A Comprehensive List of Different Essays You Might Need To Write for Graduate Degree University Applications
- kaushal984
- Apr 25
- 9 min read
Updated: Apr 30
If you have recently started researching what goes into a Master’s application, you have probably come across a lot of advice about the Statement of Purpose. Write a compelling one, personalize it for each university, make it stand out. That is not wrong advice. But it is incomplete.
The SOP is one document in a larger set of written requirements that most applicants only discover in full once they are already inside the application portal, often weeks before a deadline. By that point, the room to do things well has narrowed considerably.
This article is an attempt to give you that full picture before you get there. It is not a guide on how to write each document; we have separate, detailed pieces for those. The goal here is to help you understand what the full writing workload of a graduate application actually looks like, how the different documents relate to each other, and what surprises tend to catch applicants off guard.
How an Admissions Committee Actually Reads Your Application
Before going through each document, it is worth understanding the context in which all of them will be read.
For most graduate programs, the evaluation process works in two stages. The first is elimination, where applications are filtered against minimum thresholds on academic performance and test scores. Your written documents play no role here. If your application does not clear this stage, nothing you write will matter.
The second stage is selection. This is where your SOP, LOR, Resume, and any additional essays come in. At this stage, the admissions committee is not just asking “is this applicant eligible?” They are asking “out of all the eligible applicants, why should we pick this one?”
This distinction matters because it changes how you should think about your written documents. They are not a place to demonstrate that you meet the criteria. They are a place to make the case that you are the right choice among those who do. That is a harder thing to do, and it is a different thing entirely.
Within the selection stage, the three core documents (SOP, LOR, and Resume) are read in combination, not in isolation. Each one is expected to do a different job:
The Resume tells the admissions committee what you have done: your academic record, work experience, projects, and skills, presented as a factual record.
The SOP tells the committee who you are as a thinker: what drove your choices, where you are headed, and why this program is the right next step for you.
The LOR tells the committee what someone who has worked closely with you actually thinks of you, a third-party perspective that neither you nor your resume can provide.
The three are expected to be consistent with each other in substance, even though they serve different purposes. A project you mention in your SOP should appear on your Resume. A recommender who writes about your research abilities should be describing the same work you have referenced in your SOP. The committee notices when these documents feel disconnected, and it raises questions about credibility.
Beyond these three, several universities ask for what we call Additional Essays, a distinct category of written requirements that sit outside the standard SOP and often require entirely fresh content. We will come to these later in this article.
The Statement of Purpose
The SOP is, in most cases, the document that carries the most weight in the selection stage, and also the one that tends to be misunderstood in a specific, consequential way.
Most applicants approach the SOP as a place to present their academic and professional history in essay form. The result is usually a document that describes the past in detail and says very little about the future. The admissions committee, however, is primarily interested in the future: whether you have a clear, credible sense of where you are headed and why this program is the right vehicle for getting there. Past experiences are relevant to the extent that they explain how you arrived at that future. They are context, not content.
What this means in practice is that the SOP requires a different kind of thinking than most applicants bring to it. It is not a writing exercise. It is a positioning exercise that happens to be expressed in writing. The difference becomes apparent when you try to do it.
For a detailed guide on how to approach this, including the specific questions your SOP needs to answer, the structural choices available to you, and a documented set of mistakes to avoid, read our comprehensive piece: A Comprehensive Guide for Writing the SOP
What Happens When You Try to Submit It
Once your SOP is in good shape, most applicants assume the hard part is done. What they find when they log into application portals is often something different: constraints on length, format, and even the presence of an SOP requirement at all, none of which are visible from a university’s public-facing website. These only surface once you are inside the application form itself, which is typically the last place you want to encounter a surprise. For a list of ten universities, expecting two or three to require meaningful rework of content you considered finalized is realistic.
To understand exactly what this looks like in practice, we have put together a dedicated piece with screenshots taken directly from inside the application portals of multiple universities, not from their website pages, but from the actual forms you would be filling out. That is the only way to show you what you will encounter at the point of submission: SOP Customization Requirements: Things That you will Encounter during Applications.
Letters of Recommendation
LORs tends to receive the least attention of the three core documents, partly because applicants assume it is largely out of their hands. That assumption is worth examining.
In a significant number of cases, recommenders, particularly professors and senior colleagues with heavy workloads, will ask the applicant to draft the letter themselves and simply sign off on it. This means you may end up writing a document that is formally attributed to someone else and is supposed to evaluate you from the outside. That is a very different task from writing about yourself in your own voice, and most applicants are not prepared for it.
Even when recommenders do write independently, the quality of what they produce depends a great deal on how well you have briefed them: what to emphasize, which experiences to reference, what the program is looking for. A recommender who knows you well but receives no guidance will often produce a warm but generic letter. Generic letters are not harmful, but they are also not doing any work for your application.
The other thing worth knowing is that the right set of recommenders is not simply “whoever you know best.” The appropriate mix of academic and professional recommenders varies by program type, and the credibility of a letter depends partly on the nature of the recommender’s direct interaction with you. A professor who taught you one course carries less weight than one who supervised your thesis or evaluated independent work.
For a full guide on selecting recommenders, understanding what a strong LOR needs to contain, and navigating the drafting process whether you are writing it yourself or briefing someone else, read: How to Frame Letters of Recommendations (LORs) for Endorsing Candidates for Graduate Degree Applications.
