Common College Essay Mistakes: Word Choice

Over the last couple of weeks, essay review season has really started to pick up at College Coach. We’re diving into drafts each day, providing both the big picture ideas and the small-scale tips to help students find success with their college application essays. Our past blog entries have focused more on the big picture: how to approach the “failure” prompt from the Common App; ways you can effectively use the Additional Information section; brainstorming through writer’s block. Today I want to focus on the smallest of issues with college essays: the words you choose to use.

Write Like You Talk

Most students who come into my office have normal vocabularies. There’s a big word dropped here or there in reference to an idea they’ve discovered in school—maybe it’s existentialism or photosynthesis or even spectrophotometer—but multi-syllabic mouthfuls are rare when I’m just chatting with a student about what he cares about and why, and that’s the way it ought to be.

How to finish your application essays on time

One of my colleagues at College Coach sent an email to our admissions team today. “Six weeks until November 1!” it said. I had to check my calendar just to be sure. Yep, she was right. Six weeks until the first big deadlines of the student admissions cycle. Six weeks until those precious ED applications would be shipped off to my students’ top choice colleges with personal statements perfected, activities lists completed, and supplements fully executed. Six weeks until we could all pause and breathe a heavy sigh of relief and either begin the anxious wait for decisions or take a well-deserved rest before diving back in to more applications.

I like to encourage all of my students to treat November 1 as a “soft” deadline. Whether or not you plan to apply Early Decision or EA, it’s helpful to give yourself an endpoint to aim for—an endpoint that ensures your supplemental essays don’t hang over your Thanksgiving dinner like a dark cloud.

The Common Application launched yesterday, allowing hundreds of thousands of students to create their accounts and begin applying to colleges around the country. The essay portion of the Common App requires the most planning, the deepest thought, and the hardest work. But before you start drafting your essays, it can be helpful to take a step back and reflect on who you are, what you care about, and the message you want to send to the admission officers who will read your essay.

I always tell my students that their essay topic must be internally motivated: it should be something you write for yourself, not something you manufacture for the sake of your dream school. If your approach is to try and figure out what a student who gets accepted to College X would write, you’ve defeated the purpose of the college essay. I just want to get to know you, not some fictitious person. And considering that during an admissions period I might read up to 5,000 essays (and then multiply this number by 28 years), I have learned to easily spot an essay that is not sincere, that is not a passionate topic for the student, or that isn’t something that truly defines the individual.

Universities are places where debate and argument are fostered in all academic realms:  science, philosophy, law, culture, politics.  More often than not, they are places where students encounter the “other” — those holding beliefs that might seem “different” or “strange.”  Conflicts are bound to arise in such environments.  But how does one conduct himself when he sees an opportunity to make an argument that goes against the grain?  That’s the question facing students who choose to answer the Common Application’s essay prompt number three:

Reflect on a time when you challenged a belief or idea. What prompted you to act? Would you make the same decision again?

How to Write the Common App Essay Prompt About Failure

Today we continue our series of posts on common application essay topics. The second prompt asks students to, “Recount an incident or time when you experienced failure. How did it affect you and what lessons did you learn?”

While most essay topics offer an open door for you to relate an accomplishment, moment of triumph, or positive personal attribute, this one asks instead that you to begin with failure. This isn’t some trap that the Common App has laid for unsuspecting students, nor is it an opportunity for you to score extra humility points with an admission office. It is, however, a prompt that requires care and thoughtfulness in its execution. A well-written “failure” essay can demonstrate remarkable growth and maturity, while a flippant or shallow version will cause you to lose ground with application readers.

It’s mid-July, and I’m sure most soon-to-be seniors are enjoying a much needed respite from school work, term papers, and standardized testing.  But the halcyon days of summer, unfortunately, will eventually come to an end.  It’s not a bad idea to get started on the main Common Application essay — get it out of the way before it has to compete for your attention against tests, papers, extracurricular activities, and any supplemental application essay questions, most of which get published August 1^st.

So where does one even begin when tackling the Common App essay?  Is there anything in particular colleges want to see?  Let’s start with the first essay prompt (we’ll dive into the rest as the weeks progress):

Spokespeople for the Common Application recently announced that the 2013 – 2014 version of the application would include five brand new essay prompts, which are:

• Some students have a background or story that is so central to their identity that they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.
• Recount an incident or time when you experienced failure. How did it affect you, and what lessons did you learn?
• Reflect on a time when you challenged a belief or idea.  What prompted you to act? Would you make the same decision again?
• Describe a place or environment where you are perfectly content. What do you do or experience there, and why is it meaningful to you?
• Discuss an accomplishment or event, formal or informal, that marked your transition from childhood to adulthood within your culture, community, or family.

It’s October in the US, and all around the country many a high school senior is logging into the Common Application, reading the supplemental essay prompts required of their prospective universities, rubbing their exhausted eyes in disbelief, and collectively uttering a simple, yet disquieted,   “Wha…???”

Yes, we’ve all come across them:  those “nefariously” written college essay prompts, so challenging in nature even Einstein might not know what to make of them.  So to help prevent you from getting “lost in translation,” the expert college admissions consultants at College Coach have banded together to conduct an “exhaustive search” for The Most Challenging College Essay Prompts of 2013 and decrypt them for you—the writing’s up to you. 

College applications can be fraught with stress for both parents and students.  So how do parents avoid turning “help” with admission essays into “too much help”?  To guide us through this parental conundrum, we’ve turned to Jacob Palmer, student blogger and junior at American University, for some parent / student advice.  Jake relates to us his essay writing experiences and the impact his mother’s help had on the process.

How would you describe your relationship with your mom when it came to writing your essays?

I’d say it was strained, but in a good way.  Students are encouraged to be creative and take risks with their application essays, and conflict inevitably rises from that risk taking.  And while creative essays can work, oftentimes a student requires some guidance to make sure their essay doesn’t sacrifice message for originality.  I used my mom as a resource to bounce off ideas.