This article will cover one of our successful Vanderbilt Common App essays that worked. In this example essay, we worked with a client over a period of time to consult, edit, and advise on their essay. We made sure to make the essay stand out in a manner that would be competitive in the application pool.
This is crucial. The admissions process at Vanderbilt, like many other elite schools, is rigorous and brutal. Students who are performing at the highest level are often the only ones considered, and from that small pool, only a select few are picked.
That’s why Vanderbilt boasts an acceptance rate of 4.7% for Freshmen and 25.24% for transfers. You can find more about their admissions stats and the overall profile of accepted students here.
If you’re also looking for how to get accepted into Vanderbilt in general plus some more information on analyzing the school’s acceptance rates, then check out our blog post on how to get accepted into Vanderbilt.
With that said, here are our client’s stats for when they were accepted as a transfer to Vanderbilt.
Applicant Stats
- GPA: 4.0
- Major: Human and Organizational Development
- Extracurriculars:
- Started their own small business
- Online marketing and PPC ads strategy internship at a startup
- Worked at a hardware store
- Language courses and completion program abroad.
We wanted to share this information with you because we thought this would help paint a better picture of what kind of student it takes to get accepted as a transfer. As you can see, their GPA is perfect. Though, perfect is not always mandatory. They also have extracurriculars and future aspirations that align quite well with their intended major.
This is a very strong attribute when it comes to effective applications.
More often than not, students have irrelevant extracurriculars that don’t point toward one particular major or intended future aspiration. For instance, they may have an interest in playing the piano, competing in E-Sports, and writing fiction stories on publishing mediums such as Wattpad. Then, they’ll apply for a major like mechanical engineering: something very different from their interests.
This is actually okay! In fact, it’s totally normal and sometimes even encouraged to have external interests outside of your major. It shows you’re human. However, the best and most effective extracurriculars are those that align well with the career or project plans you have after graduation.
It’s not always necessary. After all, extracurriculars are just that: extracurriculars that you do in your free time as an interest. Though, having some align with your future plans and goals works well. In this case, our client’s experience in business and working at the startup worked very well in his favor as someone who plans to pursue entrepreneurial endeavors in the future.
So, with that said, let’s cover the Vanderbilt Common App transfer essay that worked. We’ll also cover four attributes about the essay that we believe made this essay stand out from the rest of the application pool, and ultimately contributed to the client’s success.
Table of Contents
- Vanderbilt Common App Transfer Essay Prompt.
- Successful Vanderbilt Common App Transfer Essay That Worked.
- What Made the Vanderbilt Transfer Essay Strong?
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Vanderbilt Common App Transfer Essay Prompt.
Please provide a personal essay that addresses your reasons for transferring and the objectives you hope to achieve (Minimum word count 250 words, Maximum word count 650 words).
Successful Vanderbilt Common App Transfer Essay That Worked.
“‘Now you’ll be less likely to get bitten by the scorpions.’”
Diego was my couchsurfing host. He lived in a small house in Nicaragua without running water or electricity; nonetheless, from what little he had, he generously offered his own extra set of blankets so I’d be lifted from the ground and out of reach from scorpions.
Outside his home, the half-restored houses, burned crops, and atomized topsoil as a result of the fallout of rioting years prior, made the streets look dystopian. It was Daniel Ortega: the president. His reforms shrinking social security coupled with the lethal police response silencing protests ignited the powder keg that would lead to civil unrest.
Even so, the maelstrom of protests and brutalizing police didn’t stop Diego from restoring his community. Now, with me by his side, we cleaned up the chaos by assisting the local farmers. We helped them harvest their fruits and sell them on the vending stands to get back on their feet.
We weren’t the only ones.
The old, the young, the women, the men; they bonded together and congregated into a collaborative effort to rebuild the community so dear to them.
I’ve witnessed such a deep sense of camaraderie in many communities across the world: the Saharan Berber nomads fighting to preserve their culture, the Ecuadorian community bonding to fight off robbers during riots, Syrian refugees coming together to integrate into Turkey, and the people of Columbia working together to ward off the cartels who destroyed their community.
As a student who took their entire college course load digitally while traveling, seeing that camaraderie between communities showed how much true connection I was missing with my classmates online. Now, I am seeking a college with the kind of tight-knit community I saw in my travels. I know I will find this at Vanderbilt, as its commitment to community will provide the bonding I yearned for as a digital nomad student.
