“Please briefly elaborate on an extracurricular activity or work experience of particular significance to you.”
> Amherst College, essay prompt
These essays ask you specifically about an extracurricular you have participated in. While your personal statement and other essays can and should draw from the experiences you had in extracurriculars, this essay focuses exclusively on one.
As with the rest of the essays, the college wants to learn something about you, so the extracurricular should be used as a lens through which one of your facets is displayed.
This essay is less common, and here there is a bonus: essays written for other topics may be easily modified to fit these prompts. Leadership and community essays, if they discuss an activity you participated in, will fit this prompt very well with only minor editing. In this way, you get two great essays that say something important about you for the price of one.
NOTE: Don’t do this if the same school asks for both – that’ll just make you look lazy.
As a final note, if you already talked about an extracurricular in your personal statement or another supplemental essay, then avoid using it again, unless you have something truly unique to say about it for another essay. Speaking about multiple different extracurriculars across different essays provides greater depth to your application, and tells colleges things they would otherwise not know about you.
