How to Write a Great College Essay
The Personal Statement.
The one essay that all the colleges you apply to will read.
Feels like a lot of pressure, doesn’t it? Tell the college admissions offices an interesting story or two about you… knowing that it weighs heavily in their decision whether to accept you or not.
Ugh.
There’s no magic formula, by the way. Successful college essays come in all sorts of forms with all sorts of content.
However, I can share some very important “Do’s and Don’ts” for this important piece of writing.
Tell your story.
That’s all it is! Take a deep breath. You got this.
Focus on you.
Your story. Your thoughts. Your insights.
Your experiences.
DO
Do tell an authentic story that is all yours. It doesn’t have to be life-altering, earth-shattering, or uniquely-stunning. It can be you and your grandpa playing checkers. It can be you and your mom at Costco. It can be you and your friends having pizza. It’s got to be your story.
Do make yourself the central character. If you’re talking about how your Uncle Bob is your role model, keep the focus on what impact he had on YOU. Admissions doesn’t want to really know all about Bob, even if he’s completely amazing….unless he’s also applying for admission (in which case he may get in and you may not!).
Do write in your own voice. This can also be known as “put the thesaurus away”. Write the way you speak (almost). Here’s a sentence from a student essay on leadership to demonstrate what I mean: “Leadership is a very helpful and stable construct that takes years to be mastered and perfected.” Oh dear. This is not a teenage voice. This is not anyone’s voice! Just say what you mean: Leadership takes a long time to learn. Easy.
Do try to make the story unique to you. I can hear you now: “Hey Miss Kristie, didn’t you just say I could write about my friends and me, eating pizza? That’s not unique!” You’re right. This is what makes this essay so hard, right? It’s not the eating pizza that’s unique, or the playing checkers with grandpa, or the trip to Costco. It’s what YOU thought about or learned or realized through that experience that makes it unique. If you can say (or write) something like… “it was right then, with the smell of pepperoni wafting through the air and the laughter of my friends filling the pizza shop that I realized ________.” Maybe you realize something about friendship or diversity or community or yourself or whatever. THAT is what makes it uniquely yours.
Do make it your best piece of work. That means several things: use paragraphs, correct your spelling, purge any (or most) slang out of it. Get someone you trust, preferably an adult, to read it over for errors.
DON’T
Don’t feel like you have to have the world’s most amazing story. I get the pressure. I get it. I mean - if you won a Nobel Peace Prize (looking at you, Malala), then you should talk about it! Or an Olympic medal? Yes, write about it. But if you - like 99% of high school seniors - have basically just been living your life, playing your sports, hanging with your friends…. it’s ok!! You have an important voice and valuable thoughts and interesting things to say. I know you do. :)
Don’t get too many people to help you. This is a trap that you might not see coming. You get your friend to read it, and she says she loves the part about the checkerboard! You get your mom to read it, and she loves it all …except the part about the checkerboard. Your brother thinks you should say “whom I was meeting” and your English teacher thinks you should say “who I was meeting”. Your other friend says you need to add some more description, and your grandma thinks your descriptions are too long and should be trimmed back. Too many cooks in the kitchen is a recipe for disaster; the same is true of your essay. Get one - max, two - people to read it over for you, looking for errors. Then STOP.
Don’t focus too much on the prompts for the personal statement essay. This is a strange piece of advice, right? Usually you WANT to focus on the prompts!! In this case, however, I really get my students to think about what story they want to tell FIRST, and what it says about them. Tell your story, and THEN see which prompt it fits. If it doesn’t fit a prompt, use the final one which is “write about whatever you want”. More students choose that prompt than any other prompt anyhow! Don’t get pushed around by the prompts on this one. YOU decide what you want to write about. Then choose the prompt afterwards.
Don’t get stuff wrong on the supplemental essays. Stuff. Like what stuff? Stuff like the name of the school: don’t say “Notre Dame University” when it’s “the University of Notre Dame”. Don’t say “I can’t wait to cheer on the Wildcats!” when their mascot is the Bobcats. Don’t tell them how much you want to be an electrical engineer when they don’t have an electrical engineering program. This is relevant for the smaller, supplemental essays that many colleges require, not the personal statement which goes to all colleges…although you should strive not to get stuff wrong on that essay either.
Don’t plagiarize. This should be obvious, right? But, it happens. Just don’t do it.
If you want to see some samples of some terrific college essays that worked, click here to swipe the file I use in my college essay workshops! It also includes one example of how NOT to write a college essay. My notes are included on the swipe file, too!
Use them as models of how a great essay should feel. Don’t steal them as your own, of course. Your essay will be amazing, too, I know it.