The Video

How to answer two of the most misunderstood prompts – Why Us and Why Major – in college applications, and why revision matters more than perfection.

My colleagues Jen Turfler and Claire Schadler and I hosted a webinar on Why Us and Why Major essays. The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length. Our colleague Ruth Louden was scheduled to join but had to drop due to technical difficulties.

Speakers: Venkates “Swami” Swaminathan, Founder and CEO of LifeLaunchr; Jen Turfler, College Admissions Coach at LifeLaunchr; and Claire Schadler, College Admissions Coach at LifeLaunchr. Audience questions were submitted in the chat and read aloud during the session.

Welcome and Introductions

Swami: Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining today’s webinar on Why Us and Why Major essays. We’re excited to talk about how to write responses that really answer the question being asked. As we go, please put any questions in the chat, we’ll answer them along the way. This presentation exists so that you can get your questions answered.

Swami: Our colleague Ruth Louden was hoping to join us today, but she’s having some technical difficulties, so we’ll go ahead and start without her. Jen, would you like to introduce yourself?

Jen: Hi, everyone. I’ve been in education for over 20 years. I’m a former English teacher who used to teach the college essay in my classes with my seniors. I went on to get my degree in counseling and had a career in counseling at UC San Diego. Now I do consulting, and I’ve really enjoyed helping students get into college for the last seven or eight years.

Claire: Hi, I’m Claire Schadler. I’ve been working in college admissions for over ten years. My other profession is teaching English as a second language, so I’ve worked with students all over the country and some from other parts of the world on college essays and applications.

Swami: And I’m Venkates Swaminathan, Swami. I’m the founder of LifeLaunchr. I’m a member of NACAC and of the Higher Education Consultants Association, where I sit on the College Knowledge Committee and chair HECA’s new AI committee. My background is in engineering, but I’ve been working with students for more than a decade, even before I started LifeLaunchr.

What You Should Expect From This Presentation

Swami: We’re going to go through a lot of material, but I want you to walk away with three things.

Swami: First, why colleges ask these questions, why us, why do you want to study aerospace engineering, whatever it is, and why the answers make such a difference in your application.

Swami: Second, and this comes up constantly in our work, the courage to actually start. Students struggle to get started because they think the goal is some abstract idea of perfection, or they’ve read so many polished examples online that they don’t know where to begin. Getting started is eighty percent of the solution.

Swami: Third, that research and revision are the most important skills here. A lot of webinars about essays show a bunch of amazing, intimidating examples, and people walk away thinking, “I don’t know how to write like that, so I’m not going to bother.” But in all the years we’ve done this, the real work is doing the research on why something is actually a good fit, and then starting a draft and revising it. Nobody writes a great draft on the first try.

Claire: Students often think their first draft has to be perfect, so they spend a lot of time on it. That’s not wrong exactly, but the revision process is incredibly important. Good writing comes from revising, rethinking, and reworking a draft. The idea of a perfect first draft can actually get in the way of writing an okay first draft that then gets edited.

Swami: I’d go even further and say perfection isn’t the goal in the final draft either. When students submit essays, you look at it and think, this is good enough, it addresses everything this draft needs to do, we’re going to submit it. Could it get better? Probably. Given limited time, does it need to? Probably not. You move on to the next thing.

What Are “Why Us” and “Why Major” Essays?

Swami: Today we’re focusing on two specific kinds of essay questions. The “Why Us” question: why do you want to apply to this college? Duke, for example, asks, “What is your impression of Duke as a university and community, and why do you believe it is a good match for your goals, values, and interests?” Why do you think the college is a good fit for you, and maybe more importantly, why do you think you’re a good fit for them?

Swami: The other is the “Why Major” essay. Carnegie Mellon asks, “What passion or inspiration led you to choose this area of study?” What is it that makes you want to be a historian, a computer scientist, a data scientist, someone who studies musical theater? Why are you applying to study that in college?

