College application essays – how do I write a genuine, standout essay?

What I’ll cover in this blog:

-Which essay prompt to choose?
-Starting sentence is critical
-Best flow for the essay
-What to avoid
-Overall Tips
-How Goal Admit can help

Which essay prompt to choose?

College application essays are a daunting part of the application process. The Common App has 7 questions and students have to pick one. The University of California application wants you to pick 4 out of the 8 prompts. And there are supplemental essays that each college will ask you to write. Remember that the goal of the essay is to show the admission officer who you are. When they finish reading your essay, you want them to like you enough to advocate for admitting you. 

First step is to brainstorm. Don’t even look at the essay prompts first. Ask yourself questions like “Who am I?”, “What is important to me?”, “What are all my acc accomplishments?”, “What are the areas I could have improved on?”. Write down words that best describe you, phrases that family and friends have used to describe you? Write down what your passions are, what excites you, what future you see for yourself.

Also write down memorable incidents that happened to you throughout high school. Did you, as a karate instructor, face a kid who was difficult to teach? Did a classmate give you an unexpected gift because you helped them? Did you decide to analyze the pattern on a sofa cushion one day and calculate the probability of a square being red? Did you, in a summer program, surprise yourself and everyone else by getting up on stage to sing a song? All of these, by the way, are incidents that happened to my sons’ that were incorporated into their college admission essays. 

Now sift through all your notes to see which essay prompt fits your narrative best. Remember that if you are applying to different majors in different colleges, the single Common App essay will need to mention/combine all your interests in some way. You can refine a particular area later in the supplemental essays. But if you’re planning to hedge your bets and apply to CS in one college and Math or Philosophy in others, your essay should convey interest in all three. 

Remember that you should not repeat facts or incidents or accomplishments in multiple essays, so plan out what you will cover in the main essay and what will be left for the supplemental essays.

Starting sentence is critical

The first sentence of your college application essay is critical. This is the very first insight the admission officer will get about you, so make it good. Draw them in. Do not write generic or cliched sentences here. This is the sentence which should hook the reader and be uniquely you. It is a good idea to draw the reader in by setting up a descriptive scene here. Instead of making a statement, paint a picture. Show, don’t tell. This is true throughout the essay, but especially important in the beginning. Please do not make statements like “I have been passionate about biology throughout my life.”. Draw out an incident and build from it to show your passion. Like talking about a visit to the beach where you saw a baby turtle struggling to reach the water and how it inspired you to join a club for environmental conservation. 

Best flow for the essay

There is a real danger of listing out your accomplishments in your college application essay. You have worked evry hard to collect the honors and medals and trophies, and it’s natural that you want to talk about them to someone whom you want to impress. But there is a real risk of the essay reading like a list. And the application provides space elsewhere to do just this – list out your activities and your honors/awards. Of course you would want to weave in your accomplishments into the narrative, but you have to be subtle about it. 

The opposite is true as well. You may feel like your application has some holes in it – a lower than you’d like GPA, or fewer AP and Honors courses than the rest of your peers. Or maybe you have a chronic illness or lost someone close to you recently. It can be tempting to use the essay to provide an explanation for your bad grades, or focus on the illness or loss. Remember “bad” is a relative term. A high achiever may think a 3.85 GPA needs an explanation. Gaps in GPA or rigor can be explained in “is there anything else you would like to share” sections. Only choose to talk about an illness or a loss if it was very recent, impacted you deeply, and transformed your way of thinking and helped you grow as a person. Remember, the goal of the essay is to give the admissions officer a close, deep, emotional and descriptive picture of who are as a person, what excites you, and how you have grown through your experiences.

The essay has to flow from paragraph to paragraph. The starting sentence of a paragraph has to  somehow, by a word or a tone, connect to the ending sentence of the previous paragraph. If you have completely disconnected paragraphs, the reader will have trouble staying interested. You cannot have one paragraph talking about your robotics team and the next paragraph talking about your tutoring, without somehow connecting the two. Like ending the robotics paragraph with a tutoring reference (tutoring a teammate perhaps?) and then smoothly flowing into the next tutoring paragraph.

