How to write the Yale short takes

FFormer Yale admissions officers describe the three short takes on Yale's application, each limited to 200 characters or about thirty-five words, as far more than an afterthought. Common and Coalition applicants currently answer all three: one asks what course you would teach, book you would write or art you would make; one asks what you hope to grow in during college; one asks for something about you that appears nowhere else in the application.

Families tend to treat them as filler written the night before submission, and the result is three answers a reader forgets by the next file. Prompts can change from year to year, so check Yale's essays page before drafting. How former officers there approached these answers suggests a different place to begin.