Writing A College Essay

Writing A College Essay If that does not offer, then the application is passed on to another reader. Elizabeth stresses that good communicators and writers have a leg up and that can also lead to scholarship opportunities and other awards. However, realize that the greater the reward, the more work that’s likely involved. Anyone who completes an Outward Bound expeditioncould say that they were challenged, that they weren’t sure they could do it, but on looking back, they feel proud of what they’ve accomplished. The real questions to ask are, why was it challenging for you, personally? What about this makes you feel proud, and how will you carry this into the next part of your life? Whether you write about it in your essay, or just list it as one of your activities, sharing the influence it has had on you, personally, will be much more impactful. Talking about how being in marching band taught you the value of hard work isn’t your story; that could be anyone’s story. Talking about how helping people feel good isn’t original; everyone experiences that. It is always best however, to ask each school this very question and to understand exactly what they are looking for from the applicant in their answer. I always tell students that they should be writing and essay that is to be published in the New York Times. If you would not want to see the work you are submitting published there in such a public way, then it is probably not in an acceptable form to submit for your application. It also depends on the school as to how many people will read an application essay. I know of a school where the complete application is read and the passed to another counselor who must agree with the decision of the first counselor. The company is only a year old and just landed $1.5 million in seed funding from investors such asFounder.org and The Social + Capital Partnership. But in this short time, AdmitSee has already gathered 15,000 college essays in their system. Many are from people who got into well-ranked colleges, since they targeted these students first. However, by the time students have gone through multiple applications, their essay writing skills have become almost second nature. As the common application was adopted by the majority of colleges across the country, it be-came very easy and very quick to apply to multiple institutions. It’s just that admissions officers learn nothing new about you when you write something that anyone could claim. A lot of students feel anxious about this because they don’t feel like anything unique has happened to them. But everyone has a different perception of their experiences, and the more you can share that, the more you’ll stand out in that stack of applications. Nothing has more impact than just being yourself. This meant that admissions of-fices soon became deluged with hopeful seniors’ applications, and they realized that they would need to differentiate from among the thousands of requests for admissions. The essay elicits such information from students, and the more in demand a college is, the more likely they will require not just one but multiple essays before admission is granted. Sharing that you participated in an Outward Bound program will help colleges understand how you’re spending your time outside the classroom. But you also have the opportunity to articulate to colleges why this experience is worth mentioning. I would encourage students to think about how participating in Outward Bound impacted them, specifically. I worked with a student last year who had played in the marching band all of high school, which is something thousands of students can claim. Even if I happened to read another essay about being a drummer in the marching band, there’s no way I could confuse it with this one. These details belong only to this student, and they show us her leadership qualities rather than just telling us. With a January 1 application deadline racing toward us, now is a great time to be brainstorming, creating, polishing and revising those essays. In September we published a blog post that provided a basic framework for how to write a killer college essay â€" and offered tips on how to incorporate the Outward Bound experience into the application. This month, we’re giving you another nudge â€" and a slightly different perspective from yet another expert. Shyu says that this model has allowed AdmitSee to collect a lot of data very rapidly. These tend to be smaller liberal arts schools or small selective programs within a larger university. Other schools may only read an essay if there is some question/s about the other parts of the application or there is a scholarship component and the answer to the essay has influence over that decision.