What not to write in a Why Us essay

RReaders in Stanford's admissions office, the office we learned from, once asked every applicant why they wanted that college in particular, and as readers there tell it, the answers came back so uniform that the prompt was eventually dropped. The same few subjects turned up in essay after essay.

Many colleges still ask the question, the same subjects still turn up, and the readers who receive them have grown allergic. An applicant who reaches for one of them loses the paragraph without knowing it, because each subject sounds reasonable, even sincere, to the student writing it. Two of the worst offenders are the ones families think of first.