bsat blog

We’ve spent a lot of time talking about Tufts university requesting YouTube submissions from its applicants. But as The Lafayette points out, application supplements have been around much longer than YouTube. Students with specialized skills or talents often send in supplements to their application to highlight their proficiency in these areas. Still the talents you display are kind of a tricky area. To help we’ve offered a pro-con breakdown of three of the most awkward application supplements.

Student Type: Musical Dabbler
Submission: Your Middle School Band’s Demo Tape

Like those dork-wads in the marching band are sending in tapes of them playing Mozart on a Sousaphone, but you used to shred your Squire Stratocaster back in the day, so why not hit them with a tape of your own skills? You remember that “Sugar Ray” cover band you formed back in middle school? The one with the dude who wanted to play turntables, but his parents didn’t want them breaking their record player so he ended up playing electric cowbell? You’ve got a video of that performance, right? Send it in!

Pros – The laid-back, island-infused stylings of mild-mannered, acoutstical rock-hop are bound to make a comeback any day now. Could be automatic acceptance if the dean’s a die-hard Sugar Ray fan. Shows that you’re cool enough to get music, but not lame enough to know how to read it.

Cons – You have a better chance of getting in because of accidental mix-up where your SAT scores were confused with those of someone much smarter than of the dean being a die-hard Sugar Ray fan.

Student Type: Adult Video Enthusiast
Submission: Porn Collection

Part of the trick of applying to college is making what you already do seem important. Sure most guys your age download tons of pornography, but only you are marketing yourself as an “Adult Video Enthusiast” and sending in your virus-riddled, near-terabyte of personally downloaded internet porno.

Pros – Displays enthusiasm and passion in a specific area. Most likely showcases a certain technical proficiency in a variety of complicated, open source computer protocols. Shows that you have an intricate, albeit non-practical, knowledge of, and wanton disregard for, intellectual property laws—and females.

Cons – Buffering…

Student: The Cool Girl
Submission: Photo Album With You and Your Boyfriend and Friends

So, like, you were talking to Veronica and she said that, like, she’d been talking to Christie and Meghan and they both thought that, like, if the point of your college application was to show who you really are than it should totally include the things that are most important to you, and, like, the thing that’s totally most important to you right now is your boyfriend and his totally hot bod, so why not include, like, a few printouts of Facebook photos of the two of you being, like, totally cute in public and stuff, and also maybe one or six of you and your friends arranged in a nice collage that says “We live for the nights we can’t remember, with the friends we will never forget.”

Pros – Photos of you and friends might appeal to the horny, middle-aged, male dean set. Shots of you and your girlfriends tailgating before a high school football game might help you out at an SEC school. Pictures displaying commitment might help out for tight-knit-community-minded Midwestern liberal arts school (but, like, you’re too pretty for those schools anyway).

Cons – Not going to get you into Bryn Mawr.

Pros – Not having to go to Bryn Mawr.