Within Vanderbilt, I plan to work alongside other entrepreneurial students to expand my organization: Business Without Borders (BWB). It is a consulting group I created that collaborates with family-run small businesses around the world, like those I’ve had the privilege of engaging with on my travels. The goal of BWB is to provide our services to those most often overlooked to promote global equity, especially in developing countries.
However, I cannot do this alone.
Vanderbilt’s deeply-rooted culture in camaraderie is perfect for building a team of future visionaries who share a similar global vision. To find the right community that shares my passion, organizations like Vanderbilt Students Consulting for Nonprofit Organizations (SCNO) would be a strong platform to start with. Their pro bono market analysis and revenue models for organizations such as The Pencil Foundation and Book’em are exactly what would prepare me to fulfill BWB’s mission.
Entrepreneurial visions can not be fulfilled with community alone: in-depth academic knowledge and problem-solving skills are needed to have any hopes of scaling.
Everything from helping Nicaraguan farmers sell their goods to hustling outside stadiums selling $53,000 worth of water bottles solidified my love for entrepreneurial endeavors. However, the comprehensive academic rigor at Vanderbilt is exactly the depth of learning I will need to fill in the gaps of my business education.
Thus, I would like to major in Human and Organizational Development with the Leadership and Organizational Effectiveness track. Its courses such as HODL 3274, Managing Organizational Change align with my goals of helping small businesses around the world.
If taking my college Zoom classes across 18 countries and 123 cities taught me anything, it’s that the most meaningful experiences abroad are made by joining the inconspicuous communities to help and work alongside them. Although I am an entrepreneur, I am also a student. To succeed at both, I will need the worldly curriculum and collaborative companionship at Vanderbilt to spearhead a worldwide initiative greater than myself.“
Successful Vanderbilt Common App Transfer Essay
What Made the Vanderbilt Transfer Essay Strong?
Now that you’ve seen the kind of writing it takes to get accepted, let’s make a few things clear. You don’t have to write only in this manner. You don’t have to copy this client’s particular writing pattern. In fact, you probably shouldn’t be trying to copy what they do too closely because everyone’s writing is unique.
What you can do, however, is borrow the particular attributes and principles that make it a strong essay. Take the principles of writing that make this essay strong, such as its use of diverse sentence structure and punctuation, and apply that same principle to your own writing.
Now, let’s cover four elements of the Vanderbilt transfer essay that made it a strong essay.
Admission to Vanderbilt is Morally Just!
Yes, we know.
You probably shouldn’t tell Vanderbilt’s admissions officers that they should accept you into their school for moral reasons. There’s no moral justification to associate your acceptance with some kind of moral superiority. That’s not what we mean for you to do.
Instead, we’re asking you to do something different. We’re recommending that you tie your admission to Vanderbilt with your ability to uphold a moral virtue.
Our client did this very well. They showed the admissions officers in their essay that their future aspirations with the BWB organization are rooted in a personal philosophy of helping aspiring yet struggling business people around the world. This pursuit of equitable financial change and equality shows admissions officers that this student is no ordinary student looking to make their project grow, but they’re looking to help pull others up as well.
Next, our client draws parallels to Vanderbilt’s resources and perfect fit for his future goals. Since Vanderbilt has the resources and environment that would best scale his future plans, Vanderbilt also inevitably becomes a gateway to the client’s success in helping others around the world. Subtly, the client’s admissions decision becomes not just something that puts his future at risk; it also implies future business owners around the world are affected by the admissions decision as well.
Think about your future aspirations as well. What do you want to do and what niche or industry do you want to get into? How does it help people? Is your admission to Vanderbilt insinuating not just your success, but the well-being of those you’ll help in the future?
If you can answer those questions and articulate them into smooth and easy reading for the admissions officers, you’re off to a good start. Plus, speaking of smooth and easy reading, let’s get to the next section: streamlined writing.
Streamlined Writing.
In the Vanderbilt transfer essay, streamlined writing is a major contributor to the applicant’s success.
Streamlined writing is especially important for essays that have a higher word count limit. In this case, the Vanderbilt Common App transfer essay has a word limit of 650. A text that long would be very difficult to follow through with the whole way, even for admissions officers. It’s easy to get details lost in the midst of reading a 650-word essay.
