3 Tips to Strengthen Your Application to USC

By: Sanaa Alam ‘25

Are you an aspiring Trojan and confused how to navigate the USC supplemental questions? Here are some brainstorming tips that helped me show many different sides of myself in my application: 

Use your high school experiences as a foundation for your essays!

When addressing USC’s prompt asking about my interests outside of my intended academic focus, I started by writing down my week’s schedule to identify how I truly spent my time. Whether it’s sports, babysitting, or arts and crafts, you can highlight a specific activity in your week that you enjoy and discuss how USC’s resources would allow you to develop that hobby into a possible career or have it further enrich your future. Remember that each university you submit your application to only knows you from the information you submit, so it’s best to use each application prompt to highlight different aspects of yourself so the admissions committee has a better understanding of you as a complete person!

Use expressive language when describing yourself: “Show, Don’t Tell”

When I was applying to colleges, I didn’t understand the saying “Show, Don’t Tell” because, technically, when you are describing your experiences, you are showing the readers your life. However, I didn’t realize that what people who used that saying really meant was to bring out descriptive adjectives and adverbs to pull the reader into the scene. 

One brainstorming trick that worked for me was writing down the experience I was describing at the top of a page and then listing the five senses below it, coming up with descriptions or ideas that fit in each category to give me vivid details to start the essay with. Another great way to keep the reader engaged is to swap any sentences in the passive voice into active voice.

Here’s an example:

Active voice: “I am interested in majoring in Health Promotion and Disease Prevention.”

Passive voice: “Health Promotion and Disease Prevention interests me as a student.”

Discuss what you’re passionate about!

Throughout high school, you probably committed time and energy to events and projects you were interested in. Spend time discussing how they impacted your interests and future career choice. Writing these essays can even help you figure out what you should study in college. When I first started my college applications, I intended to be a Chemical Engineering major. However, when I started writing these essays, I realized I was stretching to meet the requirements and didn’t have many compelling reasons for why I wanted that major. When I switched to writing about a pre-health major in chemistry, the prompt was still tough to answer, but my response discussed the importance of intersectional sciences, which I was passionate about, and I was able to relate my future major to my life experiences much more easily. After I made the mental switch, my college applications were much stronger because I showed vulnerability by describing the source of my true interests.

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