The Prompts Vary, So Read Them Carefully

Swami: I want to start here because it matters so much: read the actual question, because the wording varies, and the differences matter. Carnegie Mellon’s Why Major prompt asks about passion or inspiration. But their Why Us question doesn’t even sound like a Why Us question: “As you think ahead to the process of learning during your college years, how will you define a successful college experience?” They’re really asking what your definition of a successful college experience is, and how Carnegie Mellon will satisfy that goal. Colorado asks something similar but different: what do you hope to study, and why, and if you don’t know yet, what has shaped your interests?

Swami: Every one of these prompts is worded in a subtly different way, and it matters. You can’t take content written for one school, swap in a different school’s name, and expect it to work, because the questions are asking for genuinely different things, and the colleges themselves are different.

Jen: And later we’ll show you a Venn diagram that makes this point well: if you could recycle an answer across schools, it’s probably too generic to begin with.

It’s a Lot Like a Job Interview

Swami: Here’s a model that helps. In the business world, interviewers often ask, “Why do you want to work here?” It’s an important question, because a generic answer, the benefits are good, the pay is great, it’s a highly reputed company, isn’t a good answer. They want to know you’ve done your homework: that you understand their culture, their product, their business model, and how you’d fit and add value.

Swami: Why Us and Why Major essays work the same way. Colleges aren’t looking for flattery. They already believe they’re a great school, that’s why they work there. They’re looking to confirm that you understand their culture and their academic product, and whether you’re likely to fit and succeed there.

Colleges Want to Know if You Fit

Swami: Let me give a few examples, because schools differ so much from each other. Caltech is a deeply research-focused institution. If research isn’t something that matters to you, Caltech isn’t the place, and that’s fine, it just means you’re not looking for each other. WPI, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, is built around learning by doing: a project-based curriculum from day one. And many liberal arts colleges look for students who are self-driven academically and want independence in choosing their own path, rather than a fixed curriculum.

Claire: I’d add that this is true across the most selective schools too. Just because a school is selective, or has a great reputation, doesn’t mean it’s a good fit. You might be a great fit for one Ivy League school and not another; they’re very different from each other. Students sometimes skip the fit question because they think, “I know these are good schools, so I’ll apply.” There are amazing schools you’re simply not a good fit for, and that’s not a flaw in the school or in you.

Swami: Exactly. Colleges aren’t a ladder where one is simply better than another. You can find two schools with similar admission rates, Colorado and Texas A&M, say, or Princeton and Yale, that aren’t remotely similar to each other. It’s like restaurants: one might have more people wanting to eat there, but the question you should ask is, will I like the food?

Swami: Colleges are also businesses, and it’s worth remembering that. When a college extends an offer of admission, they’re making a bet on how likely you are to actually accept it. If they need to fill a thousand seats, they might extend offers to sixteen hundred or twenty-two hundred students, based on history. So when a California student applies to the University of Michigan, in-state students already have a well-regarded public university system at home, and it’s cold in Michigan. Colleges need a specific reason a student would actually choose to leave for Michigan instead. A generic answer, it’s a highly regarded institution, doesn’t give them a reason to believe you’d show up.

What a Why Major Essay Is Really Testing

Swami: A few things. First, is this real, a genuine interest, not just something that sounds good on an application? This especially comes up with majors that have historically led to high earnings: engineering, computer science, data science. Just because you could make a lot of money in a field doesn’t mean you’ll thrive in that program.

Swami: Second, are you prepared? When you show up, can you actually do the work? This is obvious for something like Berklee College of Music, where the real question is, can you play? But it’s just as true for academic majors: will you be able to handle the math coursework, the history coursework, whatever the major demands?

Swami: Third, will you last? If your interest is genuine and you’re prepared, that’s what helps you stick with something when it gets hard, and for most students, it does get hard.

Swami: And finally, and this is a little uncomfortable to raise, but important: whose goal is this, really? Is this your ambition, or your parents’?

