Demystifying the College Admissions Essay

By: Alan Gelb

In all my years of essay coaching, working one-on-one with more than a thousand students on the 650-word personal statement that is required on the Common Application, one question has been asked of me more than any other: “What do I write about?” The other question I am routinely asked is: “How can I make my essay one of a kind?”  Those two questions, taken together, suggest that there is a pervasive sense of mystery and confusion surrounding this all-important assignment. Eliminating some of that mystery will get us to the core of this challenging task.

 

What Should I Write About?

 

The personal statement needs to be…well, personal. That may seem obvious, but that obvious truth escapes a great many students who are being asked to review their life and come up with a story that captures the essence of who they are and presents them in their very best light. The personal statement should not be viewed as an opportunity to promote oneself. Self-promotion—i.e. bragging about one’s achievements—is one of the very worst mistakes a student can make on this assignment. 

I counsel students to imagine themselves at a party, sitting next to someone they do not know. The task is to make some kind of connection. Do you do that by talking about your achievements? Do you tell that stranger about your perfect tennis season, your successful installation of vending machines as Student Council president, or how you were named Volunteer of the Year by Habitat for Humanity? No. Touting your achievements gets you nowhere. It is far better to examine those areas of activity—tennis, student government, community service—and pull out a story, also known as a narrative, that will allow you to talk about the internal and deeply personal nature of those activities. 

You might write, for instance, about how you learned to work with a difficult person, or how you overcame someone else’s preconceptions about you, or how you overcame your own preconceptions about someone else. The emphasis should not be on what you did as much as it is on who you are. There are endless facets to examine around any activity, and you want to pull out and examine the aspects of your experience that reflect on your personal development.

 

What Does My Essay Need to Do?

 

The best way to begin to answer that all-important question—What do I write about?—is to develop a better understanding of what the Common App personal statement is intended to do. To my mind, this assignment is designed to meet three main goals and perhaps one collateral goal.

 

1. Persuade the Admissions Committee to Invite You into Their College Community.

The job of the admissions counselor is to assemble a college community that will work for both the institution and the people who populate that institution. To that end, they are looking for individuals with the right academic credentials. Next, they want to recruit those with special skills and talents (bassoonists, lacrosse players, debaters, and so on). And—very importantly—they want to make sure that everyone they are inviting into their community has the right human qualities. 

They are hoping that the people they accept will arrive on campus with no bad habits, like making trouble for their roommates or spending the day in bed, and they will be poring over these essays for any red flags that might suggest problems. In a very real sense, the personal statement serves as a kind of diagnostic, and students want to make sure that when the admissions counselors read their essays, they will find human qualities that reflect well on them. Think in terms of empathy, self-reflection, self-awareness, kindness, curiosity, dedication, and a sense of humor.

 

2. Tell the Reader a Good Deal About Yourself

Back in the old days, college applicants were required to visit campus—or some other off-campus site, like the offices of alumni—to have an interview. The point was for the interviewer to assess the interviewee. That tradition has gone the way of the full-service fill-up at the gas station. These days, if you do have an interview on campus, chances are that it will be with a grad student or an upper-level undergraduate, and it will be primarily an informational interview, geared to answering your questions, not the interviewer’s. Therefore, in a very real sense, the college admissions essay has become your “interview.” 

Some years ago, a study by the Independent Educational Consultants Association (IECA) determined that the essay was the fourth most important determinant when it came to college admissions, with the grade-point average, standardized test scores, and the breadth of a student’s curriculum (i.e. how many A.P. courses he or she has taken) being the most important determinants. That has all shifted now, as many colleges and universities, in the wake of the pandemic, have deemphasized standardized test scores, allowing the essay to take on even more importance. 

In fact, the essay is the only place in which students can significantly differentiate themselves from other applicants who might look a lot like them on paper. And so, students will want to seize this opportunity to tell their readers quite a lot about who they are. If a student plans to write about her lifelong love of chess, that might be fine—but at the same time she will want the reader to know that her Lithuanian grandfather taught her chess and she, in turn, taught chess to kids in inner city schools and the thinking she uses in chess parallels the thinking she uses in the lab or whatever. In other words, the essay should provide a well-rounded picture of who the student is.

 

3. Show the Reader That You Can Write.

This goal seems obvious, but the point here is that students must be scrupulous about bringing their writing to as high a level as possible. That means developing a strong narrative structure, using fresh and unstilted language, avoiding jargon, proofreading again and again, and giving out one’s work for critical feedback. Perfection is not a human quality—not even for Tiger Woods or Yo-Yo Ma—but the quest for perfection has a legitimate place in writing. We must never settle for second best. Writing requires diligence and commitment, and good writing does not come easily to anyone.

 

4. Write Something That Will Help You Stand Out From the Pack. 

This is the collateral goal that we can strive to achieve. For many students, the holy grail is an essay the likes of which the world has never seen before. That’s why students often ask me how to develop a “quirky” essay about peanut butter or cupcakes or tiddlywinks. They are under the impression that something eccentric will naturally seem entirely fresh and new and unprecedented, when, in fact, something eccentric can just as easily seem tired and come across like it’s trying too hard. Rather than directing students toward unprecedented originality, I counsel them to stand out from the pack by achieving a depth of emotion, authenticity, truth, and self-insight that will imprint them in the minds and memories of their readers. Capturing reality is a great way to make yourself memorable.

I also tell students that instead of aiming to write something that the world has never seen before, they should expect to write within a genre. That is to say, they will most likely be writing about their family (the family story genre), or friends (the friend genre), or work or hobbies or travel or service or any of the other genres that students typically write in. The challenge is to bring freshness and conviction and writing skill to the genre you choose.

 

There is a great deal at stake when it comes to writing the college admissions essay. Students are being asked to write about something that is deeply personal and to do so in a way that will be meaningful to others. They must strive to achieve a level of excellence in their writing that might very well stretch them beyond their recognizable limits. They must do all of that within a framework of pressure: school demands bearing down on them; parental anxieties bearing down on them; their own “imposter syndrome” making them doubt themselves. And no writer—lay or professional—can feel relaxed about writing 650 words of prose under such conditions. Hopefully, the demystification of the college admissions essay will help alleviate some anxiety and allow students to access the deep well of emotion that will enable them to complete this work successfully.

 

If you would like to get in touch with Alan Gelb, or would like to speak to us about helping your student with college essays, please schedule a call with us HERE.

 

For additional insights, read:

How to choose colleges to apply to

5 Simple Tips to Writing a Great College Application Essay

5 Ways Parents Can Better Support Their Children During the College Admissions Process

Definitive Guide to Writing Help

 

About Alan Gelb:

A widely published writer of fiction and nonfiction, Alan Gelb first began to explore the college admissions essay when his own sons were going through the application process. As a marketing communications consultant for higher education, Alan had a long history of writing recruitment and development materials for top colleges and universities across the country, and so had a sense of what the schools were looking for. Putting that together with his understanding of the narrative form, he came up with a unique approach to the personal statement. As he continued to work with college applicants, Alan collected his theories in his book Conquering the College Admissions Essay in 10 Steps. Each year, Alan and his team work with students all over the world, helping them to uncover very special stories that admissions counselors remember. http://www.conquerthecollegeessay.com/

 

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