Oh Hampshire, the Common App was only the beginning for you.

We're gonna need a bigger bike

Our lovely friends over at Hampshire College accept only the Common App, which is becoming more and more, um, common these days. For many schools (including even the great Dartmouth), just the Common App and its required long- and short-answer essays are enough. But Hampshire has other plans. It has eight - count them - eight required writing assignments, including a three to five page writing sample and a series of single-sentence short answers among them.

If you happen to be a transfer applicant, great. Make that nine.

Hampshire is known for its atypical approach to everything, from its curriculum all the way down to the architecture on campus. But here they outdo themselves, overlooking the amount of time you're already going to be sinking into the Common App's basic requirements and tacking a few thousand additional words onto the application. Good times!

Lucky for us, repurposing writing from other applications is the name of the game with these taskmasters. With a little cleverness we'll see if we can't whittle it down to something more manageable. The school has a number of questions dealing with your academic interests, what you plan to study, and the ways you plan to apply your knowledge in the future. It may be possible to answer all three by repurposing an essay for another school about your intellectual interests. Hampshire's other required short answers address diversity and local involvement - perhaps these can be handled by a single essay you've done on community service?

Rethinking your previous work can help to minimize the amount of effort expended for rarities like Hampshire, and can help you turn a month's work into an afternoon's, sandwiched between playing some video games and, you know, eating a sandwich.