What The #%@!& Should I Write About In My College Essay?

What The #%@!& Should I Write About In My College Essay? Tell the reader something about yourself that might not be included in the rest of the application. College application essays are a special literary genre, but they are of course personal. They add further dimensions to an individual’s record and great ones need to be creative, thoughtful, and well written. admissions counselor only has a few min to read your essay and his or her attention is the key here. most college essay are very much the same so if you can make your essay stand out, you must delivery a great college essay that the counselor will remember and share with other counselors. a great college essay must use personal experiences to delivery a big message focused on passion of learning, motivation for excellences, and personal value in contributing to community as a whole. A great college essay is an essay that is interesting, pithy and well written. You want both to keep the reader’s attention and to make the reader want you to be a member of the next freshman class at the reader’s college. This is your chance to make your application stand out and your one opportunity to have a real voice appear in the file. Essay questions about diversity are designed to help admissions committees understand how you interact with people who are different from you. For some students, the essay is also a chance to explain factors affecting their high school record. Did your grades drop sophomore year because you were dealing with a family emergency? Did you miss out on extracurriculars junior year because of an extended medical absence? The personal statement is not the place for long lists or catalogs of achievement. Make sure to check out our other posts on college essays, including our step-by-step guide to how to write your college essay, our analysis of the Common App Prompts, and our collection of example essays. Most importantly however, a great essay will reveal an aspect of a self that a student has chosen to highlight and a voice that is unique to that self. A great college essay is one in which the student’s voice and though process comes through clearly. It should be consistent with the rest of the application and showcase an aspect of the student not highlighted in the rest of the application. It is also well written and grammatically correct. As you plan your essay, you definitely want to keep the length requirement in mind. Many colleges still put a strong emphasis on prestige; in fact, some colleges, such as Ivy League schools, have built their entire business model around the promise of prestige. It’s also on full display at college commencement ceremonies in which students and faculty don elaborate outfits and accessories that signal importance. Since the admissions committee is reading hundreds of essays, it’s your job to move them, make them laugh, and force them to realize that they need you at their institution. Your essay should exemplify the manner in which you think. Instead of basing your character off of grades and standardized test scores, the essay provides the reader with a sense of your personality and views from your perspective. Writing a good college essay means being honest about your feelings and experiences even when they aren't entirely positive. A lot of students panic about finding a unique topic, and certainly writing about something unusual like a successful dating app you developed with your friends or your time working as a mall Santa can't hurt you. But what's really important isn't so much what you write about as how you write about it. You need to use your subject to show something deeper about yourself. Most colleges are pretty diverse, with students from a wide range of backgrounds. Many applicants attempt to do too much with their essays and then struggle to edit them down to 650 words. Realize the purpose of the personal statement is not to tell your life story or to give an exhaustive overview of all of your accomplishments. Let your list of extracurricular activities, academic record, letters of recommendation, and supplemental essays and materials show your range of accomplishments. Colleges want to know if you struggled with a serious issue that affected your high school record, so make sure to indicate any relevant circumstances on your application. The most important role of the essay is to give admissions committees a sense of your personality and what kind of addition you'd be to their school's community. These kinds of qualities will have a profound impact on your college experience, but they're hard to determine based on a high school transcript. In the college essay, you need to contextualize your examples for the reader. If you are writing a good complex essay, even your topic sentence will require more explanation than just one sentence. Many students want to call it a day after writing a first draft, but editing is a key part of writing a truly great essay. To be clear, editing doesn't mean just making a few minor wording tweaks and cleaning up typos; it means reading your essay carefully and objectively and thinking about how you could improve it. We know what kinds of students colleges want to admit. We want to get you admitted to your dream schools. Since the main point of the essay is to give schools a sense of who you are, you have to open up enough to let them see your personality.