Claire: I’d add friends to that list too. There’s a bit of a ripple effect, if everyone in your friend group is interested in a subject, you might drift toward it too, without it necessarily being your own interest.

Jen: This connects back to fit. I look at what extracurriculars, research, and internships a student has done, and if none of it aligns with the major they’re pushing for, it’s not a convincing story to the college that this is a real passion or that they’ve prepared for it. Be careful about choosing a major just because it sounds prestigious if you don’t have real experience in it.

Inspiration, Preparation, Purpose

Swami: Our framework for the Why Major essay comes down to three things: inspiration, preparation, and purpose.

Swami: Inspiration: what drew you to this? It’s rarely “I played with Legos as a kid, so I want to study engineering.” Early experiences can be meaningful, but you need to connect them to something more recent.

Claire: I tell students, this has to have happened in high school. You’re allowed to reference a spark from earlier, but the bulk of your interest and involvement can’t be from before high school. There needs to be something inspiring and motivating you in the last few years.

Swami: Preparation: what have you done about it? How does your coursework or your extracurriculars connect? The University of California asks this well: tell us about an academic subject that inspires you, and how you’ve pursued that interest inside and outside the classroom. A lot of this comes down to core skills. If you want to study computer science, the core skill is mathematics, not programming, counterintuitively. Colleges want to know you can handle advanced, abstract math, because that’s what differentiates students who succeed from students who don’t.

Swami: Purpose: what do you intend to do with your education? This can trip people up, because plenty of students genuinely don’t know what they want to do four years out, and that’s fine.

Jen: It comes up a lot. Sometimes a student will say, “I just want to major in business to make a lot of money,” and that’s not going to land well on its own. We work on framing it around a broader impact: how might this contribute to the world, even if the exact path isn’t clear yet.

Swami: There’s nothing wrong with wanting to make money, it’s a legitimate reason to go into business. But colleges want to see a deeper purpose behind it, and that can be a genuinely hard question for students to answer.

Why College: How Are You a Good Fit for Each Other?

Jen: I always tell students to think of the Why Us essay as a Venn diagram. One circle is all about you: your interests, passions, goals, values, what you’ve done in the area you’re interested in. The other circle is all about the college: the courses they offer, special concentrations, internship or research opportunities, campus clubs. What you’re looking for is the intersection: how do you fit together? Who are you, who is the college, and why would you be the perfect match?

Do the Research

Swami: We use a tool called Soar for this kind of research, which I’ll show you in a bit, but you don’t need Soar to do this work. Look at the department’s website. Look at faculty pages to see who’s actually teaching there. Look at the course catalog. Look at directories of student organizations. Attend info sessions if there are any, and visit if you can. Look at clubs and intramurals too, not just academics.

Swami: Honestly, when I think back on college, what I remember isn’t the classes, it’s the people. Is that true for you two?

Jen: Completely. And I find that falls on deaf ears sometimes when I say it to students. They need to think about the other sides of it too, not just academics and reputation. That’s all part of fit.

Match Your Depth to the Word Count

Swami: These essays vary in length, maybe 250 words, maybe 550. Match your depth to the word count. In a 250 or 300-word response, you can make one, two, maybe three specific points. In 550 words, maybe four or five. Don’t try to stuff seventeen things in, it’s not a laundry list of every activity you’ve done. Give yourself room to actually explore the things you pick.

Claire: When students try to include too much, it turns into a list, there’s no room left to explain why any of it matters to them. My advice is usually to cut two things and expand on why the remaining ones interest them.

Jen: And remember, the rest of your application is there to showcase your activities and experiences. These essays don’t need to become a resume. It’s a chance to explore a few things in depth, the application as a whole still gets read holistically.

Research, Write, Revise

Swami: I’ll say this again because it matters: research, write, revise. Don’t expect your first draft to already have everything we’ve talked about, nobody’s first draft does. And honestly, for most of the students we work with, the last draft isn’t perfect either. It just addresses everything it needs to.

