Moves You’ve Never Seen Before

My standard line at wedding receptions when asked whether I’ll be spending any time on the dance floor is that “I have moves you’ve never seen before.”  As with language used in guarded recommendations from teachers, this doesn’t necessarily mean my moves are particularly good.  It means only that they’re distinctive for reasons that may be obvious when you visualize a gangly bald guy making like a rhythmic octopus.  I also have a three-part breakdance repertoire that went out of style with parachute pants and headbands, but I never got the message.

Being distinctive can be a challenge for colleges and universities, especially in the era of the Common Application, which has the unfortunate effect of making member institutions look even more similar to one another.  Mind you, the profound benefit of the Common Application—simplifying a process that already intrudes more than it should on a meaningful senior year of high school—more than outweighs this downside.  Nonetheless, on a marketing level it’s regrettable that we all ask the same questions.  We all profess interest in the same information formatted the same way.  Even the institutional supplements to the Common Application, which do provide an opportunity for differentiation, have a standardized look and feel.  Perhaps most deadening of all, online applications (used by the overwhelming majority of applicants, 85% at William & Mary) appear on the screen as if they’re still paper forms.  We don’t take advantage of what can be done in an online environment that print won’t allow.

Until now.

This summer I wrote a treatment for what can be thought of as the video interpretation of the essay prompt on William & Mary’s Supplement to the Common Application.  Although students do not need to see the video prompt in order to complete their applications successfully, the video offers additional context that is intended both to put them at ease and to promote their creativity.  We called the project the YouEssay, and this summer the same team that produced the video we show our campus visitors filmed, edited and scored the final, two-minute cut, which lives on YouTube.  It also appears as a link on William & Mary’s supplement form and makes the College the first institution to use multimedia as part of its essay prompt.

– Henry Broaddus

p.s. — All twelve of the admission officers who read applications for William and Mary appear in the feature (if only briefly in a few cases), and yes, we do dance at the end.