How to write a Why Us essay about your major

RRead the way Stanford's admissions readers read it, nearly every selective college's Why Us prompt asks two questions at once: what would you come here to study, and why this campus. The wording shifts from Cornell to Duke to Columbia, but read closely, the prompts collapse into that pair. Students read it the other way. They hear why us and start describing the school, its quad, its traditions, its residential life, which is the half of the question they know least about. The result is a page of admiration any applicant could have written, and it tells the reader almost nothing about the person applying. There is a better way to divide the page, and it starts from what you actually know.