The greatest danger to writing that isn’t streamlined is the possibility that vital information gets ignored. Let’s say you have a block of text. The whole 650-word essay is one or two paragraphs long. Those are some large blocks of text; so, it would be unsurprising if admissions officers read through it and missed out on a few crucial details that outlined your positive traits.
It’s not to say that they’re not paying attention. Rather, it’s more that writing that is dull is harder to analyze on a deeper level than simple and streamlined writing. Once the writing is easy enough for people to understand within one read, they can make a deeper analysis. This gives admissions officers more opportunities to find reasons that you’re a good fit.
So, your goal is to streamline the writing; this means you’ll need to make the writing simple, easy to read and follow, and not choppy enough that admissions officers can’t process all the information at once. Try to do what our client had done with their essay. They diversified their sentence structure so that not all sentences are the same length for too long. They used different forms of punctuation all the time to ensure writing was not static and robotic. They also spaced out their paragraphs so that the admissions officers would read through each major point easily.
Admitting Insufficiencies.
This goes hand-in-hand with one of our most common bits of advice: be humble in the admissions essays.
It’s okay to brag in the admissions essays. In fact, it’s exactly in the essays that you should be bragging. But, remember who you are and what you’re applying for. You’re a student. You’re applying to learn at one of the greatest institutions because you believe that, despite your high performance, you have something valuable to gain from a paragon of knowledge.
Thus, it would be foolish not to be humble in the admissions essays. In this case, our client admitted to their insufficiencies by showing that they are pursuing an ambitious project that they cannot handle alone. Because they’re only one single person, they won’t have the capability of doing everything on their own.
The applicant admits that they need the power of collaboration to help them achieve their goals. But, remember: one’s weakness can be their strength too.
In this case, admitting that you’ll need to collaborate and get help from other people to fulfill your dreams can actually be a strong reason for attending Vanderbilt. It’s because of their insufficiency in working alone that they need a collaborative environment. So, they capitalize on this need by showing how it can be well aligned with Vanderbilt’s deeply rooted camaraderie.
Think about some of the ways you may be insufficient. More often than not, your particular weakness can most probably be patched up at Vanderbilt because they may have a unique resource that would help iron it out. Then, show how that need makes Vanderbilt a prime choice.
Writing in Imagery.
This is not always possible for every student, and we understand that.
Not everyone is capable of writing in deep imagery that would captivate the admissions officers or show them in great detail the student’s life. However, it’s an aspect of the Vanderbilt Common App transfer essay that made it a fantastic example.
If you don’t know how to write in deep imagery that paints a good picture for admissions officers, you may want to think about speaking with a college admissions essay editor or advisor. At PenningPapers, we can provide you with exactly that for free in a 30-minute phone call.
Now, we would recommend if you’re thinking of writing your Vanderbilt transfer essay with strong imagery that you at least outline the main points you want to write first. This helps you with wiring in imagery because you can take the admissions process from an organized and logical format.
Outlining the essay first before adding details helps you know what topics to keep and which to spare. Then, when you’re looking to flesh out the details of the story, imagine reading from the perspective of the admissions officers. If they are looking for reasons to accept you, they are going to comb through your essay for specific traits that would be useful for increasing the school’s ROI.
So, think of the parts that schools would pay attention to; then, write it with an imagistic description that has the right connotation. You’ll also want to explain in detail a lot about the way you felt about things. Usually, explaining the feeling of events rather than just the surface-level occurrences helps students paint a better picture and imagery of what events were like.
Remember: not everyone can relate to your unique experiences; but, they can relate to the feeling you got. So, they might not know what sailing on a sailboat is like. But, they’ll relate more to the feeling of fear in being in a confined space like a sailboat and therefore understand you better.
This is what our client did. They wrote in great detail the kinds of ruin they saw in their travels but also the feeling of camaraderie they saw and felt from the community. By explaining details from the perspective of emotion instead of surface-level happenings, our client could more easily choose the right words to set the tone of the essay.
If you are still unsure about how to write the Vanderbilt Common App transfer essay, don’t be afraid to reach out for extra help. Getting accepted into a fantastic and competitive school is no joke. So, our 30-minute phone consultation guarantees that we’ll take your essay seriously and give you the proper advice needed to help you learn how to stand out amongst the rest of the brilliant and already amazing admissions pool. This is a school many covet. So, don’t take half-measures and just “kind of” write it. Get as much help as you can before submission.