Swami: One thing we talked about yesterday: this essay is only one part of the application. How do you help students keep that in perspective?

Claire: I point out where else that information already lives. If a student wants to cram something in, I’ll remind them, that’s what your letter of recommendation covers, or, you already have that in your activities list. Schools often pair a Why Us or Why Major prompt with another essay where related material fits better. Giving students the bigger picture, showing them everything else that’s part of their application, helps them stop trying to fit it all into one draft.

Jen: Students sometimes forget they already wrote an activities list, or that colleges will see their full transcript. Once they see the whole picture of what’s going to the college, it’s easier to understand what role this particular essay needs to play.

Swami: And this is where a lot of online advice leads students astray, clever tricks from TikTok or Instagram that they feel pressured to use.

Claire: I ask students to pick the three most important things they want to communicate, and just write about those, without worrying about clever hooks or flowery language. This isn’t a performance, it’s answering an interview question directly, with concrete facts about what they’ve done and why they’re a good fit.

A Note for Parents: Whose Goal Is This, Really?

Swami: I won’t belabor this, but it’s worth saying plainly: whose goal is this, really? It’s an uncomfortable question, but an important one for both students and parents to sit with, because colleges can tell whether what a student is writing about is their own ambition or their parents’.

Jen: You can tell right away if it’s not a student’s authentic voice or experience. I want to hear who the student is and what their experience has actually been, not what they’ve been told to write.

Swami: And I understand where it comes from, we live in anxious times, parents want the best for their kids, and that comes from genuine care. But college is harder than high school, and studying something you don’t really want to study, or aren’t suited for, makes that harder still.

Using Soar

Swami: I want to spend a few minutes on Soar, our platform, though I want to be clear this presentation isn’t really about Soar, it’s about how to write these essays. Plenty of you watching don’t use it, and you don’t need to, you can do everything we’re describing with other tools or on your own.

Swami: One thing Soar gives you is a shared workspace, parents, students, and counselors all in the same place. Students also do their writing on Soar, on what we call the Writing Hub, where we assign lots of questions, some of which seem random at first: if your life had a theme song, what would it be? Who besides your parents has been the most influential person in your life? These questions build up a record of a student’s own writing over time. Combined with their activities list, resume, college list, transcript, and intended major, that record means you can ask a very specific question and get a very personal answer. You can even ask Soar, based on this student’s writing, what do you think their values are, and it does a surprisingly good job.

Swami: There’s nothing stopping a counselor from doing that work by hand, we do it ourselves too, reading through everything a student has written. It’s just that when the median student we work with writes fifteen, twenty, even thirty essays across their applications, having a tool available at any time helps.

Swami: For Why Us essays, it’s about connecting your values and interests to the college’s resources. For Why Major essays, we have a tool called the Why Major Preparation Inventory, which walks through what drove your interest, what you’ve done about it academically and otherwise, and your long-term goals.

Claire: For students who start working with us early, in ninth or tenth grade, we might assign one of these prompts a month, so there’s a real, accumulated record in the student’s own voice by the time they’re applying.

Live Demo: Research Examples

Swami switched to a screen share of Soar and walked through two fictional demo students built specifically for this kind of illustration.

Swami: These are all test students, none of them real, so the answers are made up too. First, Theo Marchetti, an imaginary student considering pre-law. On Soar you can ask something like, “I’m considering my application to William & Mary. Based on all my writing, activities, and profile, how do you think my values connect to William & Mary?” This is essentially the Venn diagram Jen described earlier, done as a live exercise.

Swami: It pulled out themes from Theo’s writing, intellectual honesty over winning, the gap between rules and reality, argument as collaboration rather than combat, civic engagement with rigor, and matched them against what William & Mary values: one of the oldest student-run honor codes in the country, a strong public-purpose and civic-engagement identity, a real pre-law pathway, and a small community of about seven thousand undergraduates. It also flagged some practical things worth being aware of: incomplete English and arts requirements on the transcript, the cost of an out-of-state public university, and the acceptance rate.

