Fellow college applicants… Get ready to take out a pen and paper because this is probably going to be the most important article that we write here in PenningPapers.
We’re taking a different route this time. This article will not be our usual “how to” guide. Instead, this should be considered a warning. The story we’re about to tell you is a true story; it’s a tale as old as time.
Back in the early days –during our company’s infancy– we were presented with two very similar college applicants.
One was a straight A student with near-perfect SAT scores who was captain of his basketball team and had many service hours serving in a homeless shelter. The other one was, well, practically the same. The only difference was she was captain of her tennis team and volunteered her hours at the local arboretum picking up peacock droppings.
So, what happened to these students?
Well, the first student entered community college to study computer science and later switched to business administration, then political science. He didn’t really have much direction in the end.
The second student: she was accepted into UC Berkeley but chose to attend UCLA. She never kept in touch with us too often, so we didn’t know what happened after she graduated.
How Important are College Essays?
It was unfair; we certainly heard an earful about how unfair it was, that a student with perfect grades and extracurriculars and service hours could get rejected while other students with the same qualifications got accepted.
This is the part where we tell you what the difference between these two students were. What exactly helped one get into an elite university? We know what you’re probably thinking.
“One student had a better essay than the other” Yup! It’s about the college essays. Here’s the thing that these sites don’t cover though. It’s a lot harder to write a good college essay than people think.
Sure, the sage advice that it’s not always about grades and holistic admissions weighs your essays more is true. We know in fact that the quality of your college application essays is so important that it can make or break your admissions decision.
What exactly makes a good college essay though?
Well, we have heaps of articles on our site that talk literally about this topic. We don’t think anyone would be too thrilled to jump into thousands of tutorials, so let’s make it short.
How To Actually Get Accepted Into Your Target School
Here’s the thing. The key to getting accepted is to stand out from the rest and be seen as a more “worthy” applicant for the school.
So if a school doesn’t want to only have straight-A students with good SAT and ACT scores, they’ll usually be looking for interesting people with a diverse and unique background. That’s typically what happens in all upper-level universities with highly competitive acceptance rates.
So just have a good background story and don’t be boring, right? Nope. You’ve got to have the right voice and writing ability too.
In fact, college admissions essays are such a beast of their own that even some of the best writers in high schools have trouble writing a good admissions essay that actually gets accepted because they were never prepared for it.
The hook has to be interesting enough. You can brag, but not really; but you should, kind of. You should talk about something with passion but beware of cliché. Don’t forget to be human and normal. You can fit in humor, but it has to be right, and appropriate. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
Good grief!
Well, at least you can ask your school counselors and family about how to do the admissions essay…
But wait, you shouldn’t! They’re typically more harmful to your admissions process than beneficial…
Are you about ready to pull your hair out? Most people tend to when they come to us to talk about the admissions process and realize writing it is much harder than they think.
We won’t leave you empty-handed though. We want to give you a list of advice on how to write the admissions essay so that it’s at least better than what you may already have.
Note: following this advice is no guarantee that your college essay is perfect. We highly recommend having at least 2 qualified admissions expert sources check and edit your essays before submission.
How to Write the College Admissions Essays
Here is some important advice to consider when writing your college application essays.
- Drafting, a lot of it: Yup, this goes without saying but you’re going to have to do a lot of drafting if you want to make a college application essay that gets you accepted. No, that doesn’t mean only editing your admissions essays until they look “perfect”. You need to have multiple final drafts for the same prompt. So, why would anyone want to do that much extra work? The reason is most applicants don’t know what they really want to say in their essays. You’re halfway through, and you don’t know if you really like your topic; or, you’ve finished a final draft and still feel oddly dissatisfied. Avoid this by writing out multiple drafts and later perfecting them. This will ensure you don’t regret what you sent after submitting that “submit” button.
- Meaningful Specialty: Your essays should focus around a unique attribute that makes you different from the rest of the crowd, but in a meaningful way. Sure, you can lick your elbow, but that doesn’t really show you’re special in a worthwhile manner. There’s usually something about a particular talent or skill that shows something about your identity, character, or being. Visiting the local pet store every weekend and giving attention to the bunnies may be a worthy thing to talk about because most people don’t do that with their free time; it also shows that you care about animals that my not live a good life in the confines of a store.
- Issues, Issues, Issues: Whenever you’re faced with the problem of writing about, well, problems, you have to write about more than just that. You may have had a lack of a fatherly figure in your life and struggled to identify with masculine archetypes as a result. Okay, what have you done about that problem, and what can the admissions officers learn about you as a result? Facing adversity usually reveals something about the content of your character. Perhaps you learned to find the father figure in archetypal symbols like superheroes or literature, and that made you more independent and capable of finding the worth in smaller things. Remember: it’s all about how you’re different from the rest because of the issues.
- Diversify your writing: You have to make sure your college application essay has difference in both sentence length and punctuation. Sentence word choice also goes without saying. The difference in length will help streamline the reading process for your admissions officers and it ensures that they enjoy reading your application more; they’ll also understand everything going on when they’re skimming (because they certainly will be skimming through every single one of the college application essays in their piles). A difference in punctuation achieves a similar effect, only it gives a more sophisticated and structured effect to the application. Having only periods with no commas, semicolons, or colons can also make your admissions essay seem less passionate or genuine.
- Don’t lie, or sound like you are: Sometimes, with all the love in the world, we get students who are blunter than a hammer. They are so straightforward in their writing that they will just write whichever heavy content they want without any sign of emotional significance. Instead of, “it rained especially hard for my family when my grandmother, the pillar of good character, passed away from our lives and into the next…” we hear students sometimes write “So, my grandma died…”. The problem with short and blunt writing like this is that it sounds like a lie to admissions officers. It doesn’t seem invested enough to be something that someone would say truthfully. Of course, there are exceptions to blunt writing. Sometimes it achieves a positive effect. You just have to know how to make it work in your favor.
Don’t forget this one: it’s more about the delivery than the content.
This means that how you write your college application essays will trump what you write about. It’s not to say the content isn’t important, but a package that has been neatly wrapped typically makes a better impression than a package that was hastily duct taped together. And impressions matter, a lot.
Although many applicants know just how important college applications are, they typically don’t realize their essays are not fully optimized for acceptance. In fact, many applicants happen to miss a great deal of vital details. We highly recommend you make use of our free admissions essay analysis service by contacting us and sending us your rough drafts; we check your admissions essays by committee so be patient!
