Admissions officers are interesting people who are bored and maxed. They want to read interesting essays. They want to find interesting people to populate next year’s freshman class. If you are an interesting person, they want to get to know you. If you’re not an interesting person, start working on it (hint: the 1st step is asserting that you are, in fact, an interesting person. Then start pretending you are one.). The beauty of the fact that they are looking for interesting people is that once you have become an interesting person, you simply have to be yourself in your essays. You don’t have to pretend anything.
Quotes from “An Interview With a College Admissions Officer” (listed in Essays That Worked for College Applicants706671):
That's why I urge students to write as they would in a diary or a letter to a friend. When you write a letter, you may ramble, but when you're finished, your letter sounds like something you would really say." [see How to un-gut an essay746875]
A good college application portrays all of your most important positive facets and hints at more.
What is voice and how to get it?
From the day I started writing things longer than a sentence in approximately first-grade, I have found it effortless and natural to engage what I later learned to be called my "writer's voice." That reveals that it's not a trait you need to develop through years of study. instead, I think it's a natural ability that every speaking person has and uses, but that some fail to port into their writing. People try to write for prompts, people try to be objective, people mistakenly resign themselves to the idea that "good writing" can't be spoken from the self, personal. In the midst of talking, they neglect to engage person behind "I." It's really easy to do this, you just have to stop thinking about the prompt and start thinking about writing an interesting essay about a fascinating self observation for fun, like you'd post in your blog, and then begin writing. The result will be something that is the precursor to a fully voiced college essay.
*Note: UC (University of California) essays matter less than statistics, at least for raw admission. The same cannot be said for Regents scholarships, candidates for which are automatically selected from top applications.
Dream: "If I went to MIT (your school here) I would..."Good question for applicants to ponder: if you could go to MIT for a day, what would you do? This is the basis of (It's like if I ran the zoo!)
Do not write like a dead fish that was robotic to begin with. [Link to interview with admissions officer] Instead of talking about yourself and the things you did (and invariably sounding like an arrogant prig), reveal through vivid and specific examples why the things you like to do are awesome.
Doing it right: “Imagine playing chess while simultaneously running a marathon with a pack of wolves pursuing you. The game is called Squash and it’s a sport for multitaskers.” ~MIT student 2015
The same applies to larger essays; and while no rule is absolute – the only absolute goal in college applications is the intended impression – these are good guidelines for maintaining the vivacity of your essays.
Consider the difference between these 2 variants of the following intro paragraph. The former is specific and immediate, but blatantly self-aggrandizing and purely descriptive of actions that transpired. It doesn’t go beyond the circumstances discussed. The latter, however, without any direct quotes manages to achieve a comparable level of immediacy plus a distinctive personal voice backed with a mildly self-deprecating and philosophical tone:
Doing it wrong (pompous and denotative): "I'm available all summer."
"I'm interested."
"I'm in!"
"I would love to do this, [John]. I'm ready to go!"
With these enthusiastic words, a cadre of brilliant high school computer scientists pledged their support of an "interesting idea" I had proposed: I was going to hire them.
todo: [Link to essay –UC]
Doing it right (subtle, humorous, and humbly philosophical [Note: humility must be employed judiciously; avoid shortchanging yourself]):
“I never intended to hire anybody. In fact, I never sought to obtain employment myself. I was too busy having fun with computers to be bothered with any of that. But as soon as you know how to hit "ctrl-alt-delete," it seems everyone wants tech support, and one thing leads to another.”