How To Write A Winning College Application Essay

How To Write A Winning College Application Essay Over the years, students who tell me they absolutely love to write have said they struggle with the application essay. So if you’ve been biting your nails or tearing your hair out even a little, you’re not alone. Focus on ways you have internalized and personalized academic research and demonstrate how this will enhance the university’s academic community. Writing about hiking the Appalachian Trail or obsessively reading “To Kill A Mocking Bird” is noble but not memorable. But please, please, please do not not procrastinate on your admissions essay. Everything I’ve covered in this article matters only if you give yourself enough time. If you start the day before the application is due, all I can say is good luck. It’s impossible to write an article covering every possible essay prompt you could encounter in the college application process. Even if you’re only applying to a couple schools that you know you can get into, it will still serve you well to write a compelling admissions essay. A great college essay is one in which the student’s voice and though process comes through clearly. It should be consistent with the rest of the application and showcase an aspect of the student not highlighted in the rest of the application. A great college essay is an essay that is interesting, pithy and well written. You want both to keep the reader’s attention and to make the reader want you to be a member of the next freshman class at the reader’s college. This is your chance to make your application stand out and your one opportunity to have a real voice appear in the file. The same applies to wanting to be in a city or town or being part of a small, medium, or large student body. While you may prefer certain settings or sizes, the fact is, you can easily find those qualities anywhere. A more concrete reason for this prompt is that colleges want to have a high yield, the ratio of accepted students who end up attending. Yield factors into rankings in sources like U.S. Standing out from everyone else could put you in the running for additional scholarships and will also simply make a good impression, which never hurts. Ah, college application essays â€" the necessary evil of college-bound high school seniors everywhere. If you’ve just finished your junior year of high school, then these may very well be in your near future. News and World Report and contribute to the overall reputation of the school. This essay is one way for them to gauge how likely you are to attend and help them attain a high yield. If you seem genuinely passionate about the college, then they can assume you’re more likely to matriculate if offered a spot in the freshman class. College essays can seem overwhelming, but you are sharing who you are as an individual. Tell the reader something about yourself that might not be included in the rest of the application. College application essays are a special literary genre, but they are of course personal. They add further dimensions to an individual’s record and great ones need to be creative, thoughtful, and well written. Most importantly however, a great essay will reveal an aspect of a self that a student has chosen to highlight and a voice that is unique to that self. Simply recanting facts will not distinguish you from other candidates with equal class rank, grades and test scores. Making your scholarly endeavors personal will pique curiosity and demonstrate your potential to contribute to an academic community. admissions counselor only has a few min to read your essay and his or her attention is the key here. most college essay are very much the same so if you can make your essay stand out, you must delivery a great college essay that the counselor will remember and share with other counselors. a great college essay must use personal experiences to delivery a big message focused on passion of learning, motivation for excellences, and personal value in contributing to community as a whole. It is also well written and grammatically correct. Many students fall into the trap of offering superficial or generic reasons for wanting to attend. An admissions committee doesn’t want to hear that you’re attracted to the warm weather â€" you can just as easily find that at another college in the South. Emory even calls out the commonality of that response in its prompt. Free writing, ideally done with pen and paper instead of on the computer, is an exercise in opening the creative mind and letting ideas flow. Knowing this, you will be more relaxed and inspired as you write. DO NOT PROCRASTINATE. Look, we all procrastinate.