Writing a Standout Essay in Order to…Stand Out! College Essays in 3 Steps
August 25, 2009 by Keith Berman
Writing a standout essay in order to…stand out!
As a Certified Educational Planner, I have often heard admissions officers cheekily joke about the similarities among applicants from high-density areas such as Westchester and Long Island, using scary phrases like “mass edit” and “coin flip.” Some students, unfortunately, simply hear “be different,” and little else, resulting in essays painted in watercolors, video-taped personal statements, and even some composed completely of stickers (sadly, none of these examples are hypothetical). The movie Legally Blonde only increased these efforts; instead of being perceived as a comic figure, the affably ditsy pre-law played by Reese Witherspoon, whose application tools include a video of her poolside and a pink, scented résumé, is seen as a paragon of the creative applicant.
According to Shannon Miller, Assistant Director of Undergraduate Admissions at Johns Hopkins University, she has certainly received her fair-share of very unique submissions: “A few years back, we received a board game created about Johns Hopkins University – it was called “Hopkinsopoly” and modeled after the real Monopoly game. There was definitely a lot of time and detail put into it… I also received a box in the mail with a label on it that said these are a few of my favorite things. The student put all of her favorite things…including her running sneaker…into the box to show what she would do with a free day [a JHU essay topic].”
Unfortunately, these students don’t believe the patently obvious truth that they are unique, instead choosing fiction and alternate media over clarity and self-reflection. Beyond strongly advising against the tactic of tape recording your essay and putting it inside a pull-string doll (yes, it has been done before), this article will give you the ABC’s of how to communicate who you are in a college admissions essay; helping you choose the topic, execute it successfully, and get it ready for submission.
How to find your topic right now
There are a hundred ways that colleges ask you the same college essay topic: “discuss, in detail, an important moment in your life, and reflect on how it changed you.” This is a difficult topic for anyone to write on. For a high school senior who is taking eight classes and probably active for many hours after school, it is even more difficult to step back and reflect.
If nothing readily pops into your mind (for some people, this might include immigrating, change in family structure, moving), I have one strong piece of advice: ask your parents. I know, yuck, but, while you were running the race through high school, they were your biggest fans, watching every stride from the sidelines. They can probably tell you what school projects meant the most, when you started to care about the environment, why you started to take an interest in independent films – essentially, how you developed into the thinker you are. The event they choose may even sound trivial, but do not dismiss it immediately. A common attitude among college applicants is that their parents do not understand them or what they are going through, but give it a try. I know many students who actually end up taking their parents advice, as outrageous as that may seem.
Your parents did not grow up where you grew up, did not go to the same school, and did not experience life as you did. However, they have the ability to look at the wallpaper around you that you might take for granted, and notice what is interesting, different, and important; especially in the context of being professionals, high school graduates, teachers, and friends. If you are at a loss for a topic, put your parents knowledge of you to the test, and see where it leads. Some parent-inspired sample topics that have worked effectively for my students are:
- the local lawn-mowing competitions, in the Boston suburbs;
- that election in New York or New Jersey that briefly made national news because of vote-counting scandals and poll intimidation;
- the hazard of the small-town, southern practice of drive-through liquor stores that you always rally against;
- that art project you brought home from school to frame and hang on your wall that made you feel like a real artist for the first time.
For you, it might be a common source of discussion, but your parents may very well recognize the need for you to share your experience with a larger audience.
What a college essay doesn’t usually look like, but should!
Now you have an idea, and that is a large part of the battle. So, how do you start writing? My advice is very direct: start talking about the event that changed you, the anecdote. Forget an introduction, forget a conclusion, just start telling your story (only one!). I have yet to find a student who, as a matter of course, writes a personal statement using adjectives and action verbs. Your goal is to let the reader, who has no idea who you are or where and how you live, walk in your shoes for a few minutes. That is a difficult goal, and impossible without using descriptive language. When relating events, many students like to close their eyes and really visualize everything they possibly can about their subject matter. I find this technique of mental imaging to be highly effective. It’s the difference between “I took the SAT at the local high school,” and “the puke-yellow, redolent new paint on the wall only increased the sense of institutionalization I felt in the 10 X 10 grid of students surrounded by proctors on each wall.” The first statement gives no entrée for the reader, while the latter makes the reader grimace while empathizing over a shared experience.
