How to Ignore College Application Essay Hype

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Keep Your Summer Chill!

Many of you are already out for summer, or at the finishing line. Yippee!!

If you’re now officially an incoming high school senior, or soon to be, it’s time to get cranking on your college application essay.

I’m sure you have heard that summer is the ideal time to start the brainstorming and writing process. If you can get them all done before the start of your senior year, all the better.

You most likely have heard these essays can be critical to your college acceptance chances.

Yes, it’s true they can matter, and sometimes tip the scales in your favor. No doubt it’s worth putting in significant time and effort on them.

But I believe it’s important not to fall for all the hype and madness around this application process.

I know when I’m stressed or anxious, my creative juices quickly shrivel up.

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Once you start reading about college application essays on the Web, you most likely will find advice that uses intimidating words, such as “transformational” and “differentiating.” So-called experts like to say things like how it’s critical to “Be yourself”  in your essay, and how these are your “Chance to shine.”

They aren’t wrong, necessarily. But all the ballyhoo isn’t very helpful if all you want to know is how and where to start, and what topic to write about, and how to craft it into an effective essay.

When you hear that a killer essay is one that shows you “transforming yourself,” that’s quite a directive. It means you had some type of dramatic change in your life, whether it was physical, emotional or even spiritual.

If you had that type of experience, good for you. And it could make a solid topic.

Most of us, however, by age 16 or 17 or even later, have not experienced that type of radical metamorphosis. So can you still write a great essay?

Absolutely!

What I have found working with students on these essays and the search for the holy grail topic, is that the simple, everyday “mundane” ones usually work best. Same goes for life changes. They don’t need to be profound to be interesting and meaningful.

For instance, if you are rooting around for an interesting topic, and reflecting on ways you have changed in recent years, look for the smaller changes. Look for shifts, adjustments, alterations, smaller movements in your life. I believe the most interesting shifts come in your thinking, especially if you learned something new or unexpected, or saw something in a different light or context.

The idea is that your essay topic doesn’t need to be about a momentous change in your life. Instead, recall moments, incidents or experiences that happened in your recent past (high school years are best), and see if anything changed or shifted in your thinking (about yourself, about others or about the world) in the process of dealing with whatever went down.

That takes off the pressure to have had a radical life experience where you were one person, and then something happened, and suddenly you were an entirely different person. That rarely happens. Instead, brainstorm those everyday moments or “times,” and explore how your thinking changed. Even better, think about how what you cared about changed. Hint: those are called your values.

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Colleges love to not only get a sense of your unique personalities in these essays, but they value seeing how you think, feel and behave, and what you value and learn, in these essays. You can write a “transformational” essay without having changed from a bad person to a good person, or a shy person to an outgoing person, etc.

You are changing all the time, and it can be hard to notice at the moment. Take a little time to think of things that have happened to you, and more time to examine how you responded to them. Another hint: best place to find interesting moments are those that involved problems.

Even if you are following me so far, you most likely are wondering what you do once you think of some of these personal changes or shifts, and how to spin them into a piece of writing.

I have written posts all over my Essay Hell blog on exactly what to do, and I also spell it out in my popular writing guide, Escape Essay Hell, and in my online writing bootcamp. I’m also walking students through this process in my Jumpstart webinars, which started this month. The next one is this Saturday, at 10 a.m., West Coast time, and I will have several more this month.

So many ways to get started on these essays. Pick one and get going!

I hope you are hearing my main point in this post: Don’t get freaked out by all the hype about what these essays are all about.

Like all the millions of students who have gone into Essay Hell before you, you will also find a topic and write a killer essay! Just buckle down at some point this summer, read up on what they are all about, pick what resources you think will help you the best, and you will find they aren’t that freaky after all.

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Here are some of my best posts to get you launched:

What Makes a College Application Essay Great?

The Secret to a Killer College Application Essay

#Selfie: 5 Ways It’s Like Your College Application Essay

Land in the Yes Pile

Use The Unexpected

Essay Topics That Worked

How to Show Your Grit

How to Write Your College App Essay in 3 Steps

GOOD LUCK!! You got this!

 

 

 

 

 

 

What Do Admissions Officers Really Really Want?

