Every October the same thing happens. A student finishes the Common App personal essay, feels relief for about an hour, then opens the supplements and finds eleven more questions waiting.

It looks like eleven separate essays. It almost never is.

We went through 1,162 supplemental essay prompts from 481 universities in the Borderless database and sorted them by what they are actually asking. The result is the most useful thing you can know before you start writing: universities are asking a very small number of questions, over and over, in slightly different clothes.

The six questions, by how often they appear

"Why us" and "why this major" are 40% of everything. If you can answer those two well, you have already written the bulk of every supplement you will submit this year.

What the numbers say about your workload

The median university asks for two prompts. That is the number most students should plan around. It is the tail that hurts.

The median university's supplements total 500 words. So a list of ten universities is roughly 5,000 words of supplements on top of your personal essay.

The median individual prompt caps at 250 words, and 445 of the 1,162 prompts sit in the 151 to 250 band. These are short. Students who write 600-word drafts and then cut are doing the work twice.

Now the outliers, because they decide your application list more than you think:

Adding one of those to your list is not adding one application. It is adding a week.

One more number worth knowing: of the prompts we could classify by requirement, 1,480 are required and 956 are optional. Optional is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and we will come back to it.

Why us: 22% of everything

This is the one students write badly most often, because they answer it with adjectives about the university instead of specifics about themselves.

Brown's version quotes its own description of its students, "a blend of intellectual curiosity, creativity, and humility. A commitment to collaboration," then asks how you fit it, in 250 words. Cornell asks what draws you to a specific college inside the university, then to "reflect on the learning, community, or impact opportunities that matter most to you."

Read those two again and notice what they have in common. Both ask you to connect something specific about the place to something specific about you. A paragraph praising the university answers neither half.

The practical move: write one honest answer about what you want to do at university and why, then research two or three concrete things at each school that serve it. A named course, a lab, a professor's work, a student organisation you would actually join. The self part is reusable. The specifics are the part you rewrite.

Why this major: 18%

The second big one, and the one where international students have an advantage if they use it.

Cornell's engineering applicants write two long essays and four short ones. Its business school asks "What kind of business student are you?" and wants you to use personal, academic, or work experience to show it. Its public policy school asks what draws you to the field.

These are not asking whether you like the subject. They are asking when the interest started, what you did about it, and where it goes next. If you have an olympiad, a project, a job in a family business, a problem in your own country you tried to fix, that is the answer. A sentence about being passionate since childhood is not.

Community and background: 10%

Since 2023 this question has been everywhere, and it is the one most misread by students outside the United States.

Penn asks "How will you explore community at Penn? Consider how Penn will help shape your perspective, and how your experiences and perspective will help shape Penn." Northwestern asks about "your identity, your school setting, your community" so that it can read your application in context. Brown notes that arriving at Brown "naturally invites reflection on where they came from."

Two things follow. Community does not mean your ethnicity. It can be your school, your city, a team, a language, an online group, a family business. And the context half is not a complaint section. If you did well in a school with no lab, no counsellor and no AP courses, this is where an admissions reader learns that, and it changes how everything else on your application reads.

The playful ones: 3%

Thirty-two prompts exist to see how you think when nobody has given you a template.

Cornell asks "What brings you joy?" in 100 words. Dartmouth asks you to "Celebrate your nerdy side" and, separately, "What excites you?" Brown asks what class you would teach. Barnard asks for "one bold question on your mind" in 50 words. St. Olaf gives you ten words each for "No one knows that I..." and "Everyone knows that I..."

Stanford's five-word-limit style questions are in the same family: "List five things that are important to you." Fifty words.

The instinct is to be impressive here. The better instinct is to be specific and true. Ten words cannot carry a thesis, and admissions readers have read thousands of strategically quirky answers. An honest small thing beats a performed big one.

The "optional" question is not optional

170 prompts are some version of "anything else we should know." In our set, 956 prompts overall are marked optional.

For an international student this box is frequently the most valuable space in the whole application, because it is where you explain things a US admissions reader cannot infer:

• Your grading system, and what your marks mean in it
• A national exam that determined your subjects at 15
• Why your school offers no AP, IB or extracurriculars
• Military service, a gap for family reasons, a year lost to instability
• A curriculum taught in a language that is not your first

Use it for facts and context, briefly and without drama. Do not use it as a second personal essay.

How to write 5,000 words once

Because the questions repeat, the work compresses. Build four things, then adapt them.

1. Your "why this subject" story. Where the interest started, the thing you built or did because of it, where it points. This feeds the 18% directly and half of the "why us" answers.
2. Your context paragraph. Your school, your system, your constraints, your community. This feeds the 10% and the optional box.
3. One activity, told properly. The 85 activity prompts want depth: what you did, what changed, what you learned. Not a list.
4. A short list of specifics per university. Two or three concrete things you would use there. This is the only part you cannot reuse, and it is also the only part that makes a "why us" essay sound like it was written for that university.

Then check the word limits before drafting, because the median is 250 and writing long is the most common way students waste October.

Start your own journey

Before you write anything, do this. Open the supplement list for every university on your list and count the prompts and the words. You will usually find a small group that asks for two prompts and 500 words, and one or two that ask for six times that.

That table tells you something about your list that no ranking does. A twenty-prompt university has to earn its place, because the time it takes is time taken from the rest of your applications.

Then write the four pieces above once, well, before October. The supplements stop being eleven essays and become one story told at different lengths.

Kai, the Borderless AI college counselor, pulls the current prompts for every university on your list, shows you which ones repeat, and helps you turn your story into answers that fit their word limits. It's free to use.

Start with Kai, and read the stories from students who did it.