College Prep: How to Write a Great College Application Essay
College application essays can vary widely from prompt to prompt and one school to the next. However, the general brainstorming and writing processes will be largely the same for all college application essays, from personal statements to reasons for attending a specific school. Here, we’re walking you through some specific things to keep in mind to help your essay stand out and give a powerful, sincere message to offer admissions officers a glimpse into what makes you a great candidate for their school.
Take a moment to think about what your college application includes apart from your essays — transcripts, GPA, test scores, extracurricular involvement, teacher recommendation, etc. While all of these things probably paint a certain picture of you as a student, they don’t do as great of a job of painting a picture of you as a PERSON. Your teacher recommendations likely speak highly of you and touch on your values and character, which is a great start, but the essays are a chance for YOU TO DECIDE WHAT YOU WANT THE ADMISSIONS PEOPLE TO KNOW.
That’s a huge thing. YOU get to pick what to write about—within the limits of the prompt. For a personal statement, your options are pretty limitless. Do you want to talk about an important obstacle that you had to overcome? Or an influential person in your life? Or something that just makes you super happy? It’s totally up to you.
For more specific prompts, you still have a lot of options. Why do you want to go to a specific school? Why do you want to study what you have chosen? How will you spend your summer? Consider what your answers to these questions will tell the admissions team about you as a person from more than a surface level. Are you passionate about something? Are you a natural leader? Do you struggle to break out of your shell? None of these are good or bad or wrong — it all depends on what message you are trying to convey and WHY.
College application essays are a great way for you to communicate something different to the college admissions officials. Take this opportunity to let them learn something about you that they wouldn’t know by just looking at your transcripts and the rest of your application. You are UNIQUE. Show them that.
When it comes time to sit down and actually write your essays, keep these tips in mind to help you cultivate a strong piece of writing that makes you shine:
Start Early
The very first thing you should do is make sure to give yourself enough time to actually write strong essay responses. Once you know which schools you are going to apply to, make a list of their application deadlines and how many essays you’ll have to write for each. Don’t be surprised if you end up with a list of 10 essays that you need to write by January 1st. If this is the case, make a plan to give yourself enough time to revise each essay and produce a quality product. You know your schedule and your procrastination habits better than anyone, so schedule time to sit down and write and make a point of staying far ahead of deadlines.Brainstorm
The initial brainstorming step is one of the more important steps in this list. This is when you’ll weigh your options and come up with some different directions that you could take your essay. You’ll need to start with the prompt and what you’re requested to do. Think about what the admissions officers want to see in a strong essay. Do they want you to show that you are a leader? Do they want to know what you will add to their campus? Do they want to know what makes you better than other applicants? Take a moment to put yourself in their shoes. What do you think will stand out to them? Next, check out some examples. There are a lot of common types of college application essays, such as the “Why Us” essay, where you have to justify your reasons for wanting to go to a specific school. Find some exmaples that you like for the specific type of essay. Then consider what you like about them and how you could apply that to your own essay. If you’re struggling to come up with ideas of your own, work on a brainstorming activity to get you thinking along the right lines. I’ve developed a great set of brainstorming tools that I like to use with my students to get them thinking along the right lines for a powerful topic. The exercises I use include things like “Life Mapping” and sample topic worksheets. Interested in doing some brainstorming on your own using these tools? Check out my Complete Personal Statement Brainstorm Suite of the same tools I use during sessions with students to help them come up with great personal statement topics.Have a Plan
Just like you should create an outline before you write a literary analysis essay for your AP Lit class, you should also come up with some kind of a roadmap before you start writing your application essays. Why? Because if you don’t your essay is likely to take an odd turn and end up somewhere that you didn’t really expect. This isn’t always a bad thing, but it can make for a messy essay that isn’t very cohesive to the reader. It might make sense to you because you’ve been inside your own brain for your whole life and therefore already have all of the context that you need to understand your essay. However, the same is not true of others who will read it and likely be confused. As you write, you should know where your final destination is and work toward arriving there in an organized fashion.Show Instead of Tell
This is a big one. Showing instead of telling your story will make your essay more enjoyable to read AND more memorable to the admissions officer reading it. What exactly does SHOWING instead of TELLING mean? Check out the examples below —
Telling: “I went to the farm all the time. My grandfather always gave me lots of chores to do, including things like mending fences and feeding cows. While they don’t sound like very enjoyable tasks, I thoroughly enjoyed my time working with him on the farm.”