Many essays that have an effective anecdote are so powerful that they do not need any introduction, and the conclusion is so obvious from the scope of the story that at most it should be just a few sentences. If, at the end of the anecdote, you finished nervously presenting your first research paper to an audience, the conclusion statement “I learned a lot about presentation skills” is probably overkill.
What you want to avoid is openly intellectualizing without personal evidence. Your authority as a writer derives from describing things you have felt, seen, touch, tasted, and heard. I cringe at essays that start with impossible-to-defend-in-500-word truisms that sound like they come right from popular songs: “I believe the children are our future,” “what the world needs now is love,” “imagine no possessions,” “where have all the flowers gone.” Usually, they go on to talk about a few large human conflicts (World War II is a frequent example), and end up saying very little about themselves while giving short shrift to the powerful examples they cite in passing. The place for conclusions like these, if at all, is after an anecdote whose theme is so obvious, it almost goes without saying. Start your essay by describing that song and that stage from your Battle of the Bands competition, or the exact words of that first conversation you had in Spanish after five years of studying it, instead of saying “international communication is an important thing.”
Sending it out in three steps
1. Spellchek
You know your essay is complete after a few, definite steps. The first is to spell-check. Misspellings reflect that you have not even looked over your own essay, and that is not the statement you want to send; especially after writing another essay on top of all the homework you have to do. Admissions officers are very open about the fact that misspellings are an instant turn off, saying, among other things, that it reflects a lack of effort, a lack of interest, and a lack of academic preparation.
2. If you can say it, you can send it
The second is to read your essay out loud. Besides picking up obvious places where “of” is spelled “O-F-F” and where you forgot to capitalize “I” (you are not E.E. Cummings!), reading out loud will help you answer the ultimate question: “Does this essay tell someone who I am?” If you feel uncomfortable sharing your personal statement with yourself out loud, certainly a stranger reading it will feel even more uncomfortable. What is nice about the college essay is you get to talk about yourself, on your own terms, and your words are taken at face value; there are otherwise very few opportunities to do this in competitive admissions. The ultimate criterion is this: “Would you read this essay to someone else, and stand behind every word?” If not, then don’t submit it.
3. Be thoughtful about your second reader
The final tip is to read your essay to an adult who is not your parent. I once had a senior Ivy League admissions officer say to me, “Keith, we know students are going to get help with the essay, it is so important. What I never understood is why they don’t go to an expert for advice!” Use her candor to your benefit, and read your essay to someone you know can write, someone you are sure has an understanding of the standard. Parents are not usually a good choice, as they have too much of an insider perspective on the event you are describing to be impartial – they may cry at the end of your essay about how you got your first poem published, but they may be crying because they remember something you did not write about!
To summarize…
Hopefully, you will now have three strong ideas as to how to get from a blank piece of paper to a strong representation of yourself that you can be proud of. The essential process is:
- Find a topic that really can paint a picture of the “wallpaper” that is around you, which allows someone to walk in your shoes – the best place to start is your parents.
- Jump into writing the anecdote, instead of writing a protracted, empty intellectual introduction. Descriptive adjectives and action verbs are your friends.
- Yes, spellcheck and edit, but more importantly, read your essay out loud to yourself, and then to someone else, until you can say, “Yes, this is me, in 500 words.” Try to find an expert to read the essay to, and listen to his or her comments.
You are unique, and you have something to say. From the moment you wake up, the choices you make are completely your own, and you will stand out as being different if you are just clear. This is difficult enough to do in a 500-word essay, being focused and clear. If you are the type of person who wants to be understood, and welcomed into a community for whom you are, following the above steps will help you achieve that goal.
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About the Author: Keith Berman is a Certified Education Planner (CEP) and is the Founder and President of Options for College, a full service college counseling and consulting company in New York City. He has been quoted numerous times in U.S. News & World Report and Boston Magazine among other publications on issues related to school selection.
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