Five Essential Tips for a Perfect College Essay

Writing about ourselves is one of the most difficult tasks we are called upon to do.  Ask any adult who has written their own résumé.  It can be hard to crow about your accomplishments, in part because we know that it’s not nice to brag.

Essays aren’t about bragging.  They are an opportunity to bring your personality to light.  So consider these tips to help you spotlight yourself in the perfect college essay.


1.  Consider your audience.

Think about what it must be like to be a college admissions officer.  Stacks and stacks of applications.  Hundreds and hundreds of essays.  A few short weeks to read them all.  At some selective colleges and universities, an admissions officer may have only a few minutes to read through your entire file, including your essays.  So do what you can to grab their attention from the opening line.

College admissions officers are humans.  They want to be entertained.  They want to be moved.  They want to care about the person on the application.  They want to learn something new.  So make sure that you consider your audience as you write.  You don’t want your reader to drop off to sleep after the first paragraph.


2.  Put yourself at the center.

The prompts colleges offer to serve as the lynchpin of the college essay focus on things other than you.  They ask you to write about another person in your life, or a historical character, or an issue you care about. They ask you to write about your conception of diversity.  Or maybe they want to know about an activity you enjoy.

The problem with the prompts is that most students launch into a lengthy exegesis about that other person, or that issue, or that activity, without saying much of anything interesting about the real focus of a college essay:  the applicant.  If you write about Grandpa Joe, don’t recount his life story:  show how his life has affected yours.  If you write about a social or political issue, don’t waste words telling us about how to solve the issue:  illustrate how that issue makes you feel or has prompted you to act.  If you write about an activity, don’t restate facts that we can read about places on your application:  show how that activity reflects your personality, your life’s priorities, or something special about you.


3.  Tell a story.

Everyone likes a good story, including admissions officers.  No matter what topic you choose, try to incorporate a good yarn at the center of it (with you as the principal character, of course).  Consider the beginning, middle, and end of that story.  Think about what you learned in your English classes about the construction of a good story—whether fiction or non-fiction.  Is there a conflict that needs to be resolved in the narrative?  What is the climax of the story?  How do you construct the arc of the story, from the initial build-up to the denouement?  You are telling your story, so make sure it has all the literary elements of a good one.


4.  Go deep.

College applications are very superficial.  The blanks and the spaces in the application require you to fill in basic data about yourself:  parents’ names, grades in school, extracurricular involvements.  It’s all a bunch of facts.  Information devoid of spirit or humanity.

The essay, then, is your chance to show off your humanity, to display some emotion, some soul.  The objective is to communicate—to a perfect stranger—what it is you care about most deeply, to plumb the depths of your sentiments, your passions.  So get philosophical.  Help your reader to understand what makes you different from that stack of other soulless applications she is reading.  Give her something to think about, something that makes her say, “Wow, this kid is mature—deep, even.”  If you stay on the surface, you miss your opportunity to demonstrate that you are unique.  So go deep.

5.  Show some vulnerability.

In my brainstorming sessions with my clients, I’m always on the lookout for those stories in which the student was uncomfortable.  Was there a difficult situation that you had a hard time navigating?  Did a situation make you uneasy, frustrated, or confused?  If you had to relive that situation, would you have handled it differently?

Many students hesitate to write about such experiences, believing that they need to demonstrate strengths, rather than weaknesses.  They fear that they will be passed over if they do not appear superhuman:  “I faced the unbeatable foe, and slayed him!”

Yet admissions officers are not looking for superheroes to populate their campuses.  They are looking for living and breathing humans who are capable of reflection, who understand their fallibility, and who will contribute their strengths and an ability to reflect upon weakness to the betterment of the campus community.

So don’t be afraid to show some vulnerability, to acknowledge frailty, or to even admit defeat.  We’re all human, and that humanity should be at the heart of your college essay.

Mark Montgomery
College Essay Consultant



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Getting Started on Your College Admissions Essay

a girl writing college admission essay

Writing about oneself is difficult. Really difficult. But write about yourself you must. So you may as well get started. But how? Most students start with the five prompts offered by the Common Application.

