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Many students think that by using the Common Application, they only need to write two essays. But in addition to the Common Application’s basic essays, most schools require multiple supplemental admission essays. Some applicants have never even heard of supplemental essays – which can make for a pretty rude awakening as deadlines approach.

The facts:

• Submitting 7 college applications often requires more than 15 different admission essays.
• Just finding and organizing your college essay questions can take several hours.
• Many admission questions are hard to find, and some are not even located on the Common Application, especially the program-specific and scholarship questions.

CEO provides your essay questions in one place, instantly. We save you hours of work, keep you organized, and make sure you never overlook any essay questions.

We've put together a page explaining what Common App supplements are, and have provided a few examples of colleges that have them. For example, Yale has 2 required supplemental essays along with 5 short-answer essays. Some schools that have gone completely overboard: NYU has 3 required essays and as many as 27 program-specific essays.

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These errors are all too common, and they're the kinds of things that can sink an application for good. Letting yourself be sloppy, cliched, repetitive, or negative won't just make your essays forgettable, they can even actively work against you, ruining whatever goodwill the rest of your application has engendered with the person reading it.

So without further adieu, make sure you never make these common mistakes:

• Don't litter your essay with quotes from others
• Don't go thesaurus-happy
• Don't generalize or stereotype
• Don’t use profanity or crass humor
• Don't use stuffy language

Take a look at our more comprehensive list of writing styles to avoid and see what other kinds of common errors you can be sure to look out for.

Maybe after you get the acceptance letter you can think twice about getting the tattoo to match.

The University of Miami got a few new ways to recruit students this week - Lebron James and a few of his friends.

The King's decision caused us to pause and consider His Majesty's... shall we say... not so tactful way of revealing where he was headed. Let's compare it to the somewhat less prickly process of letting your family know which college you'll be attending. Yes! I said it! You will get in! Somewhere! After that initial joy wears off, take your tips from the Chosen 1:

1. Don't schedule an hour-long slot on prime-time television, no matter who asks for it. We understand you're going somewhere. We understand it is very, very important to you. And to many other people in your life. Even to people you have not yet met. But the process of telling people should take you fifteen seconds at best. Perhaps thirty when speaking to the elderly. An hour is pushing it for anything that can be safely squeezed inside a single sentence.

2. Don't surround yourself with children like you're Mother Theresa. You are not bringing wider peace to the populace. You are bringing academic potential and all the hard work of preparation that comes along with it. You are not, however, raising a city from the ashes. If, for example, you're going to college in, oh, say, southern Florida, remember that southern Florida has seen a lot and has done okay without you.

3. Don't tell people where you're about to "take your talents." We also understand how talented and wise you are. Just get in there and get those straight-As like your mama made you to. Just get in there and get 'er done. And if there is, oh, say, someone else who might have a leg (or six) up on you, pay them respect and just let everyone know about where you're headed quietly. A phone call, an email, even a press release to the proper media outlets, and you'll be fine.

Follow these three simple tips and it is highly unlikely that anyone will shove life-sized cutouts of you into the garbage face first. Better yet, very few people will set anything on fire with your name on it. Stay strong.

Here are some other speed-mongers who whose abilities, while not necessarily as speedy as CEO's, will amaze you. Behold.

Think long and hard about how funny you are. Are you funnier than this cat? Are you sure?

As we have mentioned many times before the college essay is not to be considered a cousin of the typical five-paragraph essay. It is a piece of writing that lends itself to an invention of its form, and in its best cases operates almost like its own genre. Depending on the prompts there can be opportunities to discuss unique experiences, failures, crimes, and misdemeanors. There is also an almost nagging opportunity to write the thing as wittily as possible. For many, that urge is irresistible.

We recognize this desire. We have felt this desire. We demand that you repress this desire.

Why?

Because unless you are simpatico with the admissions officer reading your essay - and have caught him or her in the right mood on the right day - you run the risk of just straight up falling on your face with any gag or tonal shift you attempt. And that is not a risk you can afford to take.

It's not to say that you're not funny - though in our experience you are almost definitely less funny than you think - it's that the shaky likelihood of your reader thinking your humor is good and appropriate to the subject is multiplied against the shaky likelihood that you're funny. Multiply it again by the number of admissions officers who have to read the thing and you've written yourself into a statistical hole.

But the best reason to avoid humor in these essays is the amount of time you're going to spend on the piece. You will be able to much more easily figure out if your essay is good by avoiding humor. You will be able to focus on structural, stylistic, and content elements that are much more easy to quantify. The flip side of that, of course, is that those elements are much more easy to recognize as being well done by the admissions officer, too.

It's not that we don't like funny! We live for funny. It's just that we really live for your admissions success, and that's no laughing matter. Ba-doom-ching.