Writing Your College Essay: Tips and Tricks
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When applying to college, most private and public universities require the main essay called the Personal Statement. If you have a senior applying to college, you can find most of the prompts on the Common Application under the Common Application Essay section. If you are unfamiliar with the Common Application, then we should explain that most colleges have consolidated their applications into one platform so that students can apply to multiple colleges online. Long gone are paper applications and typewriters!
The Common App Essay is in fact the centerpiece of the Common Application. This essay is really the place where you or your student can shine. The essay itself is meant to show the college more about the student that isn’t highlighted in the student’s GPA, SAT/ACT scores, or letters of recommendation. There are a few basics students should know as they prepare to start their essays.
The Basics:
Word Limit: 250-650 words
Unlike the word limits on traditional essay assignments, this rule is difficult and it’s easy for students to find themselves going over the word limit. The Common App won’t allow a student to submit an essay that is under 250 words or over 650 words. The reasons for this are both practical and skills-based. On a practical level, it prevents college admissions officials from having to read thousands of excessively long essays. On a skills level, it’s an opportunity for students to show their ability to write concisely, which is one of the most important skills for college success.
The Prompts
Every year the College Board releases the Common App Essay Prompts. There are seven options to choose from and they vary slightly from year to year. Here are the recently released prompts for 2019-2020.
Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.
The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?
Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea. What prompted your thinking? What was the outcome?
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 importance, no matter the scale. Explain its significance to you and what steps you took or could be taken to identify a solution.
Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others.
Describe a topic, idea, or concept you find so engaging that it makes you lose all track of time. Why does it captivate you? What or who do you turn to when you want to learn more?
Share an essay on any topic of your choice. It can be one you've already written, one that responds to a different prompt, or one of your own design.
Three Tips:
Now that you’ve got the basics, we can delve into some advice. This essay can be difficult and stress-inducing for students. To help students write their essays, we have three tips for writing a killer college essay.
Write First, Ask Questions Later
It’s human nature while writing to second guess and edit as we go. However, this strategy is counterproductive to writing a good paper. The process of deleting and reshaping as one writes the first draft actually limits the imagination and ideas that a student can produce. What admissions officials want to see from the student in this essay is their ideas, values, and personality. When the students sit down to write the paper, let them write naturally without inhabitants. It’s much easier to cut an essay down than to add.
This advice applies to prompts as well. Instead of choosing the prompt before the say, try just writing on the topic that feels the most meaningful and then assigning it to a prompt. The prompts are intentionally broad enough to encompass a wide range of essays and the admissions officers are first and foremost looking to see the student’s personality shine through.
The Smaller, The Better
If you read through the above prompts, you’ll notice that one of them is not “describe your whole life in 650 words or less.” That is not something anyone wants to read or write. Most of the prompts ask a student to focus on one specific experience, value, or role model and expand outwards. The first step to writing an amazing college essay is to sit down and simply brainstorm a list of powerful and specific moments that the student feels has influenced them.
Think Team
The advice above about writing first doesn’t mean “don’t edit.” It’s actually quite the opposite. The editing process is crucial to producing the creative and concise paper that admissions officers are looking for. However, sometimes people aren't great at editing their own work-especially when the topic is something important to them. People can be biased in favor of themselves. Therefore, the student needs an editing team. Many high schools have a team that is meant to help with this, but they often have hundreds of essays to read. Finding a tutor who can work one on one with the student to hone their paper is a great idea and can relieve stress from both you and your student.
Should you need advice, call our staff for a consultation on what services we can provide tutoring, coaching, and editing.
Here are a few of their experiences with this exciting assignment.
Testimonials:
Sam L
“I wrote about something personal to me. I didn't do a profile on someone that I admired and I didn't try to invent a situation to make myself sound impressive to the admissions board. I trusted that what was going on in my own life was interesting enough. It didn't matter that I opened with the lyrics to "Charmed Life" by Leigh Nash because I had watched "Uptown Girls" for the billionth time earlier that day. I just wrote. I wrote about moving from Texas to Los Angeles to pursue acting, and my passion for storytelling couldn't help but bleed into my essay. I was so excited and because of this connection, I was able to give my reader a piece of who I uniquely was at that moment in time. That's all those scary admissions people really want - to know who you are and not who you think you should be.”
Peter
“I wrote about a repetitive experience that felt representative of the person I was. Over the course of my basketball career, I won eight “Most Improved Player” awards, either on school teams or summer basketball camps. I wrote about how I noticed myself being a quick learner and improving in all aspects of my life and how it made me feel proud of who I was already and who I was becoming. It was very powerful for me to write about myself in that way and I think admissions officials felt that through my writing.”
Kayla
“I wrote about growing up in a large, metropolitan, and diverse city. I wrote about how growing up immersed in a culture surrounded by languages, ethnicities, and religions different from me shaped me to be the person I was when I wrote the essay. I talked about being exposed to people different from me at a very young age piqued my curiosity in travel, other cultures, and allowed me to understand tolerance and acceptance. ”