Using AI to Write your Essays?
With the growing availability of AI tools (ChatGPT, Claude, etc.), you might be tempted to use them to write your SOP, LORs, and other essays. Is that a wise approach? How low should your AI Detection score be? What do Universities have to say regarding this issue? Click the button to know more
The Resume
The Resume is often treated as the most straightforward of the three documents. It is a factual record, the thinking goes, so it mainly requires accuracy and a clean layout.
That framing misses something. In a graduate application, the Resume is read alongside the SOP, not before or after it, but as a companion document. The admissions committee will notice when the profile conveyed in your Resume and the narrative constructed in your SOP do not align. An SOP that emphasizes your research orientation needs a Resume that reflects that orientation in how experience is framed and prioritized. A Resume structured around responsibilities rather than outcomes, one built for a hiring manager rather than an admissions committee, creates a subtle but real disconnect.
Beyond this, most applicants do not realize that universities use Applicant Tracking Systems to filter Resumes before any human review takes place, much the same way that employers do. Formatting choices that look clean and professional on screen can render a Resume partially or entirely unreadable to these systems, not because the content is weak, but because of how it has been laid out.
For a structured guide on Resume format, section ordering, ATS compatibility, and how to write bullet points that read as contributions rather than task lists, read: Things to Know about Crafting a Resume for University Applications.
Additional Essays
Even applicants who have planned carefully, with their SOP drafted, LORs organized, and Resume finalized, tend to be caught off guard by this one.
Several universities, beyond their SOP requirement, ask applicants to submit essays that cover content the SOP would not, and in most cases cannot, cover. These are not variations of the SOP, and they are not resolved by the kind of customization described above. They are distinct essays that require fresh brainstorming, fresh positioning, and a perspective on a different aspect of who you are. At InkStudio, we call these Additional Essays because that is what they are in practice: a separate layer of writing work on top of everything else.
The main types that appear across graduate applications are:
Diversity Essay. One of the most commonly required additional essays at US graduate programs. You are asked to reflect on aspects of your background, identity, or lived experience, and to articulate the perspective you would bring to the academic community.
Personal History Statement. Closely related to the Diversity Essay in spirit, but with a specific focus on your personal journey: the circumstances, challenges, or experiences that shaped the path that led you here. The specific prompt differs enough between universities that content cannot simply be copied across.
Video Essays. Some programs require applicants to record responses to specified prompts. These may be submitted as uploaded videos, or in some cases recorded live within the application portal at a scheduled time. The live format is particularly difficult to prepare for, because it tests how you think and communicate under pressure rather than how well you can write and revise.
Program-Specific Essays. Many programs ask questions tailored specifically to their curriculum, research environment, or departmental culture. These cannot be adapted from other essays. University of Washington’s MS in Data Science, Northwestern’s Master of Engineering Management, and IESEG’s Masters in Management are examples where the additional essay requirements are entirely specific to the program and have no generic equivalent.
Miscellaneous formats. Some universities use Q&A formats in place of traditional essay prompts. Others ask about academic setbacks, extenuating circumstances, leadership experiences, or how you would contribute to the learning community. UIUC requires additional essays on top of a 1000-word SOP for most of its programs. Stanford’s “Enriching the Learning Community” prompt also falls here; it looks like a Diversity Statement on a quick read but asks a meaningfully different question.
None of these can be handled by adjusting content you have already written. Each requires its own story, its own framing, and in some cases an entirely different medium. The practical consequence of discovering this at the last minute is that either the essays are rushed, or the deadline is missed.
For the full picture, including actual screenshots from the application portals of Harvard, Northwestern, Berkeley, CMU, University of Washington, Stanford, UIUC, HEC Paris, and others, read: Indicative Guide on Different Additional Essays That You May Encounter during Masters Applications
What This Means for Your Application Timeline
If there is one practical takeaway from everything above, it is that the writing workload of a graduate application is consistently larger than applicants expect, and it is almost always discovered later than is comfortable.
The standard advice is to start early. That is true, but not specific enough to be useful on its own. In terms of this writing workload, starting early means the following:
The SOP should begin taking shape at least three to four months before your earliest target deadline. Not because the writing itself takes that long, but because the content gathering, brainstorming, and iterative refinement do. SOP Customization as per different university requirements can happen only once a base draft of your SOP is finalized.
LORs need to be initiated at roughly the same time, since recommenders require lead time and the drafting process, whether you are doing it yourself or briefing someone else, takes longer than most applicants expect.
The Resume can be built in parallel, but it should be finalized before you begin customizing the SOP for individual universities, since the two documents need to hold together as a coherent whole.
Additional Essays can be worked on in parallel, but you will only discover these requirements once you start filling out your application forms on the university portals. The only way to avoid being caught short is to open those portals early by creating your logins well before the deadline, identify what is required, and start working on the additional essays content along with your SOP, LORs, and Resume.
How InkStudio Approaches This
At InkStudio, we work with applicants across every layer of the writing process described above: from the initial SOP draft through to customization, LOR framing, Resume building, and Additional Essays.
The reason we stay involved through all of it is not simply that each document requires effort. It is that these documents are read together, and the quality of the overall application depends on how well they work as a set, not just on how strong each individual piece is in isolation.
If you are at the start of your application process and would like to understand what this would look like for your specific profile, you can reach out to us here:
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