College Admission Help

College Essay Advice

Found this interesting college essay advice at Bukisa:

Assemble all of the application forms for all of the colleges you are considering applying to. Read and jot down any essay requirements, particularly any prompts or questions your essay must respond to. Your goal is to try and see if you can't get away with writing only one or two essay which will satisfy the needs of all you applications.

For each school you are considering...do some research so that you can fill in the blanks in the following sentences:

"At ___ (the name of the school) I would hope to study ___ by majoring in ___ so that I could explore my interest in ___ and possibly one day pursue a career as a ___. I believe that ___ (name of school again) is an ideal place for me to study ____ because _____________________"

Some version of these 2 sentences needs to appear in at least one application essay that you submit to every school - usually starting off the last paragraph. It shows that you care about that application and that school enough to know why you would like to go there.

Now you need to do the hardest part of the essay. You need to take any prompt or question you are responding to and figure out how to combine that with what you want to study with a catcy/quirky/clever opening. If you're lucky enough to be allowed to write any essay you want for all of your applications, you still need to combine an opening with where you want to go and what you want to do.

For example, I helped my sister with an essay recently where the prompt was something to the effect of, "What is the greatest challenge facing your generation and what are you doing about it."

I helped her to come up with this:

"I am not Angelina Jolie or Condoleezza Rice or Oprah Winfrey. I am not the daughter of some billionaire or politician or record producer. I am also pretty sure I will not be the next Miss America or Olympic gold medalist. I am not even the president of my student body or the valedictorian. What I do know, however, is that none of that prevents me from making a meaningful difference in the lives of people around me—people I know and people I will never meet.'

"The greatest challenge facing my generation is one of self-worth and guiding purpose. My generation believes that changing the world is the province of the smartest, the richest, and the most famous. In the face of Bono’s extravagant ONE Campaign, Bill Gates’ giant foundations, and even the occasional twenty-something on MTV promoting his save Darfur organization STAND, there does not always seem to be a place for the less glamorous among us to make a difference. I find it a little sad."

You need an opening that is going to get someone's attention and then let you tell your story. In the next three paragraphs, my sister described working at a daycare that serves the underprivileged, helping her friend in his fight against leukemia, and then concluding with how if everyone did such simple things how much better everything will be. It was one of 2 essays, so she used the other to describe her reasons for choosing that school.

In an open essay, use your opening to get you to where you can start telling your story and how it leads you to what you want to study and where. Here is the opening from my sister's other essay:

"“Let’s do eckersizes!! All right now…one..two..three…and switch!” I chirped while sitting on a lumpy hospital bed next to my stubborn grandfather leading him through his rehabilitation exercises. He had just gone through open heart surgery, and everyone kept telling me how I was the only one he would listen to and work for, so I kept at him. At eight years old the word ‘exercise’ was still a bit beyond me, but a love of guiding someone through a recovery regimen was just budding. I was fascinated with how simple movements done over and over again, day after day, could result in someone recovering from an injury or illness."

The essay goes on to talk about my sister's desire to study athletic training and why the school she was applying to was a good place for that.

Start early, this is a tough essay to write. Ideally, start over the summer after your junior year in high school. Most senior high school English classes will spend some but not enough time on this in the fall.

Have several people read your drafts for multiple perspectives.
Hold onto this essay when you're done - you can probably use it lots of times for scholarship applications.
Your parents are probably not the best judge of this essay. Most adults simply don't do this kind of writing and haven't since they were applying to schools.
When you get to a final draft, have people read it simply for grammar and typos. You must strive for a 100% error-free essay

College Essay Advice