Texas A&M's Silly Surprise Supplemental Essay Requirements: Diversity, Influential Person, Life Event

EDIT 10/25/2021: Texas A&M does not read the essays for their top academic admits, even for engineering.

EDIT 07/06/2022: Texas A&M has discontinued the Diversity short answer for Fall 2023 applicants. They only require Life Event and Person of Influence

Many applicants who rank in the top 10% and score well on the SAT are receiving their positive admissions decisions within a few days of applying. It’s absolutely impossible to conduct holistic review, i.e. reading the entire application and comparing the file against most other applicants, and release decisions so quickly. By contrast, UT-Austin doesn’t release decisions any earlier than late November because the review process takes time. So, Texas A&M is wasting the time of thousands of applicants who will gain admission even if they submitted no essays at all. Shame on their staff for burdening tens of thousands of student and school work hours for essays that won’t be read. I invite any Texas A&M staff to dispel my assertion.

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In my new book Surviving the College Admissions Madness, I discuss how applicants are writing more college essays to more universities than at any other time in history. Universities that admit most or all of their applicants based on academics are starting to require essays. Essay requirements are like a computer virus infecting systems everywhere. Their importance and pervasiveness is one reason why blogs like this and admissions consulting services like mine exist.

Every time universities change their essay topics, it drives traffic to my site because I can create new posts like this one. I respond by raising my prices for future families. I feel bad for high school counselors and college advisors whose workload will now increase while their salary remains the same. A colleague of mine at an inner-city school remarked, “Yeah, that’s one reason why I’m looking to move into independent consulting.”

Parents often tell me, “I don’t remember having to write any essays in my college applications, let alone three dozen.” And they’re right. OU, for example, now requires more essays than UT-Austin despite them admitting over 80% of their applicants. Universities are so out of touch with society that you can’t do anything but laugh at this point. This post’s snarky tone reflects the frustrations that families and high school counselors share with me.

Texas A&M for Fall 2022 now requires three short answers, not including an Engineering-specific supplement.

Person Most Impacted: Tell us about the person who has most impacted your life and why.

Life Event: Describe a life event which you feel has prepared you to be successful in college.

I have strong reason to believe they do not read these essays except for marginal and borderline applicants. It makes me wonder: what’s the point?

My first piece of advice that I discuss later is to simply not answer these questions at all, or write a few sentences and move on. If your academics are above Top Quarter with a 1450, then you’re almost certain to gain admission to TAMU. Don’t worry about these hoops; your time is better spent elsewhere.

These questions are so half-baked and low-effort that it’s like scribbling an answer on a worksheet just before you turn it in since you didn’t bother working on it the night before. A&M is so lazy they don’t bother updating their admissions website. Now tens of thousands of families will stress out over some bureaucrat’s whimsy.

Also, the prompt should read “Describe a life event that you feel has prepared you to be successful in college,” not which. [Insert UT pompous elitism joke here].

Moreover, this prompt dismisses that students will have already written an Essay A “telling their story” that implicitly shows how they will be successful in college. Who imagines this nonsense and thinks it’s a good idea?

More initial thoughts: UT-Austin was the first university to break from Apply Texas essay requirements common to all Texas universities in 2017 when they released three short answer essay topics. Texas A&M, ever in UT’s shadow, followed last year by requiring a surprise question about Diversity (that they’ve since discontinued). UT-Austin released their own set of silly and onerous short answer questions for Fall 2022. Little brother tries to emulate big brother even when it makes zero sense, especially as UT casts its shadow over their transition to the SEC athletics conference.

Texas A&M will be most high achieving applicants’ second or third choices behind UT-Austin and comparable with UT-Dallas, who has recently gone entirely essay optional, understanding that fewer application barriers means more applicants. Desirable applicants will have even less motivation to want to apply to or enroll at Texas A&M when they erect barriers to apply. TAMU didn’t publish this new topic anywhere on their website, and as of July 2022, they still haven’t published them.

In my many years of serving families, I’ve never had a client get rejected from Texas A&M who was also competitive for UT-Austin. So my first suggestion is…

Don’t write the new essay topics at all

If you’re a high-achieving student ranking in the top 10% of your class and scoring an SAT/ACT 1400 or 31, you could not submit any essays at all and A&M is highly likely to admit you. If you’re outside of the first quarter or scored below a 29 or 1350, then consider putting your best effort forward on these supplements.

Texas A&M’s middle 50% range for test scores is 1160-1390 on the SAT and 26-31 on the ACT.

For many of their programs, they practice “rolling admission” where you get an acceptance a few weeks or less after applying. Rolling admissions, by definition, doesn’t include a holistic review component because there is no way to review apps and offer decisions so quickly. Additionally, holistic review necessarily must wait until most or all applicants are in to compare your “personal achievement score” with the other applicants seeking your same major.

One issue is that Texas A&M representatives tell prospective families, particularly for Engineering, that they need to submit their applications ASAP. Yet they require essays that prevent that from happening. The inconsistencies are boundless.

So my honest advice for this topic and for others is to write a few sentences at most and move on. You’re going to gain admission anyway unless your academics are marginal. Another option is to repurpose a UT-Austin short answer or another university supplement to respond to the prompts. My idealistic hope is if enough applicants opt out of writing the essays by inputting (N/A), then Texas A&M will get the hint that students are unwilling to jump through seemingly endless and unnecessary hoops.

Their recent broadcast to admissions professionals says as much: “We anticipate receiving only a few sentences or at most a paragraph or two for these questions.”

Answering tell us about the person who has most impacted your life and why.

The easiest way to answer this question is to discuss a favorite teacher. Other options could include an orchestra director, choir teacher, sports coach, and so on. You could discuss a family member or grandparent. It doesn’t really matter, honestly, and I don’t know what Texas A&M reviewers hope to gain from asking this question.

Answering describe a life event which you feel has prepared you to be successful in college.

This will probably be the easiest question to repurpose from the UT-Austin short answers or other supplements. I suppose any experience will do, and any of the blog posts that I share can help you share about:

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