A little while ago, I spent two years living in North Carolina, just a few miles away from UNC Chapel Hill. Like you may have been, I was instantly smitten with the stately brick buildings, the charming tradition of the Old Well, and the outstanding food surrounding the campus. What took me by surprise, however, was just how truly dynamic and impressive the academic and community experience was in real life. Carolina is a special place, in part because it is the oldest public university in the US, but also because it is one of the best examples of the ingenuity of public higher education.

Sometimes a university’s essay prompts can reveal as much about the school’s values as an applicant’s personal statement can divulge what the student will bring to the university. If you’ve ever wondered what you should share in your application essay, fear not; some schools break down their personal statement into a few short responses and give you instructions for each solicited paragraph. MIT, for example, not only tells you what they deem important—how they aspire to positively impact the world—they tell students exactly what MIT is hoping to hear from its applicants: ideals and dreams that match up to theirs. So let’s try hunting for the clues MIT is dropping, prompt by prompt.

If you were to ask an admissions officer if there are any truly “bad” topics to avoid on your college application, chances are you’ll be advised to steer clear from essays about:

• winning (or losing) the “big game,”
• that horrible breakup with your girlfriend or boyfriend,
• your eyes being opened after volunteering in a third-world country, and
• the tragic loss or grave illness of a close family member.

Back when I served as an admissions officer at Barnard, I probably would have agreed.

As a former college admissions officer who read over 3,000 essays every admissions cycle, I can’t stress enough that students should consider quality over quantity when drafting college essays. My colleagues have previously written blog posts encouraging students to draft essays in their everyday voice, and to avoid replacing normal words with cousins from the thesaurus. The bigger picture here is to tell your own story as clearly and concisely as you can. The same goes for the length of your personal statement—hone in on the specific message you want to convey and deliver it as succinctly as you can.

Starting your college essay doesn’t have to be hard.

“Have you started your college essay yet?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I have no idea what I should write about.”

On last week’s episode of Getting In: A College Coach Conversation, host Ian Fisher debuted our new School’s Out series, held Office Hours with a former Yale admissions officer, and unpacked some of your student loan options.

Beginning in the fall of 2016, students applying to any institution within the UC system will be required to choose four “personal insight questions” from among eight options, responding to each of their chosen prompts in no more than 350 words. This new requirement gives students the opportunity to share more about themselves—1400 words compared to the 1000 previously allowed—and offers greater flexibility in what they choose to share with the admissions committee.

When I worked at Reed, my colleagues and I had a saying that we loved to share with applicants summing up the best personal statements: “Neither analytical nor creative, the personal essay is a combination of both that reveals who the student is.”

As stated by Fitzpatrick and Constantini, the personal essay can’t be entirely creative, but it also can’t rely on the DBQ-style that earns you a five on the AP US History exam, either. Further, the writer has to set aside the immense pressure they’re putting on themselves to write the “perfect” essay, which they imagine is going to win over the hearts and minds of their application reader. There’s truly no “one” thing that admissions officers are looking for; in fact, the more expected, formal, or trite a topic is, the likelier the essay is to fail.

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.