The Georgia Institute of Technology is a large public research university in Atlanta, GA. Georgia Tech focuses primarily on science, technology, and engineering, and offers more than 130 degree programs. Georgia Tech has an admissions rate of 20.6%, and they take approximately 60% of their incoming class from Georgia. As such, you’ll want to pay extra attention to this post if you’re applying from outside the Peach State.
The Georgia Tech supplemental essay is relatively straightforward, but the low word count means that you’ll want to be careful with what you write about--brevity is the soul of wit. Georgia Tech thankfully dropped one of the two supplemental essays they asked for last year, so they’ve made your work much easier.
Why do you want to study your chosen major specifically at Georgia Tech? (max 300 words)
This prompt is a classic “Why ___ major at Georgia Tech?” You’ll add a bit of excitement and personality by framing your response around a story that establishes why you’re interested in your selected major. As always, we want to wake the reader up: connect to them by showing who you are.
We recommend that you set aside an hour or more to do some research on the major you have selected. You want to know it inside and out. You’ll follow a three-paragraph structure for this essay.
BACKGROUND
We’ll start by writing a bit of an origin story--a narrative that will provide background for what you want to study. What experiences have shaped your academic interests? If you want to study Computer Science (CS), write about the time you downloaded malware, and ruined your parents’ desktop. Tell the reader how angry they were, how you felt responsible to find a solution, and then how you ended up finding antivirus software that cleaned up the problem.
Write about how you then went to create your first website, how you stayed up late creating a site to display photos of your dog. Your origin should show your inspiration, your spark, for choosing your course of study. You want someone to be able to read this paragraph and feel like they know you, and you want them to understand instantly your choice of study.
MAJOR
You’ll use this section to show why you want to study ___ major at Georgia Tech. Begin by choosing a suitable major from Tech’s list of undergraduate offerings. Find something that truly interests you--it’ll be much easier to write about something you love. You want a major that connects to courses you’ve already taken and succeeded in. This shows your continued interest and commitment to a subject. Nobody will hold you to this major if you end up attending Tech: just choose something you can craft a good origin story for.
You’ll further establish your interest in Georgia Tech by writing about two or three courses in your major you want to take. If you can and it makes for a cohesive story, talk about a professor you’d like to research with. Choose your courses by selecting your major from the course catalog and examining what’s offered. You want to pick upper-level courses: introductory courses are basically the same everywhere.
If you want to study CS, you can talk about that old jailbroken iPod you had as a kid, and how you need to take CS 2261 “Media Device Architecture” to understand just how it worked. Don’t write about wanting to take “Introduction to Computing.” Intro-level courses like these aren’t unique to Georgia Tech.
Like we mentioned earlier, you should write about a professor you’d like to study with. Look through the faculty that teach in your selected department and pick out someone with work you find interesting. The prospective CS student could write about wanting to work with Kamau Bobb on reducing the racial bias found in certain algorithms.
CONCLUSION
Finish your journey from your origin to your major at Georgia Tech by wrapping your earlier points and reminding your reader why you need to attend. Remember, a 300 words supplement is short, be sure to use all available space. If you want to include anything fun about Georgia Tech--perhaps how excited you are to cheer for the Yellow Jackets at McCamish Pavilion--this is the place to do it.
This is the only supplemental question Georgia Tech will ask you, so it’s your best chance to establish your interest in attending. Keep editing it until you’re absolutely confident in the quality of your work. You can definitely ace this one--we laid out the successful formula above.
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