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different things an admissions board would be happy to see in an application essay?
Meet Harry Q. Reader, who is on the college admissions board at the school of your choice. Anywhere from hundreds to thousands of students will apply to your school. For a couple of months, all Harry does is eat, sleep, and breathe application essays. By the time he is through for the year, he will have read hundreds and hundreds of them! The last thing you want to do is bore Harry and give him something that about forty or fifty other kids have already said. You should aim to leave an impression, something that marks you as a special applicant and sets you apart from the masses. You can achieve originality through topic or style, but the important thing is for you to achieve it. You¡¯re president of your school¡¯s National Honor Society? Well, that¡¯s great?but a hundred other students applying to your college of choice might be presidents of their National Honor Societies. You went to Italy one summer and had an incredible experience that changed your life? Sounds like a great topic?apart from the fact that the applicant right before you wrote about one of those experiences, too (except hers was in France). If possible, steer yourself towards essay topics that not too many other people are likely to write about. Personalize. Focus in on something interesting in your life that you could expand upon to reveal your personality. Remember, yours may be the 23rd essay Harry is going through that day ? give him a treat! (A caveat: Don¡¯t get too quirky. Topics that are gimmicky, downright bizarre, or overly personal won¡¯t do anything but annoy or discomfort the reader. And that will interfere with your ultimate goal: to get the reader to like you so much that he wants you to attend his college!) Let¡¯s join Harry Q. Reader again. Right now, he is reading through Applicant X¡¯s application. X, who is a member of her school¡¯s mediocre tennis team, has a decent SAT score and average grades; she¡¯s secretary of Beta Club and vice-president of Key Club, and is involved in other community service activities. She seems to be a good applicant, but Harry¡¯s worried about her grades and can¡¯t decide whether or not to deny her. He picks up her application essay, which is about her passion for helping others and the difficulties and rewards involved in forming a close (albeit time-consuming) friendship with a homeless man at the soup kitchen where she volunteers. Verdict? Harry decides to keep her. What if she¡¯d written about the time she went camping in Maine with her family and learned the importance of preserving nature¡¯s beauty? It¡¯s not likely that Harry would have been very impressed. But X wrote about something she loves ? helping others ? and her resume backed her up. The fact that she pursued something she was interested in is indicative of an aggressive personality. Now, by aggressive, we certainly don¡¯t mean that X likes to pick fights. We¡¯re talking about that get-up-off-your-butt-and-do-something quality that colleges love to see. They like to see it because that kind of passion and aggression tells them a lot: you¡¯re independent, you¡¯re interested in things for their own sake (not the admission board¡¯s), you¡¯re willing to put in effort and work hard?which are all key components in being a successful college student. So if there¡¯s something you¡¯re crazy about, or really good at, write about it! Your love for your topic will come across in the writing. Of course, there are exceptions. Harry really won¡¯t care about your obsession with Star Wars and how you have every single action figure from all of the three original movies, and how you plan on collecting figures from all the prequels. That isn¡¯t the kind of passion we¡¯re talking about. Write about a passion that will tell admissions officers something about you that they¡¯ll be interested to know. And make sure you still pay attention to the tips we¡¯ve already given you: stay small in topic (observe how X talked about her friendship with one man) and stay original. That means that for the most part, you should avoid the "How I Scored the Winning Touchdown in Overtime" and "The Time I Played a Flute Solo for the Mayor/Governor/President" essays, even if football or the flute is your passion. Just try a different angle on the same subject! This may seem obvious, but it¡¯s important. The essay is a way for the admissions committee to see what kind of writing and communication skills you have. Make sure you answer the question they are asking, and make sure you have a point to your essay; the main subject should be you and who you are. Cliched questions like "Who is your role model and why?" and "If you could have dinner with any three people, living or dead, who would they be?" are chances for you to show creativity and a good ability to communicate that creativity. They¡¯re also meant to reveal something about you and how you think, not stuff about your mom or Abraham Lincoln. It¡¯s unlikely that either of them is applying to your school. Misspellings, incorrect grammar, and awkward writing are big no-no¡¯s, because they announce to the admissions committee that (a) you aren¡¯t as good at the English language as you should be or (b) you haven¡¯t taken the time and effort to proofread your essay. We hardly know which is worse! Like we said, every part of the college application should be completed with utmost care and be as close to perfection as you can get it; you want to make as good an impression as possible. And nothing says "incompetent" like a misspelled word or an apostrophe in the wrong place. Have your essay proofread by as many people as possible?and at least one English teacher!
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