Swami: I want to be clear, Soar is meant to be a thought partner, not an authority. It doesn’t tell you what’s right or wrong, that’s still the student’s and the counselor’s job. It’s there to drive the conversation and help get to the kind of specificity these responses need.

Audience question: Someone watching couldn’t find where the Why Major Preparation Inventory lives in their Soar account.

Swami: If you’re a coach, it’s at the top of the Writing Hub, under a section called Essay Prep, alongside Foundation questions, which are the more general self-reflection prompts. Make sure a student has been given access to Essay Prep when they’re set up on Soar. All writing on Soar happens through assignments, a coach has to actually assign the Why Major Preparation Inventory before a student can respond to it. If you have questions, email me and I can send a walkthrough video.

Audience question: Does Soar come with a user manual?

Swami: There’s no printed manual, but there are tutorials at soar.ai/tutorials, and that list keeps growing. There are also webinars at soar.ai/webinars, each with a full transcript available if you’d rather read than watch.

Swami: Let me show a second example: Jordan, interested in business, considering the University of Arizona, which also asks why the school and why the major together. You can ask something like, “Can you read my writing, activities, and the U of A’s programs and clubs, and help me see if the Venn diagram intersects?” It laid out who Jordan is from their writing, someone who leads by listening, who’s energized by chaos and fixing things, who has founded something before, and connected that to specific things at the Eller College of Management: the Professional Sales Club, the American Marketing Association, Ad Cats, the Student Entrepreneurs Association.

Swami: What’s useful here is that it surfaced three different possible stories, the founder, the salesperson, the person who organizes chaos, and the real question becomes, which one is actually you? Businesses need all of those kinds of people, so it’s not about picking the “right” answer, it’s about figuring out which story is genuinely yours.

A Few Tips

Swami: A few rules I live by. First, write conversationally. Make it sound like you’re talking to me, not writing an op-ed for The Atlantic. Some students write beautiful, complex, overwrought sentences that just don’t land here. Application readers have a limited amount of time per essay, if your writing is hard to decipher, you’re wasting the time they have. Write to communicate, not to impress. Writing that communicates clearly is impressive enough on its own.

Swami: Second, be specific. Name courses, connect to real moments. In a 250-word essay, pick two or three things and focus there.

Swami: Third, remember it’s a two-way match. Don’t just explain why you like a school, use the space to show why you’d be good for them too.

Swami: Fourth, avoid clichés. If a sentence could describe any student at any school, cut it.

Claire: Students will sometimes say, “This is such a strong CS program,” with only vague supporting detail, and that could describe several other schools with strong programs too.

Swami: Claire and I have talked about this one a lot: “I want to apply to NYU because I love the city of New York.”

Claire: Colleges don’t want their location to be the reason you want to attend. There are exceptions if you have a genuinely specific relationship to that location, but loving a city isn’t a reason to attend a particular school there, you could just move to that city.

Swami: And it has to be a two-way fit. If a student says, “I want to work in the immigrant community in East LA, and there’s a specific organization I want to work with,” that gives a college something to connect to, because now it’s clear how that work matches their own values.

Common Tricks That Backfire

Swami: A couple of common mistakes: citing professors and research, and citing clubs.

Claire: Make sure a professor’s name is correct and that they still work there. Make sure any lab or research opportunity you mention is actually open to undergraduates, not just PhD students. This needs to be more than a quick search, really look into what a lab does and how you’d get involved.

Swami: If you’re using Soar, we do a lot to try to keep those references accurate, but nothing is guaranteed, always double-check.

Claire: Same idea with clubs, make sure they’re still active. Sometimes a club’s page is still online, but they haven’t done anything since 2007.

Do You Have to Be a Creative Writer?

