College Essay Dos & Donts

College Essay Dos & Don’ts To be able to tweak this essay for several colleges, Rachel will write about her most meaningful community in the first half of the essay, and then gear the second half to each college. Because UVA and Michigan request similar word counts, she will not have to adjust these for length. Rachel takes a few days to relax after completing 11th grade before creating a spreadsheet listing her colleges. She then uses both the Common App and individual colleges’ websites to find guidelines, deadlines and essay prompts. If Rachel has established a relationship with a college admissions representative, she will ask if supplemental essay prompts for next season will change. DON’T reveal something you would never consider telling your parents â€" while honest essays can be strong, your college essay is not the place to admit to shoplifting or drunk driving. DO tell a story; your college essay will be more similar to your creative writing or journal assignments that to your persuasive essay. It’s a lot like the cover letter you write when applying for a job â€" it’s your chance to reveal the person behind the accomplishments and statistics. My 17-year-old is working with Russell on a college essay. He is thorough, highly knowledgeable and patient. He has so many tips about writing a solid college essay. Admissions writing truly requires a new set of skills which most high school applicants don’t frequently get to practice or cultivate. He’s almost certainly either a genius mech pilot or the subject of some prophecy in an alternate dimension that he’ll be transported to. Even if you’re only applying to a couple schools that you know you can get into, it will still serve you well to write a compelling admissions essay. Standing out from everyone else could put you in the running for additional scholarships and will also simply make a good impression, which never hurts. So treat a college application essay as a tool for standing out in ways the robots can’t. If you start the day before the application is due, all I can say is good luck. For the most part, it’s unlikely that you’ve experienced anything extremely uncommon in the relatively short amount of time you’ve been a human. Most high school students lead lives that don’t deviate too far from the norm â€" except that one quiet guy in your class who sits next to the window near the back. They want to see how you function when removed from the safe confines of formula and expectation. Some colleges and universities are actually notorious for their unusual â€" and in some cases, genuinely strange â€" college application essay prompts. DO NOT PROCRASTINATE. Look, we all procrastinate. But please, please, please do not not procrastinate on your admissions essay. Everything I’ve covered in this article matters only if you give yourself enough time. Use the story or stories you tell to illustrate a larger, more abstract point. Rachel decides to write about her local and global communities of Third Culture Kids. However, avoiding some of these pitfalls will help you as you refine your CommonApp, supplemental and scholarship essays. Your admissions essay must be fundamentally reader-friendly. It should not read like a dense PhD dissertation OR an informal e-mail to your best friend; it should strike a balance between the two. Do write in your own language and remember to show rather than tell. According to Business Insider, Tufts University and the University of Chicago have both earned reputations for their out-of-left-field essay questions. Cited a few real-world examples of college essays that actually worked. The college application process is stressful, and the essay can seem like an insurmountable hurdle. So what’s the takeaway from this array of unexpected, possibly even bizarre essay questions? Well, first of all, you can presume that some admissions officers are just bored of essays about challenges you’ve overcome or experiences that have changed you.