I have been working with high school students on their college applications essays for more than twenty years. I have worked with many admissions counselors, college counselors, and other experts to get their points of view. I am now in the middle of college essay writing season, and working with students every day!
Here are twenty-five things to consider when writing your college essay:
1. Be true to your voice! Don’t let adults edit you out of the essay. Make sure the writing is yours. Don’t assume a persona or try to fool the reader into believing you are someone you are not.
2. Read the question and answer it completely – especially the “and its impact on you” part.
3. Have a clear thesis: what is the point of this essay? You should be able to state it in a sentence or two.
4. Back up the thesis with clear and compelling evidence. Much of this evidence could be scenes that show you living/using/applying the thesis! If you say you are going to make the world a better place, how are you doing that now?
5. When writing, don’t worry about word limits. When editing, get rid of adverbs, preamble statements, and prepositional phrases to trim an essay to the right size. Keep these processes separate.
6. Your essay must be grammatically and mechanically beyond reproach. This goes beyond proofing: you may not end a sentence with a preposition or split an infinitive even if it would otherwise be acceptable to do so.
7. For “why us” essays, do research far beyond the website. Call students at the school. Visit if you can. Discuss courses, professors, programs, buildings, events, clubs, and other things that make that school unique. If you can replace the name of the school with another and all that is wrong with it are names, you have failed the quiz.
8. Don’t do too much. No lists. No string of accomplishments. No quick descriptions of the items on your resume. Focus on a few moments or ideas. Leave the reader wanting to talk to you further, not wondering why you went on so long.
9. Don’t repeat information that is contained in other parts of the application. Use the essay to provide further reasons that the school should admit you.
10. Make sure the name of the school is correctly spelled!
11. Think cinematically. Write your essay as if it were a stage play or screenplay. Write as if you are describing scenes from your life to a blind person.
12. Write about how the parts of your life overlap or connect. Write about patterns you have noticed or created in your life. Think about how the different areas of your life are woven together.
13. If it is boring to you, how do you think anyone else will feel? Your parents don’t count.
14. Write your story. The person who influenced you, your parent, grandparent, coach, or pastor may be wonderful, but they are not applying to college. If the essay is about another person, make it clear how this person affects your choices through your interaction with them, real or imagined.
15. Be honest.
16. Are you a naturally funny person? Have people told you that you should be a comedian? If the answer is an unequivocal yes, you may use humor in your essay. Otherwise, it is very risky.
17. Write about now or nearly now. Things that happened a while ago are only useful if they affect now.
18. Vary your sentence structure. All sentences should not start with “I”. Watch out for successive sentences with lists.
19. Read your essay aloud to a teacher or adult who you can trust to be brutally honest with you. Chances are this is not a relative. Watch out for unintended innuendo, offensive material, and phrasing that could be misinterpreted.
20. Think like an admissions officer or English teacher: what is this question doing on the application? What is the expected or trite response?
21. Have a strong opening. Create introduction seduction.
22. Essays dealing with politics, serious issues, or other dangerous topics need special attention. Consult with your college counselor or whoever is guiding your college process before submitting an essay that paints you in a less than favorable light or deals with a hot topic.
23. No whining, complaining, or blaming.
24. Be careful of formulaic or cliché structures: Someone I know was sick, therefore I want to be a doctor; I went on a mission trip, now I am more appreciative of my life; I got cut from the team, and I learned to bounce back. If you are writing about camp, dead people or pets, humanitarian trips, the big game, or any similar trope, you must have a unique and creative angle.
25. Draft, draft, draft! Revise, revise, revise! This takes time. You must give yourself a minimum of a month to fully develop an essay. You must put it away for a day or three and come back and give it another revision.
I have recently become more skeptical about how much time admissions staff is spending reading these essays and how much weight they have in the process. This doesn’t mean that students shouldn’t give the essay time and thought. However, they shouldn’t obsess over it either. I want my students’ essays to be the ones that are so well written, thoughtful, or creative that they get a little extra attention, and the reader says, “I’d like to meet this kid!”
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