Essentially, these boil down to the following:

  1. A person who has influenced you
  2. An experience that reflects your personality in some way
  3. A social or political issue that interests you
  4. A fictional character or historical personage that interests or reflects upon you in some way
  5. Your perception of diversity

The Common Application also includes the catch-all prompt: “Topic of Your Choice.”
Frankly, I hate all these prompts. I understand they are meant to get students thinking and off to a good start. But from my perspective, these prompts usually set students off on the wrong course from the get go.

For example, when writing about an influential person (real or imagined, fictional or historical), the student focuses so much on the other person that they neglect to write anything about themselves. Or when writing about an experience, they recount the experience without any reflection as to why it was important. Or worse, they choose an incident in which they exaggerate their own agency, hoping that they will appear heroic or even superhuman. The average college applicant in America has faced enormous obstacles along their educational path.

When it comes to social and political issues, most students start trying to solve the Palestinian problem or combat deforestation, without really telling us why such issues are important to them personally. And the diversity issue is one of the most difficult, in part because most teens have had limited experience of diversity; furthermore, diversity is such an abstract concept that it’s hard for any of us to get our minds wrapped around what it really means in practice.

So, since I’ve tossed out all the usual college essay prompts, what are we left with? Fortunately, the Common Application, as well as many individual college applications, allow students to write about a “topic of your choice.”
Bingo.

So I start not with a prompt, which can lead us in artificial or superficial directions, I start with the student. I ask them to tell me stories. I want to know about their friends. I want them to tell me stories about parents and grandparents. I want to know how they spend their time. I want to know about significant school projects. What do they read, and what do they read about?

All this conversation takes time. But it helps me to understand what is important to the person behind this application. I need to get a glimpse of their foibles and frailties. I need to plumb the depths of their feelings. Through this process, I generally can help a student come up with several viable topics for college essays. I then ask them to write stream-of-consciousness paragraphs that revolve around the general topic area until we witness the evolution of a tightly-woven essay.

Again, the process takes time. It takes patience. Some drafts work; others don’t. But with persistence, students can deliver an excellent essay that reveals something interesting and essential about their personality.
And, in the end, the topic usually does revolve around one of the prompts that appear in the Common Application. The prompts are a great place to end. But you wouldn’t really want to start there.

Mark Montgomery
College Essay Consultant

Big Mistakes on College Admission Essays

I ran across these hilarious mistakes on college admissions essays submitted to Vassar and Bates colleges. You can find them here at Beliefnet.com.
I laughed. And then I cried, knowing how much the staff of the admissions officers were laughing–as they sent out the rejection letters.
Always, always proofread those essays, folks.  And don’t leave them to your eyes alone.  Have others read them–just to make sure  you don’t leave any bloopers behind.
Mark Montgomery
College Essay Editor

Holding College Chiefs to Their Words

The Wall Street Journal came up with a neat trick: asking college presidents to write essays from the application to their own college. Tough assignment!. The results were reported the other day in an article entitled, “Holding College Chiefs to Their Words”.
It’s a good read, and a helpful tonic to high school juniors who struggle to figure out what topic to choose. You can also read the completed essays on the WSJ.com website.
One of them is even from my former major adviser at Dartmouth, who is now the President of Carleton College in Minnesota.  I gotta read that one!
Mark Montgomery

A Visit to Stanford

Today I spent a couple of hours at Stanford University.  It was my first visit to the campus, and I was part of an organized tour for college counselors.  We were given a brief professional overview of the admissions process, and then we went on a student-led tour.

Here’s a brief overview of what I learned from DeAngela Burns-Wallace, an assistant dean of admission (and, I may add, an excellent spokesperson for Stanford).

This was a record year for applications to Stanford.  The office of admission received 31,000 applications for admission, a whopping 22% increase over last year’s numbers.  Ms. Burns-Wallace speculated that many factors led to this increase, including the economic turmoil, continued demographic shifts, the changes in early admissions policies at some of its peer institutions, and the fact that Stanford has very rich financial aid packages, especially for those students from families of modest means.  In addition, Mr. Burns-Wallace credited the Dean of Admission, for ramping up Stanford’s recruiting efforts to attract more and more outstanding applicants.Stanford University on a gray April day.

Of these 31,000 applications, Stanford admitted only 2300, for an admissions rate of 7.6%–a figure that nearly identical to Harvard’s admit rate in 2008.  Of these 2300, Stanford is aiming for a class of 1700 first year students.

