College Essay Essentials

College Essay Essentials So treat a college application essay as a tool for standing out in ways the robots can’t. It’s a lot like the cover letter you write when applying for a job â€" it’s your chance to reveal the person behind the accomplishments and statistics. To make the most of this opportunity, once you have your essay questions, practice writing your essay using the tips provided by the college or from one of the links in this article. If you're lucky, your junior and senior high school language arts teachers incorporate essay writing into the curriculum. An admissions committee doesn’t want to hear that you’re attracted to the warm weather â€" you can just as easily find that at another college in the South. Emory even calls out the commonality of that response in its prompt. DO tell a story; your college essay will be more similar to your creative writing or journal assignments that to your persuasive essay. Use the story or stories you tell to illustrate a larger, more abstract point. DO NOT PROCRASTINATE. Look, we all procrastinate. But please, please, please do not not procrastinate on your admissions essay. Free-writing will help you hone your skills and practice for the real thing. You can write an excellent essay, but if you don’t focus on answering the question that the college is asking, you will likely not be admitted to the school. We’ll help you figure out what to write about, and we’ll help you finish all your essays early. You’ll submit on time and with confidence in your essays. We connect students with top writing coaches for strategy calls and detailed essay feedback. The same applies to wanting to be in a city or town or being part of a small, medium, or large student body. While you may prefer certain settings or sizes, the fact is, you can easily find those qualities anywhere. If the prompt of the essay was “Who is the most influential person in your life and why? ” don’t start the essay with “The most influential person in my life is…” It’s dull and the admissions office created the prompt, so it’s telling them the info they already know. Your essay may be the ultimate product, but before you start worrying about the final edition you’ll send off to colleges, take some time to work on the process. Colleges use essays as the most important criteriato differentiate students. There’s no such thing as the perfect college essay. Just be yourself and write the best way you know how. Read the top 147 college essays that worked at Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, and more. Everything I’ve covered in this article matters only if you give yourself enough time. If you start the day before the application is due, all I can say is good luck. For the most part, it’s unlikely that you’ve experienced anything extremely uncommon in the relatively short amount of time you’ve been a human. Most high school students lead lives that don’t deviate too far from the norm â€" except that one quiet guy in your class who sits next to the window near the back. He’s almost certainly either a genius mech pilot or the subject of some prophecy in an alternate dimension that he’ll be transported to. Even if you’re only applying to a couple schools that you know you can get into, it will still serve you well to write a compelling admissions essay. Standing out from everyone else could put you in the running for additional scholarships and will also simply make a good impression, which never hurts. Even with essay writing experience, it can be hard to frame a well-organized, comprehensive, thoughtful answer in 500 words or less. You might need to approach the questions from a few different perspectives before you find the right formula. Many students fall into the trap of offering superficial or generic reasons for wanting to attend. Inside Higher Ed, a popular website monitoring issues in higher education, estimated that 20 percent of members will eliminate the essay requirement. DON’T reveal something you would never consider telling your parents â€" while honest essays can be strong, your college essay is not the place to admit to shoplifting or drunk driving. In this competitive climate, many students think their essay must reflect an earth-shattering achievement, like curing cancer or ending world starvation, but that’s not its purpose. It’s also not a place to reiterate one’s résumé or explain away a bad semester (there’s a section in the application for that). Colleges want to “hear specifically what you learned from an experience” â€" not clichés. College counselors weighing in on the college review website Unigo indicated that, depending on the school, up to four people could read a single essay. For the application season, the Common Application announced that their 600-plus member schools, which include many private and public universities, need not require essays .