The College Essay: Best Advice

by Aimee Weinstein*

Most seniors feel a huge amount of pressure when sitting down to write that college essay and staring at a blank screen.  While this is true for any writing assignment, it is particularly painful for students since the topic of the essay is very close to home: YOU.

Your job, in writing the essays for the college application – be it the Common App, a supplement for a school, or a school that has its own application – is to make your personality and ideas come alive on the page.  The admissions people are not going to read your essays unless the numbers on your GPA and test scores meet their minimums, so at the point they are looking at your written work, you have to make your application file stand out from the next kid’s file who most likely has similar numbers.  Why should they take you instead of the other guy?

This is where YOUR STORY comes in.  Everyone has a story to tell – a unique tale of what makes you human and how you’ve come to be the person you are.  It does not have to be earth shattering like climbing Mount Everest when you were twelve and rescuing a normally nimble Sherpa from certain death when he unexpectedly slipped.  Your story might be the joy of picking strawberries every summer at Grandma’s organic farm and how it accidentally taught you to value hard work.  It might be about the time you failed to make the advanced band but something better came along to do with your time.  It could even be about making that higher-level swim team but figuring out that swimming made you unhappy and you decided to be a harpist instead.  The point is making it come alive – SHOWING the admissions committee your experience and not just telling it.

For most kids, the “show don’t tell” thing is always an issue and something their teachers have been saying for years.  Think of these two sentences:

  • The burning sun made sweat bead and fall between my shoulders.
  • It was hot and I was sweating.

Both sentences give you the idea of the weather but one is more lifelike.

One girl I worked with wanted to write about overcoming the difficulty of moving to a foreign country when just starting high school and being forced out of her comfort zone in a myriad of ways.  Instead of saying, “It is hard to become comfortable when moving to a foreign country like Japan and live in an expatriate community that is very transitory”, we encouraged her to tell the STORY of what made it so hard.  The admissions people know it’s hard – you do not have to spell that out for them.  What they want to know is what you specifically found difficult, and what you did to fix the problem.  I asked this girl a few questions – here they are:

  • Perhaps you can describe something like arriving at school in a sea of unfamiliar faces or the annoyance of trying to find somewhere to get your hair cut or only being able to text American friends in the middle of the night so your phone sat quietly unused for weeks until you made a friend in Tokyo.
  • Can you tell the reader about the coming and going of friends – put your reader into the mingled joy and sorrow that defines a sayonara dinner that happens all too often?
  • When you realized your community was forming nicely, what were you thinking and how did it make you feel?

By describing the scenes, using your senses, you can help the admissions people FEEL what you were feeling when you were hurting and when you felt better.  You can put your reader into the scene at that strawberry field and what precisely you were thinking and sensing at the moment you realized all the hard work was worthwhile.

Whatever your story might be, make it come alive – make it real – and make it YOURS.

At Inspiring Test Prep, we’re here to help.

 

*Ms. Weinstein is a writer, writing professor, and tutor who recently moved to McLean, Virginia having lived ten of the last twelve years in Tokyo, Japan. She received her doctorate from the Department of Higher Education at George Mason University and most recently taught in the first year writing department at Temple University’s Japan Campus.

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