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College Application Essays

Hot Writing Tips from The Other Side!

 

If you haven’t noticed, I have a lot of opinions about what makes a great college application essay.

But who am I?

I’ve never been an admissions officer, so how do I know what they like and want?

I thought it was time to ask a real live, breathing admissions officer who reads thousands of these essays–and uses them to decide who’s in or who’s out.

To find a great source, I went back to when I started tutoring students on these essays, and my very first client–my daughter.

When Cassidy was an incoming high school senior during the summer of 2008, I helped with her essays.

We had read the guide on finding terrific small liberal arts schools that are off the radar, called 40 Colleges That Change Lives, and she ended up going to one from that book, called Hendrix College in Arkansas.

Cassidy just graduated this spring, and her small college was every bit as wonderful both academically and socially as the book described (Five years in a row Hendrix has been on the “Most Up and Coming Schools” list for U.S. News & World Report).

I decided to ask their admissions officers how they select students using these essays. (more…)

Essay Topics That Worked–And Why

College Application Essays

How Anecdotes Make Them Work

 

One of the best ways to learn what types of topics make the most interesting essays is to check out what other students wrote about. Especially if those students had the right guidance and came up with unique, compelling ideas. Like, say, my students!

If you are new to this blog, I always encourage writers to find mini-stories (anecdotes) that they can relate in their essays to reveal and share their broader ideas, passions and values. I also advise them that everyday (mundane) topics work the best.

The idea is that an anecdote is a perfect “grabber” for an introduction, since it hooks the reader’s attention with a compelling mini-story.

It usually shares one moment or focused image, event or experience, using a fiction-like writing style.

Here are five topics that my students came up with last year. I tried to sum up their anecdote and then how they expanded that moment or experience into an essay.

RELATED: How to Write a College Application Essay in 3 Steps

See if you find these helpful in understanding how you can use this format:

Anecdote: The writer described “the time” he hoisted himself up in a tree using ropes and his knot-tying skills, but got stuck.

Larger theme: He then wrote about how his passion for knot-tying reflected his ability to solve problems, using logic, patience and imagination.

 

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The Perfect Topic: Right Under Your Nose

 

College Application Essays: Search For the Perfect Topic

It’s Closer Than You Think

 

I’ve learned a lot about what makes a great essay topic over the last six years I’ve helped students with their college application essays.

If you’re just starting the process of writing your essay, you might be surprised what I’ve discovered about the best topics:

They are not what you would expect.

1. The best topics do not include what might be considered your best accomplishments or achievements. In fact, the opposite is true.

2. They often are the very thing you think would never make a good topic.

3. Good ones can be right in front of your nose. In fact, they might be on your face.

(more…)

Find Your Defining Qualities

No matter what the prompt asks for, almost any effective college essay should showcase one or several of what I call your “defining qualities.”

If the prompt asks you to write a personal statement (for The Common App), tell about yourself or wants to know why you are a fit for their university, you will need a clear idea of the core qualities or characteristics that make you who you are—that “define” you.

Once you know those, you can write an essay that helps the reader understand how you are that way, and why it matters.

Of course, along the way, you will also mention your related interests, passions, idiosyncrasies, talents, experiences, accomplishments and even your endearing flaws.

(If you are confused at this point, you might want to check out my Quickie Jumpstart Guide to better understand the role these “defining qualities” play in a college admissions essay or personal statement.) (more…)

How to Land in the “Yes” Pile

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College Application Essays

Five Places to Start

After helping students discover their own unique topics over the last five or so years, I can spot a great topic the minute a student mentions one.

And I suspect it’s no different for the college  admissions people who read zillions of these.

Like most written pieces, you know after the first sentence or two if it’s going to be engaging or a drag (boring, trying to hard to impress, too general).

I can almost hear their conversations as they decide which essay to neatly stack in the “Yes” pile and those to toss over into the growing “No” pile:

“What do you think about the kid who got stuck in the tree?”

“Loved him!”

“How about the guy who went to Italy and took a class over summer studying architecture.”

“Lucky him. But I didn’t really get any feel about what he’s all about. Pass.”

(more…)