college admissions essay tips

college admissions essay tips

Crafting a Winning College Admissions Essay: Tips and Strategies

1. Introduction to College Admissions Essays

The essay topic is also very important. An essay topic should be about something that is “crucial to you,” something that can help admissions officials understand who you are as a person. You should not write about how much you like a college, the amount of respect you have for college faculty or the desire to attend college so that you can get a good job. All college students believe that the college that they are going to attend is the “greatest in the universe,” but admissions staff will make the determination to admit you or not, based upon other criteria. The essay topic should also be about something that you are passionate about. That is, something that you have experienced, and for which you have developed a strong voice, as well as something about which you have plenty of original ideas. Finally, the essay topic should be self-revelatory. If the topic asks you to describe the family you grew up in, for example, frame it around a specific experience. Most essays should be about no more than 3-4 pages long, and they usually should be double spaced.

With a college admissions essay, the goal is to separate yourself from the other students by convincing the university to admit you, rather than another. Therefore, your essay should not only be well-written, but also be about something that you believe in strongly (i.e., that demonstrates your potential to contribute to and succeed at college level coursework). Crafting the essay is something like participating in an interview – it should make a good first impression, and: a) portray something about your distinctive qualities that are important to admissions officials, b) showcase the strength of your writing and your capacity for critical thinking, c) reflect your uniqueness, i.e., what makes you different from other students, and d) indicate who you are as an individual.

2. Understanding the Purpose and Importance of the Admissions Essay

Although essay phobia is a real feeling that many students experience, most have known the life experience that helps them to craft a great personal essay. The school-issued prompt and a free discipline make possible two types of essays. Students may respond and elaborate upon a prompt, either right after it is given to them in the form of a posed question, or three months after hearing about it in the form of recognizing questions about their experiences or insights which naturally the composition could answer. Students may also choose to brainstorm, gather their thoughts, and write an essay based on significant, formative personal experience that already warrants a short answer or activity summary on the rest of the application.

While a college admission decision is often based on a combination of non-academic factors, such as likelihood to fill the incoming class or to compete on sports teams, few aspects of the application gauging personal qualities or beliefs are weighted as heavily as the admissions essay. The application essay is the one place where college officials are given the chance to see the applicant as an individual and hear his or her voice, rather than see the student as a list of transcripts, test scores, and extracurricular activities. Admissions officers want to hear the story or gain an understanding of what makes the student unique as a person, rather than as a member of a group (as characterizing the class). Knowing that great personal essays, often about mundane experiences or inconspicuous accomplishments, can separate otherwise similar candidates, they sometimes do lean heavily upon the essay.

3. Key Elements of a Strong Admissions Essay

The author shares a lot about himself and why he is interested in studying medicine by explaining his interest in science or other related fields. Readers, particularly the admissions readers, want to feel something from your writing. A strength of this piece is good word use and powerful vocabulary. The essay uses descriptive language. Another strength is strong sentence variety and effective word choice. As we all know, it’s easy to spot passion in someone’s writing about them. You must prove that your entire essay is about your interest and reasons you want to study these areas and that they are truly important to you. Remember to put the reader in the shoes of admissions. Try and think of how they would want to see your understanding of the written topic and its content discussed correctly. Keep the attention of the reader to the best of your ability.

While the specifics of the prompts may differ from school to school, what about the author or the essence of an admissions essay stays the same. Here are a few key elements that you may want to consider as you write your admissions essay for college or graduate school: an interesting and memorable title, an engaging and effective introduction; thoughtful and compelling examination of the topic/meeting the required specifications; a rationale or personal connection between you and your essay; nicely integrated transitions and a clear, well-organized paper; thoughtful and meaningful conclusion; concise and clear writing throughout. A standard piece of writing for the purpose of college admissions is generally a requirement for admission.

