You only have two essays to write, one short and one long, on the Boston University application. In fact, the short essay is only 5-6 sentences (which really qualifies more as a paragraph than it does a short essay). It's important to make the most of that limited opportunity to help the BU admissions committee get to know you better. So here are some tips to help you do that.
Short answer
In five or six sentences, tell us how you first became interested in BU and what steps you have taken to learn more about us.
I'm not sure I can adequately describe just how many responses the BU admissions committee is likely to read that are some version of,
"I first became interested in Boston University when I read about it in a college guidebook. The combination of great academics in large city seemed like the perfect combination for me. The more I researched the school, the more I liked it. I also visited the campus last summer."
At Collegewise, we teach our students a concept we call "Own your story." To own your story means that you've written something that nobody else applying to college could have written (or at the very least, that thousands of other kids would absolutely not have written).
The person who wrote the response above doesn't own that story. Any kid applying to Boston University could have written it. Believe me, a lot of them will. And they'll torture the admissions committee because of it.
But compare that response to this one:
"In April of my junior year, my high school counselor told me, "Kevin, you're an interesting kid. Why are you applying to such uninteresting colleges? I asked her what she thought would be a good choice for me, and the first school she named was Boston University. I've visited your website obsessively, probably once a day at least for the last six months. I've read about all the classes I would take as a communications major. And last summer, I took a three-hour road trip with my friend in my '93 Corolla just so we could take a tour of BU."
The chances that another student will write an identical response are zero. This student owns his story. So the most important thing you need to do in this response, even though it's only 5-6 sentences long, is to own your story. Be very specific. Whether you read a guidebook or talked to your friends or visited the school or went to a college fair, share the details about how you learned and followed up with BU, and do so in a way that no other applicant will be able to do.