The Foreign Service Journal, December 2013

54 DECEMBER 2013 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL EDUCATION SUPPLEMENT What Works Better For You This Year ■The entire application has been revamped to make it more interactive and user-friendly, with a new look and feel designed to be intuitive for a teenager. The questions are customized so appli- cants don’t have to answer or even look at questions that don’t apply to their situation. For example, if you click on your parents’ status as “divorced,” you’ll automatically get a pop-up question to determine which parent you live with. ■ A new auto-fill feature speeds up the process of finding high school and college names and addresses. ■ The word count for the personal essay has increased substantially. Earlier versions of the Common App limited the main essay to 500 words. Now, students have 650 words to tell their stories. ■ The five new essay prompts give you a lot of leeway in your topics, and are more creative than most of the old prompts. They also demand more thought and depth in your response. What to Watch Out For ■ The essay prompt “Write on a topic of your choice” is gone. Not only did this choice give you more freedom, but in the past you could easily write your essay before the start of senior year and know that it was usable even before that year’s Common App was released. ■ There is no prompt that focuses specifically on academics or achieve- ments, and the former extracurricular short essay, which allowed students to write 250 words on their favorite sport or hobby, has also been discontinued. The entire application has been revamped to make it more interactive and user-friendly.