Applications at Stanford are read first by territory, and then at least one or maybe two other individual readers examine each and every file.  Then the file moves to a committee of at least four admissions officers, and depending on where the applicant falls in the process, the file may even come to a committee of the entire staff.

Stanford has a “restricted early action” admission program for those students who are certain that Stanford is their first choice.  Nine percent of early applicant were admitted, making it slightly easier (statistically speaking!) to be admitted early.  But the admissions crew was very cautious in admitted students early, in part because of the difficulty of predicting eventual numbers of applications in the regular admissions pool.  Stanford doesn’t hesitate to reject applications outright in the early pool, and 14% of early applications were deferred to the regular admissions pool.  Of those who were deferred, 10% of those were offered admission.  Ms. Burns-Wallace stressed that if an applicant is deferred to spring, it is because the admissions office feels that the candidate is a viable applicant with many strengths.

During the Question and Answer period, many of the counselors asked good questions that elicited helpful information from Ms. Burns-Wallace, and from an undergraduate student who was on hand to provide the student perspective.  Here is a rundown of the questions and the answers.

Questions and Answers

  1. One counselor asked a rumor she had heard that Stanford was somehow required to admit a certain percentage of applicants from the state of Califonia.  The answer is no.  Ms. Burns-Wallace explained that 40% of the applicant pool is from California, so naturally a relatively large percentage (33% this year) of accepted students were also from California.  Obviously this is a big state, Stanford is in California, and as with other colleges, the home state of accepted students reflects the composition of the applicant pool.

    Stanford University Library2.    Another counselor asked which programs are strongest.  The answer is that all are top notch.  Ms. Burns-Wallace stressed that the advising system at Stanford is also quite strong, so every student has the opportunity to explore a variety of different disciplines during their undergraduate program.  However, the student piped up to say that three programs, in particular, have grown in popularity in recent years:  human biology, product design, and earth systems.

    3.    In response to a question about international admissions, Ms. Burns-Wallace (herself a former Foreign Service Officer in Beijing) highlighted the deep collective international experience of the admissions officers.  Several of the admissions officers have strong overseas experience, and several have been reading international application for years.  In addition, there is an committee dedicated to international admissions.  The only difference in the process is that international applications are read with an eye to the student’s ability to pay:  international admissions is not need blind.  Few international students (about 30 this year) receive any financial assistance to attend.  It’s important to note, however, that American citizens living abroad and permanent resident aliens are considered within the “regular,” need blind admissions pool, and are not really considered “international” students.Bikes at Stanford University

    4.    The Stanford supplemental questions to the Common Application are super important in the admissions process.  The admissions committee is best able to discern one’s true interest in Stanford in the answers to these questions.  in addition, they are able to get a strong sense of how the student thinks.  What is important with most of these questions (as in most essay questions offered up by just about any college) is to explain not the “what” of the question, but the “why.”  Thus the committee is not looking for “right” answers to the questions.  They are looking for genuine, creative, interesting, and revealing answers that give the reader a sense of the writer.  They seek students who have original ideas, whose minds are burbling with curiosity—and the wherewithal to turn that curiosity into questions—and answers.  Stanford does not seek out intellectuals who are purely theoretical thinkers. Stanford searchers for doers, people who will relentlessly pursue solutions to problems of whatever sort.


    5.    In this vein, both the admissions officer and the student representative stressed the “entrepreneurial spirit” of Stanford.  The focus, again, is on seeking solutions, not on sitting around in contemplation of how many angels dance on heads of pins.   Stanford students are not geeks: they are smart folks who want to solve problems and create stuff.

    zi6_03476.    Our hosts stressed that Stanford’s campus is big.  Huge, in fact.  Eight thousand acres.  Getting from place to place on foot can take sometime.  So having a bike on campus is key—everyone’s favorite mode of transport.  Biking is so common that lanes have been painted on the walkways and bikeways, and even a traffic circle has been installed in at least one busy biking intersection to cut down on accidents and frustration.  And this was borne out on our tour—bikers zipped in and out and around our group.  Being a pedestrian on this campus can be a bit unnerving, because everyone seems to be mounted upon a two-wheeled conveyance.

All in all, I enjoyed my visit to Stanford, and feel fortunate to have finally been able to see this renowned campus for myself.

Mark Montgomery
College Counselor