Showing: “The weekly drive around the curving, gravel roads to the farm always got me excited. The warm, summer air allowed me to keep the windows open and enjoy the sunshine on my face, something that made me happy even though I was about spend the rest of my day praying for air conditioning. I’d spend long, hot days doing things like feeding stinky cows and mending old, broken fences, sweating in the heat, body aching from nonstop manual labor. It doesn’t sound like glamorous work, and you bet it isn’t, but I lived for the end of the day when Grandpa would pat my back and tell me how much help I’d been. I always left the farm with a smile on my face, feeling that another day had been well spent.”
Do you see the difference?! How can you not? The telling response simply states facts and things that happened. There isn’t anything wrong with the writing, and it’s fine academic writing even, but it isn’t FUN to read. To be blunt, it is BORING. You certainly DO NOT want your essay to be boring. You want your essay to be interesting and make the reader want to ask you questions and know more. That doesn’t mean you have to completely fill your essay with descriptions and adjectives, but some inclusion of these things will go a long way. Make a point of thinking about the five senses as you write - what did you see? Hear? Smell? Taste? Feel? Feelings go a long way as well, but try to incorporate these without telling — “I was sad” tells me, so show me instead. What does sad look like?Be Honest
Just like the topic of your essay should be something that you find important, it should also be 100% true. A question I get asked every year by at least one student is whether they should make up a story to write about. The answer is ABSOLUTELY NO! Even if you sincerely think that you have nothing interesting to write about, I promise that you are WRONG. What matters is not how interesting your life has been or how impactful of an experience you have had, what matters is showing who you are and what matters to you. I once had a student write a very powerful essay about how she feels sitting by a creek while she fishes. That’s it! And it worked. Because the topic is not what matters. So take something that matters to you — no matter how big or small it may seem to someone else. This is your chance to tell your story.Don’t Worry About Word Count Yet
I know that a big, stressful part of writing your college application essays is going to be making sure that they are all in tidy, precise packages of 250 words or 650 words or whatever the magic number is for each individual essay. My advice? Don’t worry about the word limit until you have an essay response that you are proud of. Why? Because if you worry about the word limit right away there is something that is bound to happen: you will have an elaborate, well-thought-out beginning but a very choppy, quick end. This makes for an awkward essay that is lacking all balance. By ignoring the word count, you let yourself run free with your response and get your whole message down on paper. Will you likely end up over the word limit? Yep. That is okay. You’d be surprised how easy it is to go back through your essay and pinpoint individual words and phrases and sentences that don’t actually add anything important to your message. Be a critic of your own writing. You may like a sentence, but is it really adding more to your message? If not, get rid of it!Get Feedback
While I know that it’s daunting to share your own personal, vulnerable essay responses with other people, it’s a critical part of the college application essay process. Like I mentioned earlier, if you are the only one that has read your essay, it likely contains HUGE contextual gaps. This isn’t surprising by any means. You are an expert on you, so of course it makes sense to you. This is exactly why you need to let others read your essay and point out where things don’t make sense or where more information could help set the scene. Your friends and your family can definitely offer this kind of feedback, but I’d recommend going even one step further. Ask someone you don’t know well to read your essay — this could be a classmate, a tutor, a teacher. Someone who can be a stand in for the admissions officer who has never met you and will have just this essay to assess your personality and your character. Once you do have feedback, consider it without freaking out. No one is trying to be mean about your essay. They are trying to help you. If you get feedback that you don’t like, it’s time to consider whether the admissions officer may have a similar reaction, and it just might mean that it’s going to be important to rework your essay.Multiple Drafts & Polishing
Like I mentioned above, it’s possible that you receive feedback that you don’t like very much. That could mean it’s going to be wise to revise your essay, whether that be completely gutting it and basically starting over or changing up smaller bits and pieces. This goes back to why you should allow yourself plenty of time to write and revise your essays. It’s possible that you yourself won’t like it once it’s written, and you’ll want to start over. Keep going and writing and revising until you arrive at a final product that you are 100% proud of. I like to ask my students to rate their essays on a scale of 1-10 with 10 being that they are super proud of their essay and excited to send it off. If they give ratings anywhere below 10, there is a reason that they don’t like the essay. Figure out what you don’t like and fix it! Most students that I work with will write about 3-4 drafts of an essay before they feel like it’s perfect and ready to go.
Looking for more help? You might be interested in my 3-Part Complete Personal Statement Brainstorm Suite, where I walk you through the same tools that I use with my students to help you develop a personal statement topic that will make your essay shine. Check it out here:
Good luck, and happy prepping!
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