What Makes A Great College Essay?

What Makes A Great College Essay? My College Options ® is an online college planning program that connects millions of high school students with colleges and universities. Before you begin to tackle this essay prompt, there are a few points of which you should be aware. First off, don’t reiterate information that can be found in other parts of your application. Don’t just say that volunteering in a soup kitchen allowed you to see the importance of helping others. Admissions committees really want you to speak to the experience and really explain the impact it had. Finally, you’ll need to be able to strike a balance between being self-effacing and being a braggart. Some students try so hard to be creative, or to entice the reader with a sense of intrigue, that they sacrifice clarity. If your reader is one paragraph in and thinking, “I don’t have a clue what this student is talking about,” you’ve moved from arousing interest to creating confusion. It’s certainly possible and often effective to begin your essay with a description that piques interest without necessarily revealing exactly what the description is about. But while enticing and intriguing are good, bewildering and unintelligible are not. Another very simple tip, but many of the less compelling essays we read each year fail to focus. This should help you to organize a clear rough draft. We also enlisted the help of a qualified expert in the field. Meredith Lombardi, Associate Director of Outreach and Education at the Common Application, offers a few tips on exactly what admissions officers are seeking from a great application essay. Cited a few real-world examples of college essays that actually worked. Think about the special nugget of information you want the reader to know about you at the end of your essay and write with that central theme in mind. Finally, colleges can use the essay to begin picturing how you’ll connect with and make the most of resources within their specific campus communities. Careful proofreading shows the reader you care and you aren’t sloppy. Before you send your essay to colleges, have someone you trust read it and provide feedback. Usually, your English teacher will be happy to take a look. Choose one that focuses on a specific anecdote rather than the three asking for your whole life story. It makes it easier for your essay to make an impact on your admissions if you carefully pick a prompt, unlike the majority of applicants. Over 70 percent of students choose just three of the seven Common Application prompts . That is because three of them work well if you write your essay first and pick the prompt second. The college essay is a page-long assignment given to you by a school, to be completed by a certain date. Instead, use this opportunity to showcase an additional side/aspect of yourself. Secondly, you must recognize that schools don’t only view “big” achievements as a viable topic. You don’t need to have worked on a cure for AIDS or helped send a rocket into space to write a compelling essay. Your college essay gives you the chance to talk about your best assets. While your essay should convey your best qualities, you want to avoid bragging too much. If you write about an activity or an experience, focus not on how good you are or what you have accomplished, but instead on what the experience/activity means to you. Once you zero in on your topic, it’s time to organize your ideas. You might want to use an outline, laying out your main points, developing supporting ideas, and sequencing your thoughts logically. Admissions officers read thousands of essays every year. Yours doesn’t have to be the most creative; it just has to be a good read. Putting your ideas into the right words may take time. Don’t procrastinate on this part of your application.