Williams College is a small liberal arts school located in Williamstown, Massachusetts. There are about 2,000 undergrads. The school is pretty open in terms of curriculum. They don’t have minors. Rather, concentrations where students can take groupings of courses that support one area of interest Students They also have a cultural diversity requirement and encourage students to do coursework about other groups and societies. Classes are small with a student-faculty ratio of 6:1. The acceptance rate is 8 percent

Williams does not require a writing supplement. However, students who are interested in submitting an example of their written work have the option of sharing an academic paper completed within the last year, ideally 3-5 pages in length. The paper does not need to be graded, and can be creative or analytical. Please do not submit lab reports. If submitting this optional paper, please include a description of the assignment or prompt.

Oh, Williams. We do not love this supplement. The reason we don’t love it is that a lot of kids—specifically public school students—don’t have 3-5 page papers they wrote in high school, and yet, they’d excel at Williams. While we always tell our students they must work hard for their four years of high school if they hope to get into a great school, we feel that plenty of students may have worked hard and learned all they needed to, but don’t have big reports in their bodies of work. Alas.

We often advise our students to develop an academic niche throughout high school. This should be a specific area of study around which you develop your extracurriculars and higher-level classes; an academic brand, if you will. This should be something highly specific. Science is too broad. Environmental studies is perfect. You should do research on Williams and the areas of study they offer that are most closely aligned with your academic area of expertise. Pick a paper about a topic that most closely represents your academic niche. Again, Williams is pretty open academically. So, if you have a really weird and hyper-specific body of research that was super interesting to you, share it. They want to know what you’re passionate about and they want to know how you’ll continue to develop that academic niche at their school.

While Williams says this exercise is not required, we beg to differ. If you want to go to Williams, you have to submit something. Schools are getting increasingly competitive. If you want to be shoulders ahead of your competition, you have to put your all into every part of the application.

Need help with your resume? Call us. We’re great at helping students develop their academic brand.