Claire: This isn’t the place for creative writing. Your Common App personal statement is where you get to show off narrative skills and imagery. This is closer to an interview: answer the question, give supporting evidence, show your enthusiasm, and that’s really it.

Jen: Don’t force creativity. If your natural voice is a certain way, just write like that. Forced creativity is usually what produces long, unwieldy sentences and thesaurus vocabulary that a student would never actually use. Students often add that because they think a plain answer sounds boring, but the excitement in an essay comes from specific details, about yourself and about the college, not from vocabulary.

Swami: Even in the Common App essay, this is true. People think creative writing has to read a certain way, or worse, like William Faulkner. Faulkner’s writing is genuinely hard to follow, but he was William Faulkner, people put in the effort because of who he was. Nobody’s going to put that effort into reading a college application essay. Unless you have a natural, complex style, and that’s rare, be straightforward. Use your own voice.

Swami: And again: almost no first draft is great, and almost no final draft is perfect. We’ve had students get into Duke, Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, Stanford, and at the point they submitted, their essay could still have been improved. It addressed everything it needed to. Getting there is what matters.

Three Examples

Swami: A first draft: “In my years of high school, I’ve had the opportunity of growing my interest in social science, policy, environmental studies, and biotechnology. I believe it is a time for me to step into a place that will equip me with the knowledge and resources necessary to deepen my passions, feed my love for learning, and motivate me to reach further towards my goal: creating the future I aspire to see.” These are real students and real essays, with identifying details changed. This is entirely boilerplate, but this student got into the University of Michigan, and that’s the point of revision. Here’s the final version: “Activities like Michigan Mock Trial attract me since not only are they entirely student-led, they hone communication and critical thinking skills. MMT is a group on campus that is driven towards success and change, which shows in their incredible competition record. A group like that, having so many students chosen due to merit and hard work, indicates the extraordinary nature of the students there. I know I can find a group of students whose values align with mine.”

Claire: Much better, though still not perfect.

Swami: Right, but it’s clear, specific, one real connection: Michigan Mock Trial, and why that’s a genuine fit. The writing could still be tightened, it’s a little overwrought, but at some point it meets everything it needs to, and that’s good enough.

Swami: Second example, a student applying to the pre-law track at USC: “In my sophomore year of high school, I argued for expanding the list of predicate crimes in 18 USC section 1956,” and so on, about closing tax evasion loopholes. I don’t fully know what that means, but this student clearly does, and a reader would come away knowing this student wants to study law. Then: “USC’s course in Environmental Law caught my eye because I spent my junior year debating water protection regulations and would like to learn more about the legality surrounding certain environmental protections.” Simply written, nothing overwrought, just words any teenager would actually use, and it draws a clear, unforced line from past experience to future interest.

Jen: That connection is exactly right, not forced. His past experience connects to what he wants to study, and an admissions reader can look at his activities list and see it confirmed.

Swami: Last example: two students, both writing about jazz band. One is a Why WPI essay: “Not only do I love WPI’s STEM opportunities, but you have a great jazz ensemble, and I can continue as a big-band trumpet player.” That fits, an admissions reader can check the activities list and see years of playing trumpet. The other is a Why Major essay for USC, from a student who wants to study physics, and it talks about auditioning for the concert and jazz band. That doesn’t fit the prompt at all. The writing is specific and sincere in both cases, but only one of them actually answers the question being asked.

Closing

Swami: A recording and transcript of today’s session will both be emailed out. Thank you all so much for being here, we ran a bit over time today, so apologies for that. If you’re watching, we’d genuinely love to know how useful this was, drop us a note in the chat, we use that to shape future webinars. Thank you to Jen and Claire for being here today, and apologies again that Ruth couldn’t join us.

Jen: I’m just looking forward to reading all these essays.

Swami: Thanks, Jen. Thanks, Claire, and thank you to everyone who joined us today. We hope you have a great day.

For personalized help with your Why Us or Why Major essays, visit lifelaunchr.com.