THE BRIDGE TO COLLEGE
The ‘Contribute to Our Community’ Essay
By Robert A.G. LeVine
America’s top colleges – especially the private schools – want students who are both qualified and likely to add value to their campuses. In the wake of the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court decision about affirmative action in admissions, many colleges started utilizing similar essay prompts asking “how would you contribute to our community?”
This is proving to be a difficult essay for most applicants. Allow me to shed some light on how to answer the question.
The first thing to realize is that this essay will be read in conjunction with your Personal Statement, which to some degree will offer insight into your personality and habits when interacting with others. For that reason, the topic of the “contribution” essay should not repeat the same verbiage even when the ideas expressed are similar and/or complimentary.
Next, realize what not to do. Many applicants want to write about “where” they will contribute, naming a club or some other things they have spotted on the college’s website. This is not “how” you contribute! It does not answer the question very well – just because you are in a room does not mean that you are doing anything – and it feels like the applicant is, well, lazy.
Think instead about “how” you contribute. To explain how you will contribute, understand how you do contribute today. I often ask students to consider themselves as screenwriters. When writing a script, there will be one or more lead actors, supporting actors, villains, and perhaps players who are meant as comic relief. In real life, among your friends, what is your role?
Are you the catalyst who helps others get over their insecurities? The role model who leads by doing? The supportive person who finds a way to keep others focused on integrity?
How you act today is a solid foundation for understanding how you will act tomorrow.
With your role in mind, feel free to explain both what that role has been historically and how you will be that same person in college. However, instead of focusing on clubs and the like, focus on dorm life.
Yet most of the drafts we see on this prompt remain somewhat lackluster. It’s a strange phenomenon: people think that their Personal Statements should be somewhat poetic and stylish, but their supplemental essays are … not. In my experience, the best strategy is the opposite. In the Personal Statement, use “voice,” not poeticism. Be natural and conversational. However, in supplemental essays like the contribution prompt, change things up a bit.
We have seen great supplemental essays enchant because of their style. Some have been cute and charming. Some are intentionally funny and self-deprecating. Some have a staccato, imperative style. Some are absolutely serious. The ones that are straightforward? Absent extraordinary content, they don’t seem to work very well.
Finally, try to avoid things that don’t allow the admissions office to predict your success at their school. Please avoid generic compliments like learning from “world-class professors” or studying among “like-minded students.” You will find both of those at most any university. It’s just weak and wastes space. Avoid superlatives like “unique” and “perfect.” Nothing is perfect, and what might be new to you is not necessarily unique to one school or to the thousands of other students at this school. Also, please avoid describing the “beautiful campus” (which is not relevant to how you act on campus) and also avoid reference to “study abroad” (which means you want to leave the campus and your community).
As with most supplemental essays, the keys are to read the prompt carefully and, before you write, get a very good idea of what you want to say. Once you know the best message you can communicate, loosen up a bit and communicate in a way that is appropriate to your personality. After all, your personality is basically what they want to understand in the “contribute to community” essay.
Robert LeVine is the founder and CEO of University Consultants of America, an independent educational consultancy assisting students around the world with applications to colleges, universities and graduate schools. For more information, call University Consultants of America, Inc. at 1-800-465-5890 or visit www.universitycoa.com
FAMILY MATTERS
Communities and Milestones
By Anu Verma Panchal
A few months ago, I had the good fortune to stand by my parents’ side as they celebrated a significant milestone, their golden anniversary. One of my favorite parts of the event was that in addition to uncles, aunts and cousins, we had with us their closest friends, the extended “framily” that had helped my parents recreate a sense of home and family when they were thousands of miles away from the place of their birth.
Circa 1980, with a toddler and 6-year-old in tow, my parents moved to a little town in Zambia called Kabwe. They knew no one and nothing about this new country beyond my dad’s offer letter and one phone call with a relative who had once lived in Africa.
But on their very first evening, there was a knock at the door. It was a young Malayalee couple with two little boys our age. Hearing that a new family from Kerala had arrived, they had stopped by to welcome us. From that one introduction, my parents were immediately absorbed into a group of friends.
The same thing happened every time we moved towns. The news of our impending arrival reached before we did, and we were pulled into existing Malayalee social circles. Our weekends were spent at each other’s houses, uncles in safari suits swilling whiskey, aunties in sarees holding deafening conversations while we ran around and played. As the years passed, my parents grew into the veterans who welcomed new families and organized the elaborate cultural events that gave the community a sense of home away from home.
And all around town – and across the South Asian diaspora – others were doing the same thing. In Tamil, in Bangla, in Hindi, they created communities that served a familial function for each other. Community building seems to be in our genes. Or, as a friend once told me, “We’re like goats ... we can only travel in packs.”
During the college years and in my early 20s, plugging into the local desi community was nowhere close to being a priority; in fact, I reveled in the freedom from it. It was irritating, even, to see the insularity that I imagined permeated those associations. Why move to another country and only hang out with the same people? Why not at least try to assimilate?
It was only when I became a parent that I found myself searching, maybe even yearning, for some small level of connection. I wanted my daughters to learn Bharatanatyam like I had, wanted them to celebrate Hindu holidays and go to the temple occasionally. Does that mean that I want my communities to be restricted by ethnicity, language or religion? Certainly not. I am blessed with close “framily” from many backgrounds, and I enjoy Gasparilla as much as I do Onam and Navaratri.
Yet I am grateful for the generations who came before we did and established everything from the Tampa India Festival to the India Cultural Center so that we now have the option to dip a toe, an ankle or our whole selves in cultural life if we so desired.
A week before my older daughter was due to leave for college, I took her on one of our habitual visits to the Hindu temple here in Tampa. By a happy coincidence, the pujari on duty that day was the same one who had presided on the day that we had taken her on her first temple visit when she was a 6-month-old baby. “You’re the one who carried her to the front of the room when she was born, and now she’s starting college,” I told him. He beamed. “Look at that!” he marveled.
Look at that indeed. That kind of continuity doesn’t just happen. It’s the result of hard work from a lot of people who came before us, many of whom we’ll never even know. The roots they put down gave us the luxury to pick and choose how much we want to hold on to, because some variation of it has been preserved here for us.