Extracurricular activities are a great way to tell the admission officers who you really are out of school hours but often times, most college apps don't give students enough space and words to go in depth with your ECs. The most I have seen is a 250-word response for you to elaborate on an EC. Frankly, I don't think this is enough to help the admission officers to truly understand your perseverance and passion of a certain discipline. This is where the personal essays come in handy as in some cases, you can write up to 1000 words.
- Different college apps have different essay prompts as well as word limits. Below are the current essay prompts from the most 3 common applications:
- A lot of schools also include supplemental essays in their admission and these essays could be either mandatory or optional
- OPTIONAL means MIGHT AS WELL DO IT! For me and a lot of people, just one personal essay doesn't seem to cover all of our stories. Hence, supplemental essays, which are usually more specific, can add depth to your application. On the other hand, if you feel like you have fully shown all of your accomplishment and interests then I guess the supplemental essays aren't very necessary. Just don't skip the supplemental essays because you are too lazy to do them. Colleges are getting more and more selective every year, every little bit helps.
Similar to extracurricular activities, you don't want to write an unoriginal essay that thousands of other high school kids will also write in different shapes of form. Let's discuss what are some of the topics that you probably want to avoid, which can be found in this video. Here is the 5 types of essays that I think are not very effective:
- 1. The Resume Essay: college apps already provide spaces for you to discuss your accomplishments, so don't make your personal essay a detailed list of what those accomplishments are. If your essay is formatted like this "At the age of x, I did a...then when I was y, I was a part of b...now as a z-year old, I'm doing c", you might want to approach your essay differently. The reality is, the more things you want to talk about in your personal essay, the less meaningful each one is. The admission officers will have a very broad idea of who you are and what you do but there is no deeper understanding gained here. Quality over quantity my friend. As a matter of fact, focus on one idea, event, accomplishment, struggle in your life and write it with your heart.
- 2. The "I Work Hard" Essay: alright, before you and your parents flood my emails with complaints, let me clarify what I meant by the "I work hard" essay. Essays like these usually start with you struggling with something, then you worked hard and finally overcame it. The structure is actually great, but the kind of problem/challenge you choose may be problematic. If you're going to use this essay, refrain from talking your school-related challenge. Here what I mean, your grades and test scores reflect your hard work already. If you're going to talk about how you bring up a C- first semester to an A+ in AP Chemistry in the second semester, your transcript shows. Instead, talk about your intellectual interest outside of school curriculum for example. This can apply to sports as well. I understand being a student-athlete is no easy feat, but thousands of students do those essays every year. One admission officer came to our school during an on-campus visit and explicitly said: "You're automatically less competitve if you write about how you tore your ACL". Seriously, your champion titles and time dedicated to your sports speak for themselves. The reality is, everybody works hard for those GPAs and test scores, admission committees know that. Talk about something else.
- 3. The Mission Essay: For the record, please put the volunteering experience on your ECs. Anyhow, too often, students write a cliche essay like this: "I volunteered for 3 weeks at a hospital over the summer and was aware of how others are suffering. In the end, it was me who learned the most..." If the volunteering experience was truly personal to you, then please write about it. I just don't think you should tell the admission officers that you were so transformed after dedicating just a small period of time to the volunteering experience. Write about volunteer works that you really invested time to. For example, if you have been teaching the under-privileged middle school students for the last couple years, you probably should write about that rather than just some quick experience.
- 4. The Impersonal Essay: you want to make the essay unique about you. One of my teachers used to joke hyperbolically that if somehow you accidentally lose your personal essay draft on campus without your name on it, then people should know who it belongs to right away and return it to you. Seriously, if people around you can't really tell the essay is about you, you may want to get more specific.
- 5. The religious/political essay: Personal essays about politics and religion, if not done carefully, can offend your readers. Of course you can still stay neutral with your beliefs but I think the risk of offending your readers is still high. However, if you're applying to a religious insitution, then your religious experience can be extremely appropriate. If you're set on writing about something political or religious, have a person with a different point of view read it and ask him/her if it is too aggressive.
Now that we have established what personal essays can be quite ineffective, let's talk about some of the possible topics that can give your college essays an edge over others'. Here are 3 possible topics that could make your personal essays much more appealing, personal and interesting. For those of you that don't to watch the 13-minute long video, here is the recap:
- Including people from your family and communities: you probably heard from your teachers that the essay is about you and you shouldn't write about family members. This statement is true, to a certain extent. It is most definitely crucial for you to express yourself and not anyone else in your personal essays but at the same time, you can lend others' voices to convey your message. If your essay has a lot of "I","me" and "it" but lacks "he", "she" or "they", you perhaps want to introduce more people into your story. This offers a fresh perspective on yourself. Using your relationships with others can appeal to the ethos or emotions of your readers as well. Everywhere else on your application is quantitative (number-based), this is your only chance to show them your qualities beyond the numbers.
- "Flawed Hero": in this type of essay, you want to brag about your best accomplishments (hence, hero) but simultaneously, you should discuss your flaws too and show admission officers that you're not perfect. This makes you a relatable human being.
- Personal to Universal: first off, this type of essay is challenging. Basically, you're going to use your personal story as a metaphor for a universal element of how the world works. The challenging part here is that if you do it incorrectly, it will appear that you force/fabricate your personal story to fit the universal element. Vice versa,
- Treat your personal essay a serious essay in terms of word choice, tone, spelling and grammatical structures. A typo-filled essay with some run-ons will surely sabotage your academic credential. A good way to eliminate these errors is to use tools like Grammarly and Hemingway App.
- Discuss only one idea in each paragraph. Use multiple paragraphs if you need to, if your essay just has 3 paragraphs of introduction, body and conclusion with long bodies of texts, experienced readers might think that your ideas are too unorganized. Exceptions to this are the short supplemental essays when you only have room to discuss one idea extensively most of the time.
- Be concise. You have a limited amount of words to use, so maxmize them. Eliminate fillers words. Avoid repeating ideas and concepts. You should never feel the need to stretch out your existing sentences to meet the word count.
- Use first pronoun majority of the time: Unless you use a crazy format, you probably would want to tell your story in first person.
- Have a good structure: Whatever your essay is, it should somewhat have these 3 elements in my opinion:
- 1. Initial challenge/conflict/discovery
- 2. What did you do to deal with the problem?
- 3. What were the results of your actions in step 2? How did they contribute to your personal growth?
- Don't JUST propose the hardship that you have been through. While it is nice to know how hard your life has been, if you don't tell the admission officers how you tried to overcome it, then your essay is just a well-written complaint.
- Give yourself adequate time to do these essays. Just like any essays, you should have multiple rough drafts before hitting that submit button. It is easier said than done, however. Good and excellent essays will take you a long time unless you're a gifted writer. I still remember my college apps were due on January 1st, 2018 and I was still writing those essays up to the 30th of December. Needless to say, those colleges did not accept me. Besides the fact that they were top 10 schools in the nation, I think I jeopardized my own college apps for doing the essays last minute.
- Get opinions from others on your essays. Obviously, our English teachers will be ones of the first people you should talk to. However, friends and families, with their own unique perspective of you, can provide just as important insights. At the end of the day though, if you think your essays are good enough, don't change them, but it never hurts to ask for a second opinion.
- Here are some additional writing tips that I've found on the Interweb: