The Additional Information section is found under the “Writing” tab in the Common App. To get there, log into your Common App account, click the “Common App” tab, select “Writing” from the sidebar menu, and scroll down to “Additional Information.” It sits below your personal essay and is easy to miss if you don’t scroll past the main writing prompts.
What This Section Is For
The Additional Information section gives you space to share context that doesn’t fit anywhere else in your application. It’s not a required field, and many applicants leave it blank. But if there’s something an admissions reader needs to know to understand your transcript, your activities, or your circumstances, this is where it goes.
Good uses for this section include explaining a dip in your grades due to a health issue, family emergency, or school change. If you had caregiving responsibilities at home, dealt with housing instability or food insecurity, or faced a long commute that limited your extracurricular involvement, this is the place to provide that context. Students who moved frequently can lay out a timeline so admissions officers can connect the dots between different schools on the transcript. Physical or mental health challenges that affected your academic performance also belong here.
You can also use it to elaborate on something positive. If you founded a club and the 150-character activity description didn’t do it justice, a few sentences here can fill in the picture. The section works as a catch-all for anything meaningful that the rest of the application doesn’t capture.
What Not to Put Here
This section is not a bonus essay slot. Writing a second personal statement or an extra short answer doesn’t make your application more competitive. Admissions officers are reading thousands of applications, and additional material that restates what you’ve already said works against you, not for you.
Don’t paste in links to portfolios, videos, resumes, or writing samples. If you didn’t apply to a portfolio-based major, admissions offices don’t need these materials. At many schools, readers can’t even click links from within the application reading software, so those URLs go nowhere.
Avoid listing more extracurricular activities. The Common App already provides 10 activity slots, which is plenty of space to show your involvement. Squeezing in an 11th or 12th activity here signals padding rather than substance.
Additional Information vs. Community Disruptions
Near the Additional Information section, you’ll also see a separate question about community disruptions. These two prompts serve different purposes. The Additional Information section covers anything personal to your experience: your grades, your family situation, your health, your schedule. The Community Disruptions question is specifically about events that affected your broader community, like a pandemic, natural disaster, or local crisis, and how that community-wide disruption affected you individually. If something fits more naturally in one prompt than the other, put it there rather than duplicating it in both.
Formatting Tips
Keep your response concise and factual. You’re providing context, not crafting a narrative essay. A few clear sentences explaining what happened and how it affected your academics or activities is more effective than multiple paragraphs. Bullet points work well if you need to list several brief items, like a timeline of school changes. Short paragraphs work better for explaining a single situation in more depth. Either way, get to the point quickly. Admissions readers appreciate brevity, and the most useful entries in this section tend to be the shortest ones.
If you genuinely have nothing additional to explain, leave the section blank. An empty Additional Information section is completely normal and will never count against you.