4. Effective Writing Techniques and Strategies

Keep readability easy. Admissions staff do not invite essays into the college; they accept people. Therefore, resist the temptation to exaggerate your ability with the language, thereby allowing for the chance to show off your vocabulary. Use normal sentence structure and everyday language, not flowery or academic writing. Be orderly. Any personal essay is a means of expressing yourself. However, writing is orderly by nature, so in your organization of thoughts, try to remember the following. The main reason for having an introduction and conclusion is to let the reader know you are targeting them! Your introduction must be succinct and invariable. Your conclusion can be a little stronger, but unless you have written an ending that has those five readers we talked about earlier stand up and say “Wow!” an introduction that sticks to the point is what you want.

This section will explore the strategies and techniques that best enable you to construct a good college essay. Careful attention to resemblance of self across components as well as to the “you” that a particular institution will be finding in your essay will become your concern. The aftermath will be a clear and engaging essay from an active and dynamic college student – you! The college admissions essay is the one chance a college applicant has to introduce himself or herself and, beyond statistics, the intangible elements of personality, background, interests, and objectives. The admissions staff wants to pick people who will comfortably fit into the broad variety of the college’s puzzle. An interesting, diverse group of people makes a college an interesting, diverse place.

5. Common Mistakes to Avoid and Final Tips for Success

5. When you have finally crafted the perfect college admissions essay, it is direly imperative that you shred all remaining vestiges of failure. If you should happen to break up your persuasive force into fractions such as “set off” worries or everywhere, please be certain you have selected a generalized topic that TOTALLY ECLIPSES these mistakes. Remember that the best gift that you can instill upon your paper opposition according to Plato should be conceived as the mark of giving that wins the day and not the spoils.

4. Do not repeat your application on a more personal level, a mistake that potential candidates often make. Discrete information, and not a restatement of basic statistics, is key in differentiating your interest in a potential student scholarship.

3. Utilize the obvious tool of organization. When laying bricks, each one must be in place before you can move on. Writing a good essay is the same way. You can use the five-paragraph formula for each essay in your writing portfolio. Never get lazy. Your college admissions essays should contain answers that can be distilled into the question, “Do they belong in college?” Your essay can be practical and frivolous, intellectual and imaginative, and serious and hilarious but above all it needs to be a place to speak about you, the candidate which, in answering our question, is exactly what this essay organ is made for.

2. The golden key to college – so often misunderstood or thought under a spell, or broken by those young and old – is nothing more and nothing less than practicality and money, and of course an important reliance that you will use to clinch it. Dialogue is vital – perhaps it is even the key to all literature. Getting the conversation right in an admissions essay is no different. Make sure it is loud and clear and that it can enunciate your voice.

1. Remember to be yourself! This is by far the single most important thing you can do to craft an interesting and differentiated admissions essay.

5 final tips for your college admissions essay

5. Avoid, if at all possible, grotesquely disfiguring yourself, your relatives, or your last family pet simply to craft a standout opening sentence. Scarring yourself for the sake of the admissions committee is not the way to get your college education off on the right foot.

4. Do not seek out the sinister ways of the internet to correct your laziness or lack of inspiration. No one is ever actually fooled by this kind of cheating, save perhaps the occasional admissions counselor with minimal exposure to the great world of the internet.

3. Really specific minutiae about the negotiations that happen after a high school academic decathlon but that have nothing to do with the academic decathlon itself (none of which you, as a scholarship applicant, would have been directly involved in). High school students, keep your discerning eyes open here; the secrets of the mysterious scholarship application process are about to be revealed.

2. Really basic spelling and grammatical errors that suggest you should have paid attention during those years of English class. Also reigning from the obviously neglected pre-writing process, or the simple but important concept of proofreading: Missing, or incomplete, basic information such as your name or previous educational experience (which leads me to assume that the remainder of your historical knowledge might be a little less than comprehensive, as well).

1. Do not try to start life as an undergraduate by creating some kind of student-by-day/rock-star-by-night scenario as a way to perpetuate your reputation. We read that essay every year, and the best that it accomplishes is the opportunity to catalog every other possible cliché.

Having gone through the process of preparing and reading thousands of college application essays, as both a student and professor, I have a few things to warn you about if you want to write an admissions essay that will stand apart from the pack. Avoid these essay faux pas:

Common mistakes to avoid in your college admissions essay