, be most challenging for the undecideds, but ask yourself: how can you use this opportunity to reveal something about what excites you intellectually or academically?
You’ve only got 200 words, but if you chose wisely in the previous question, answering this one should be easy as pie. Whether you listed one or two interests, your goal here is to tell a cohesive story about your intellectual curiosity. Ideally, you should try to recount an anecdote that illustrates your engagement with your chosen field or demonstrates your ability to link together seemingly disparate fields. Perhaps you’re interested in both philosophy and astrophysics because each offers a way for you to contemplate our place in the universe. This is a great opportunity for you to explain how your intellectual interests relate to who you are as a person. Don’t waste it!
For these two short answer responses, we recommend using concrete sensory details to pull your reader into the story. Strong responses will not only describe the project at hand, but also make the readers feel like they’re in the room where it happened (“the room where it happened”). What about the project captured your attention and curiosity? How did you develop your skills or interest in STEM as a result of your participation? How did this experience have lay the foundation for your future STEM-related pursuits? If you’re applying to Caltech, we’re willing to bet you have a few experiences to choose from, so we recommend writing about the two that were most intellectually engaging for you.
Admissions is seeking to invite movers and shakers to campus who are excited and motivated to turn their dreams into reality. Whether you’ve been experimenting with robotics or spending your summers researching ways to integrate renewable energy into daily life, this is the place to share your story. Show admissions that you are not only planning to be an innovator, but have already taken steps to incorporate this approach in your day-to-day activities. The more specific details you can incorporate into your essay, the more sincere and personal it will feel (and be!).
Admissions wants to accept students who will contribute to diversity and inclusivity on campus. When considering one of your past experiences or perspectives to expand upon, we recommend choosing one that has the biggest impact on the way you experience and interact with the world now. Ideally, the story you tell should include a couple anecdotes. Maybe you want to write about your experience as a secondary caretaker for your younger sibling with special needs and how this role has helped you develop into a more compassionate and patient person. Perhaps you grew up without many resources at your disposal, so you learned how to get creative and think outside the box at a young age. Regardless of the part of your background that you choose to address, be specific and use this opportunity to speak to admissions in your own authentic voice.
Caltech knows that you are a multifaceted person, that your identity cannot be boiled down to nuggets of information on an application. That’s why admissions is giving you this (albeit small) space to expand on an aspect of your identity. Scroll through your application (personal statement, activity list, major selection) and take a moment to think about what you haven’t been able to include yet. Perhaps you want to write about your identity as a first-born daughter of immigrants or the daily yoga practice that grounds you and enables you to better connect with people and places around you. Regardless of what you choose to write about, you don’t have a lot of words to play with, so we recommend brevity!
Try not to overthink your response to this question. Go with your gut. Maybe there’s nothing you love more than an intense chess game with a friend or family member. Or, perhaps, you want to tell admissions about your passion for make-up and how you like to transform into characters from your favorite TV shows in your spare time. If you want to write about something bigger, maybe it’s the app you’re building to help people find volunteer opportunities in their community or the scientific discovery you made last spring. If you’re having difficulty deciding between two hobbies, fear not, admissions is about to give you another opportunity to nerd out!
We told you! This is a great place to write about a hobby or interest that maybe is newer to you, one you’ve spent less time on. Have you been learning how to play guitar? Did you start taking kayaking lessons this summer? You only have 50 words for this response, so try not to choose a topic that will require too much explaining. Instead, dive right into what makes you lose track of time!
This is Caltech’s version of the Additional Info essay, which means that, unless you have something crucial to explain to admissions, and there is absolutely NOWHERE else on the application for you to write about it, you should skip this essay. Think about it: if you were an admissions officer, would you really want to read one more essay per applicant? That being said, this essay is perfect for students who have encountered extenuating circumstances and need an opportunity to explain them. In fact, we recommend saving those details for an Additional Info essay, so that you can use the rest of your application to highlight other parts of your amazing personality. So, if something has happened that affected your academic performance, this is a great opportunity to give the 4-1-1 (that means “information” because, in the Stone Age of the 80s and 90s, we used our rotary phones instead of the internet).
This prompt is as dry as they come. If you’ve earned any STEM honors or awards, this is the place to list them. If you don’t have anything to add here, feel free to skip this prompt altogether!
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