Formula For The Perfect College Essay

Formula For The Perfect College Essay In order to write a great college essay, you don't need a committee. Besides, trying to get all the members on the same page is a lot like herding cats. Second, students want validation that they have done a worthy job on their essay, and they naturally gravitate towards the adult mentors in their life. A college counselor or English teacher is great, but when we hear that parents, SAT tutors, or my-mom's-friend-who-is-good-at-writing are also weighing in, we start to worry. The other thing I caution about is the service trip. If you want to write about how you saved the word, you shouldn’t do it. When my best friend John Smith ‘20 told me about U.Chicago’s diverse campus environment , I was excited, but skeptical â€" diversity can mean different things to different people. So I went to see for myself, visiting on September 9th, 2017. The info session was intimate â€" more so than any other I have attended â€" with a relatively select group of students offered full campus access. Bob Davis ’12, my tour leader, was extraordinarily patient, walking me through U.Chicago’s outstanding array of clubs and societies, including the MSAC Committee. U.Chicago is one of the only schools I am considering that even offers a student-led Diversity Committee, much less one that advises faculty and university management on key outreach issues.Outstanding. The college essay is an important vehicle for telling the admissions committee about yourself, but the academic factors are far more important, even if the essay is worthy of a Pulitzer. Don’t worry about being someone else’s idea of a “good writer.” If you’re not funny, it’s not the time to be funny. If you’re not a good writer and don’t have a huge vocabulary, don’t use fancy words. Your ideas can be profound and can show deep insight into your character, even if they are told in simple, unadorned phrases. In brainstorming about what topic to write about for your Common Application essay, look at what you intend to present in the rest of your application and think about overarching traits that can represent you. I attribute a lot of my successes to how my application as a whole, not just the essays, constructs a story about who I am and what I’ve done. We learn that the author knows how to turn a phrase, the author is a warm and caring person, the author has a sense of humor, and the author will bring us cookies if we admit her to our imaginary college. All in all, we see a student who is a skilled writer with a warm heart â€" positive traits, to be sure. Maybe not, but I loved the rules, the structure, and the big questions that surrounded organizing a government. This essay doesn’t share many life-defining revelations; we learn, as a brief aside, that the author often cared for her younger siblings, but little beyond that. Yet despite its relative lack of major information, it reveals a lot about who the author is. I thought about these things constantlyâ€"while brushing my teeth, doing chores, and driving to school. Unable to take this beloved course a second time, I chose my senior classes with more than a touch of melancholy. I was skeptical that even the most appealing humanities class, AP Literature, would be anything but anticlimactic by comparison. I’d become so accustomed to reading the function-focused writings of Locke, Rousseau, Madison, Thoreau, that I found it difficult to see “literature” as anything more than mere stories. As the name implies, writing apersonal statementis apersonalexperience, making it just a little bit different for everyone. Not just the process, but the actual statement itself, too. That said, you should absolutely get someone to edit for typos and grammar. Don’t just farm it out â€" learn from those writing lessons and use the essay to become more confident in your own voice. You can fix the writing and your thoughts will still be there. There are any number of formulas out there for writing personal statements for college applications. Some encourage you to stick to the traditionalopening-body-conclusionformula, while others insist you should take a risk to spice up the admission officer’s reading experience. None of them are wrong, but it doesn’t mean they’re right for you.