Your college essay is the most important thing in your college application. It is the thing that can tip the scales to your advantage when applying for a college. Your statistics, grades, scores are all put aside as the admission officers read your essays, your story. These essays are meant to humanize you so that you're not just a paper full of numbers for them to choose.
Numbers aren't everything. These admission officers are trying to find brilliant students who will be a great addition to their school. I know a person from high school, he was a genius, but he didn't do anything but study. I remember he complained to others that he didn't have a story to tell and that he was thinking of lying about it- which you should never do. While I, on the other hand, my statistics were subpar to his, but I did extracurricular activities and had my story. In the end, I got into UC Berkeley and he didn't.
The thing is that everything is a case-by-case basis and it really depends on the school. It's good to do some research on the colleges you want to apply for because many of them have preferences. Some require a certain standardized score, some value the extracurricular activities you did, and some value the essays more than the others. You can do your research on Reddit and Google.
How colleges usually choose students is that there are several admissions officers at a table and they go by an application one at a time. They go over your statistics, read your essays, and then discuss with each other if you're a fit for a school. Certain schools may run things differently between each other like how many officers they have, if there's a time limit, if they choose between students, or go back to change a decision.
But for this chapter, we will be focusing on the college application personal essays.
I don't know how other college applications work, but I'll be using the UC Application as my main example. For the UC Application as explained in the previous chapter "My UC Application Personal Essays", you choose four out of eight questions to answer. Other schools will have different systems such as having a prepare list of questions for you to fill out.
I'll be listing out the tips rather than writing them in paragraph form to make it easier to read and go over.
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Narrative:
It's your story: Remember that this is your personal essay, your own story. You need to take advantage that the admission officers are looking at you as a human being, not as a paper of statistics.
Become a detailed narrator: You need to be narrative in your essay. You need to move the reader and have them sympathize with your journey and story. Open up a thesaurus and get creative with those adjectives.
Choose your questions wisely: When choosing between what questions to answer (such as the UC Application), pick questions that are completely different from each other. You want the admissions officer to get a holistic look at you as a person.
[As an example, you can go over my UC App essays. Through my essays I showed that I was a leader and I did an extracurricular activity related to my intended major of Civil Engineering (Question 1), I told them I'm an accomplished writer (Question 3), I shared my bullying story and one of my written works (Question Five), and I shared another story of my passion for my intended major (Question Six)]
You can choose difficult questions on purpose: When having to choose between questions to answer, it's also great to choose the difficult questions not everyone answers. The officers will pay more attention to you since they don't receive many answers to that certain question. However, you must not force yourself to answer a question if you don't have anything to write for it. You'll hurt yourself more than you'll help yourself.
Make your story as unique as possible: You need to consider what other people will be writing. Say you're a low-income student and you want to write about it. It's a very moving main purpose of your essay, but you need to make it as unique as possible because there are millions of other low-income students. You have to tell your personal story that makes you stand out from the crowd.
Create a main purpose of your essay: If you create a great line or point, use it, and make your essay revolve around it. Take advantage of them so the readers will know the purpose of your essay. You must always have the main purpose of each essay. Of course, there's the question itself but it's great to have a theme for the essay. This will help you be unique for the admissions officer to remember you.
Connect any extracurricular activities or interests: Try to connect any extracurricular activities, hobbies, or interests you have included in your main general application into your essays. They help add to the narrative and give more depth to both your general application and essay.
Don't. Be. Modest: The essays give you a chance to show the readers what you're made of. You won a competition- awesome! You volunteered at an event- great! But you must share it eloquently to show how mature you are as a person.
General Writing:
NEVER. STOP. EDITING. There should be no grammar or punctuation mistakes. If you submit your essay and you find a mistake in it after, stop stressing over it. The admissions officers are human and can overlook one or two mistakes, but never more.
Contractions: Extend contractions such as turning "I'm" to "I am". This is very annoying especially because of the word count, but this is how you professionally write an essay that you should do when doing any essays. Using contractions is more for verbal dialogue, not for professional, written works.
Reading Out Loud: It's helpful to say aloud your essays so you can hear if there is anything wrong with the grammar. You can also put your essay through Google Translate and have it play it back aloud to you so you can hear any mistakes.
Don't be afraid of change and sacrifice: Don't be afraid to make edits. The word count makes things very difficult and sometimes you don't want to sacrifice a good line. However, sometimes it's necessary. Always be sure to read over the entire essay and see if you can change a line to make it more concise or delete it altogether. An individual sentence may be brilliantly written, but you have to make sure it makes sense and follows through the entire essay, or else it's better off being deleted.
Resources:
Grammarly: I use it when writing for my stories too.
Your family and peers: It's great to trade your essays with your peers so you can get a second opinion while seeing examples of other essays. Of course, some people are better at editing than others, but just be sure to share it with as many people as you can trust. You can also post it anonymously - be sure to hide any personal information - to get more feedback.
Afterward:
Scholarships: Once college applications are complete, do scholarships! What is most important is doing written-essay scholarships. You already have so much material from writing your college applications. You can also take advantage of the fact that many seniors are burnt-out from finishing their college applications so there are scholarships just sitting there not being applied to. I'm just saying, I filled out as many scholarships as I can and I got a total of $28K in scholarships including a four-year scholarship.
Finding a scholarship: There are scholarships for everything! Your gender, sexuality, nationality, ethnicity, major, hobbies. Even how tall you are! For once me being 5'1" was too tall for a short-person scholarship. There are scholarships about potatoes you guys. Potatoes.
Be good little angels: After filling out your college applications, even if you get accepted by a college, you need to keep up your grades and be on your best behavior online or offline. There are thousands of stories of seniors having their offer rescinded because of a bad party or their GPA took a dive.
Comment here if you have any other tips you'd like to share with others.
Comment here if you have any questions about this chapter and you want me to elaborate on it.
Rubix