What to avoid

This is actually quite a long list:

1. Avoid cliches and quotes. You have a limited word count, don’t waste any of them on things someone else said. 

2. Avoid any negative references to others – don’t say things like “he was a bully”, “my coworkers did not share information”, “my parents nagged me”. It’s always better to frame these from your point of view “I felt hurt by what he said to me”.

3. Always use active voice, not passive voice.

4. Avoid using old fashioned words like “ergo”, or “thus” or “forsooth” or “erstwhile”.

5. Do not use run on sentences. Sentence types should vary.

6. Do a “Find” to check if you have overused any particular word. It can be easy to end up using “created” or “amazing” or “passion” multiple times. Find synonyms for descriptive words that you have repeated more than 3-4 times in a 650 word essay.

7. Check your sentence construction – is it conveying what you want to say? Sometimes when we have two-part sentences, the meaning gets lost

8. Show, don’t tell. Always be descriptive and paint a picture of the scene. Instead of saying “I picked up the mail” you can say “I walked down the brick steps in front of my house to check if the mailbox held surprises or disappointments for me today”. 

9. Avoid listing out accomplishments. They should blend in with the narrative. Instead of saying you won a lot of science bowl awards, you can describe a typical tournament setting and then, at the end, “casually” add that “there were many such wins”. Remember your honors and awards are already listed elsewhere.

10. Don’t make excuses for yourself. It’s easy to say lower grades were because of a death in the family or anxiety issues or strict teachers. A Senior in high school has to show that he takes responsibility for his shortcomings. No excuses. As I mentioned earlier, do not even mention shortcomings in the essay. Focus on your accomplishments, highlight that you are a genuine, kind, honest, talented student. Remember the grades are already in the application. You want the admissions officer to read the essay and think “this is what defines the student, not the grades. I like what I am reading”.

11. Avoid using technical terms. The admissions officer may not know what a “spectrograph” or what “anencephaly” is. If you have to mention it, provide a very brief explanation. Remember you have a limited word count, do not waste it on describing the work that a lab did or technical details of your contributions. A high level easily understandable description is enough.

12. Avoid making overtly religious, political, or social arguments/comments or talking about current world conflicts. You do not know the admissions officers beliefs and you do not want to take the risk of offending them. Of course, if maybe religion is a core part of your life and defines you, and not talking about it would not be true to yourself, then go ahead. 

Overall Tips

Be genuine. This is the single most important aspect of writing your essay. If you make up facts or incidents to make yourself look better, admission officers are experienced, they will spot it. Make the essay personal, emotional, and engaging – show the admission officer who you are, what you are capable of, and what you will bring to their campus.

Iterate. I cannot emphasize this enough. Please review your essay at least 4-5 times. And do this well before the submission date. So you have to marinate it, maybe think of a better way of writing something, or maybe remember something that was crucial to mention that got left out. Scrutinize each and every sentence to see if it can be improved – remember the word count is limited and you have so much to convey.

Share it with a limited number of people who know you very well. Remember each and every person will have a different point of view and often the opinions will diverge. If you have a counselor, they will be the primary reviewer. I think a parent who knows you well should definitely review the essay. Maybe a trusted friend can give you honest feedback on it.

Try to be within 10-20 words of the word count. If you write a 550 word essay when the limit is 650 words, the hundred words are a missed opportunity to convey another facet of yourself.

How Goal Admit can help

I’ve taken a writing course at Stanford. I was closely involved with the essays both my sons’ wrote. I’ve written an as-yet-unpublished book of short stories. Writing is one of my passions. I have researched college application essays very well, as evidenced by this blog. I will take the time to get to know the student, brainstorm with him, iterate as many times as needed on reviews, and help create a unique, genuine essay to impress the admission officers. Because our goal is to get you admitted to the dream college of your choice.