You’ve read one of those lists. “50 supercurriculars for economics applicants.” Read Freakonomics. Listen to a podcast. Watch a documentary. Enter an essay competition. Fifty of them, and every one stops in the same place — it tells you what to consume, and never once tells you what to do with it.

So you read the book. You listen to the podcast. And when you sit down to write your Q3 answer, out comes a sentence that proves you own the thing, not a sentence that proves you thought about it: “I read Freakonomics, which developed my interest in economics.” That sentence could have been written by anyone who’s ever picked up that book. It’s a receipt, not a thought.

Here’s the actual problem with those lists: a supercurricular isn’t the book, the podcast episode, or the competition. It’s what happened in your head while you were consuming it. Most lists never teach that second half, so applicants end up with a paragraph that’s really just titles wearing a sentence structure.

We’ve grouped the usual categories below, and for each one we’ve shown the flat version next to a version with an actual idea sitting inside it.

A book

Take the classic — a book. Say it’s Freakonomics, because a lot of applicants have read it. The flat version tells the tutor nothing:

Weak: “I read Freakonomics, which developed my interest in behavioural economics and improved my analytical skills.”

There’s no claim in that sentence, and nothing a tutor could push back on even if they wanted to. Now go one level deeper. Levitt argues that legalised abortion in the 1970s explains a large share of the fall in US crime two decades later — a specific, checkable claim, not a vibe. Don’t just report it. Say what you thought of it. Did it feel too neat? If you go looking for the pushback (worth doing before writing about any book you cite), you’ll find that Foote and Goetz went back through the original regressions and found an error in the state-level controls — the effect shrank considerably once it was corrected.

Stronger: “Levitt’s claim that legalised abortion explains a large share of the 1990s fall in US crime persuaded me at first, but Foote and Goetz’s re-analysis, which found an error in the original state-level controls, taught me that a clever mechanism and a robust result are not the same thing — and that the second is much harder to establish than the first.”

That’s not “I read a book.” That’s “I tested a claim against the pushback, and here’s what the tension taught me.”

A podcast or documentary

The same problem shows up here, often worse, because there’s no cover to hold up and no author name to drop — so the instinct defaults to pure summary. “I watched a documentary about the 2008 financial crisis, which taught me about the dangers of subprime lending” reads like a Wikipedia sentence, not a personal statement one.

Here’s a composite example in the same style. Say you listened to an episode on central bank independence — the argument that governments shouldn’t set interest rates because they’ll always be tempted to cut them just before an election, whatever inflation is actually doing.

Weak: “I listened to a podcast on central bank independence, which taught me about the importance of keeping monetary policy separate from politics.”

Stronger: “A podcast on central bank independence left me with a genuine tension rather than a tidy conclusion: independence protects policy from short-termism, but it also removes the one lever voters can hold accountable if the bank gets it wrong — and I’m still not sure which cost is bigger.”

You don’t need a neat answer. You need to show the tug-of-war actually happening on the page.

A competition or course

Third category: an essay prize, an online course, a summer school, that kind of thing. This is where we see the most name-dropping and the least substance. “I entered the Marshall Society essay competition, which improved my economic knowledge” tells a tutor almost nothing. Improved it how? What was the essay even about?

Weak: “I entered an essay competition on universal basic income, which improved my understanding of welfare economics.”

Stronger: “Writing a competition essay on universal basic income, I initially assumed the disincentive to work would dominate, but modelling a few scenarios changed my mind for lower-income groups specifically, where the income effect looked stronger than the substitution effect — a distinction I hadn’t taken seriously until I tried to argue it out on paper.”

A competition is a container for an argument you made. The container isn’t the interesting part — the argument is.

A data or personal project

Last category, and often the strongest if you have one: a self-directed data project. Composite example: say you tracked supermarket receipt prices for a handful of everyday goods over a few months, against the headline inflation figure.

Weak: “I completed a project analysing supermarket prices, which improved my data analysis skills.”

Nobody’s impressed by “data skills” as a phrase on its own — it’s “teamwork” in a lab coat.

Stronger: “Tracking my own weekly shop against the headline inflation rate over three months, I found my personal basket moved faster than the official figure — which sent me looking into why a household index and a national one can diverge, and I settled on differences in weighting and substitution behaviour as the likeliest explanation.”

Now it isn’t a data project. It’s a small piece of independent economic reasoning that happened to use data as the raw material.

The shape is always the same

Book, podcast, competition, project — it doesn’t matter which. The flat version names the thing and asserts a vague benefit. The version that works names a specific claim or argument inside the thing, and shows your own thinking colliding with it.

And here’s the part that cuts against instinct, because it’s tempting to look well-read: you don’t have space for five of these done shallow. You have space for one, or maybe two, done properly. If your supercurricular list currently runs to four or five bullet points, pick your strongest, and your second strongest, and go deep on those. A short line naming the others at the end is fine as a supplement — it just can’t be the substance of the answer.

Where this fits in your three answers

Supercurricular material like this belongs mainly in Q3 — what else you’ve done to prepare, and why it’s relevant — though a genuinely strong idea from your reading can sometimes anchor Q1 instead, if it’s really what pulled you toward the subject in the first place. Wherever it lands, the test is the same one we apply everywhere: does this sentence show desire or fit, or is it just proving you own a book?

Where to go from here

None of this is complicated in principle — pick fewer things, and think harder about each one. The hard part is doing it to your own draft, because a vague sentence is much easier to spot in someone else’s writing than in your own. If you want a second pair of eyes on whether your supercurricular section has actually landed an idea on the page, or is still a list of titles in a trench coat, that’s exactly what a review from EconCoaching is for.

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