essays

Answered

@sanjida, it is clear from your questions that you are very unaware of the college admissions process in the United States.

There are 4300 colleges in America, and there are many different ways to satisfy the essays that are required to successfully apply to these colleges.

Let me first list the different types of essays that may or may not be required by an international student when applying to a US college:

1. TOEFL, IELTS, or DuoLingo essays - if the college has an English language proficiency requirement, you will have to satisfy that written response on that individual test and the that score will reflect your English speaking, writing ability.

2. Standardized Test Essay component - If you opt in for the Essay section of the SAT or ACT, you will have written essay prompt given to you at the time of testing. Those essays for a separate score of your SAT or ACT and can either help show colleges that you are an excellent writer or backfire and show that your writing ability if lacking. So since they are optional, I would only sign up for the optional essay section if you are a confident writer.

3. College admissions portal essays. There are 2 main portals, 1.) Common App run by the College Board corporation which has 950 partner college members and the 2.) Coalition app which has about 6 times fewer partner members. The members tend to be the most popular and largest private colleges in the US like Boston College or Boston University or Rice or Duke. These portals aggregate data points that seem to be common on all college applications like Demographics, Test Scores, Extracurricular Activities, Recommendations, and 1 standardized essay usually around 650 words. If you are apply using the Common App, you will complete all the info including their essay. You will get 6-7 prompts to choose from to write your essay. Examples of that are in the links below. The same goes for the Coalition App. You will get 5-6 essay prompts specific to the Coalition App.

3b. Part b of the Common App or Coalition App is that many private college also have supplemental essays specific to their college. So if you are applying to Harvard, you will have an additional Harvard essay to write, with its own Harvard set of prompts to choose from. Sometimes there are 2 ,3 or 4 supplemental essays to write.

4. The 3300 colleges that do not use the Common or Coalition app. have their own application portals. For example, Georgetown, Tulane or large public schools like the UC system have their own portals and you have to establish a separate account for each own. These portals have much of the same common data inputs as the Common App but for the UC portal they may ask you more granular questions about your academic transcript because they recalculate it in to a UC GPA. Also the essays will be different from the Common or Coalition app essays.

5. Lastly some colleges want evidence of your expository writing ability so they require you to submit an Graded Paper. Schools like this are Princeton, Amherst, Brown and others. So you will upload to their college portal a separate graded paper in a .pdf format with the original teacher comments and grade for the paper.

Therefore as you see from the variety of essays that are part of the US college admissions process, you can not assume that an essay is an essay that can be written according to your own desired topic and reused over and over. One of the Common App essay prompts is 7.) Share an essay on any topic of your choice. It can be one you've already written, one that responds to a different prompt, or one of your own design. However, this is only 1 essay and if you have to take the TOEFL, SAT/ACT, and write other supplemental essays or submit papers, you can easily see that there are other essays you will have to be prepared to complete in order to satisfy the college admissions process.

950+ Colleges are Common App Partners:

Common App Essay Prompts

https://www.commonapp.org/blog/2021-2022-common-app-essay-prompts

150+ Colleges are Coalition App Partners

Coalition App Essay Prompts

https://www.coalitionforcollegeaccess.org/essays

Many colleges have their own college applications

Georgetown Essay Prompts

https://blog.collegevine.com/how-to-write-the-georgetown-essay-supplements-2021-2022/

Tulane Essay Prompt

https://blog.collegevine.com/how-to-write-the-tulane-university-essays-2021-2022/

UC Essay Prompt

https://blog.collegevine.com/how-to-write-the-university-of-california-essay-prompts-2021-2022/

TOEFL Essay Prompts

https://www.toeflresources.com/sample-toefl-essays/

Supplemental Essay Prompts

UChicago

https://collegeadmissions.uchicago.edu/apply/uchicago-supplemental-essay-questions

Yale

https://blog.collegevine.com/how-to-write-the-yale-supplemental-essays-2021-2022/

Harvard

https://blog.collegevine.com/how-to-write-the-harvard-university-supplemental-essays-2021-2022/

Columbia

https://blog.collegevine.com/how-to-write-the-columbia-university-essays-2021-2022/

Stanford

https://blog.collegevine.com/how-to-write-the-stanford-university-essays-2021-2022/

Brown Graded Paper

https://admission.brown.edu/first-year/supplementary-materials

Princeton Graded Paper

https://admission.princeton.edu/how-apply/application-checklist/graded-written-paper

Amherst Graded Paper

https://www.amherst.edu/admission/apply/firstyear/writingsupplement/optionb-faq

Wishing you all the best. Good luck.