College Essay Tips

College Essay Tips But please, please, please do not not procrastinate on your admissions essay. Everything I’ve covered in this article matters only if you give yourself enough time. Most high school students lead lives that don’t deviate too far from the norm â€" except that one quiet guy in your class who sits next to the window near the back. He’s almost certainly either a genius mech pilot or the subject of some prophecy in an alternate dimension that he’ll be transported to. Even if you’re only applying to a couple schools that you know you can get into, it will still serve you well to write a compelling admissions essay. Standing out from everyone else could put you in the running for additional scholarships and will also simply make a good impression, which never hurts. So treat a college application essay as a tool for standing out in ways the robots can’t. It’s a lot like the cover letter you write when applying for a job â€" it’s your chance to reveal the person behind the accomplishments and statistics. While it is important to talk yourself up as the awesome student you truly are, you still have to remember that the application essay is not a résumé. You can certainly submit a résumé with your application, but your essay is not the place to do it. We want you to expand upon a few characteristics that make you great, not just give us a list with the thousand and one things that contribute to your greatness. This way, we are able to fully grasp why these particular characteristics, out of the many you could have selected, are so important to you and who you are as an individual. Many students fall into the trap of offering superficial or generic reasons for wanting to attend. An admissions committee doesn’t want to hear that you’re attracted to the warm weather â€" you can just as easily find that at another college in the South. Emory even calls out the commonality of that response in its prompt. Besides, that other essay would go on forever, and, as I mentioned, we read thousands of these things each year. The overall workload here is really dependent on your college list, so if your list isn’t as ambitious, some of the timelines above might not apply to you. The main point here is that getting a head start and planning your essay workload is essential to limiting how stressful the college application process needs to be. Don’t rely on spell check alone to catch all of your mistakes, either. Be sure you are using the correct form of words too (they’re, their, there, your, you’re, etc.). Few things will throw off an application evaluator more than misspellings and typos in the college essay â€" except when you mention the wrong college! Don’t tell us how much you want to attend XYZ University when you are submitting the essay to The College of ABC. Make sure to get these done early so that you give yourself a lot of time to work on the remaining regular decision supplemental essays. If you chose your essay prompts correctly, hopefully you can use an essay or two from here for some of your remaining school essays. UC application deadlines are at the end of November, so they should be your next priority if you haven’t worked on them already. If you start the day before the application is due, all I can say is good luck. For the most part, it’s unlikely that you’ve experienced anything extremely uncommon in the relatively short amount of time you’ve been a human. If you choose not to disclose your disability in your essay or college application, remember, you may still disclose at any point after you are accepted into the school. You will need to do this to receive any of the accommodations and support services that you might need to be successful. To help youth applying to college navigate the college essay in order to submit their best work with their college application. We've cooked up a bunch for you, based on, uh, who you are slash what you care about. DO NOT PROCRASTINATE. Look, we all procrastinate. The same applies to wanting to be in a city or town or being part of a small, medium, or large student body. While you may prefer certain settings or sizes, the fact is, you can easily find those qualities anywhere. You can write an excellent essay, but if you don’t focus on answering the question that the college is asking, you will likely not be admitted to the school. A thoughtfully crafted essay and a clean, clear application can make a tremendous difference in the college admissions process. Remember, in the grand scheme of the college admissions process, the application essay is a unique opportunity â€" and an opportunity to be unique.