Burned in Essay Hell

  I don’t know how I missed this. In April, a batch of nearly 70 college application essays written by the incoming class of 2017 at Columbia University were made public. It was quite the scandal. Many of the students who shared their essays among their...

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Oprah and Prompt 2 of The Common Application

  Yesterday, I wrote about how you can answer Prompt #2 of The Common Application and write about recovering from a failure. Coincidentally, our favorite motivator Oprah Winfrey stood up in front of the graduating class at Harvard University just last weekend and...

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...

How to Answer Prompt #1 of the New Common Application

College Admissions Essays: The Common App. Prompt #1  My Favorite  Out of the seven prompts you can chose from to write your application essay for The Common Application, I like the first one a lot. (UPDATE: As of 2017, you can now write about any topic you want. See...

Four “Bold” Sample College Admissions Essays

College Application Essays “Meant to Inspire” All Students Showed an “Appetite for Risk”  Earlier this year, a business writer for The New York Times invited students to share their college admissions essays on the topic of money, class,...

Common App Prompt 4: When Your Problem is a Good Thing!

How to Answer Prompt 4 for the Common App for your College Application Essay Prompt 4: Describe a problem you’ve solved or a problem you’d like to solve. It can be an intellectual challenge, a research query, an ethical dilemma—anything that is of personal...

College Essay Help from The Best: The New York Times

  Mentor Essays for The Common App And Other College Application Essays   If you are one of those students who understands how important these college admissions essays can be to landing in the school of your dreams, the New York Times just published a dream...