The College Application Essay: Part I

The halls of every high school are tense right now. After all, it’s March: the season of waiting for envelopes or emails from colleges. Some students who applied early may be lucky enough to know whether they were accepted, and where. But a good number of others will be anxious until April, since many universities don’t send out their final acceptances until then.

I feel for all the young people who will spend the next month or two consumed by a process that is entirely out of their hands. If that describes you, please take this to heart: You’ve done everything you can. Try to enjoy these last few months of high school. But I know the futility of such advice. I know many students will be agonizing until May 1, confirmation day at many schools around the country, when they will announce to the world the place they’ll call “Home” for the next four (or more) years.

So seniors and parents of seniors, hang in there just a few more weeks. Juniors, it’s your turn. As you’re gearing up to write those all-important application essays, the ones that will demonstrate to college admissions committees that you’re a good fit, I can offer a few tips.

Start early, but not too early. If you’re a high school junior, and if your parents are anything like most at my kids’ high-powered high school, you’re probably being pressured to start your essays yesterdayor, barring that, over spring break. 

I have a reputation for being a careful planner, but this seems a bit early even to me. I think it’s better to spend second semester of junior year delving into the courses that might help you decide what you’d like to study in college. And it’s certainly better to spend spring break frolicking with friends at the beach, hiking, or playing frisbee with your dog. (If you MUST break out the AP or SAT test prep guides at some point, so be it. But please, no more than 2 hours a day, okay? Apply some sunscreen and go play.)

Summer—that’s your starting point for application essays. You won’t have the pressure of papers, pop quizzes, or AP tests distracting you from the task. You’ll have had time to let the last year of learning settle, and you’ll be able to step back and take stock. Maybe you’ll even be a little more certain about why you want to study a particular subject, or at a particular school.

Don’t be freaked out by the questions. A lot of college application essay questions are purposely general. Some students see that level of generality and freak out because they think they have to chronicle everything they’ve ever done that will make them a good fit for college. When they try, their essays become a choppy, centerless mess—which is what no admissions officer wants. 

In fact, college admissions committees don’t want you to tell them everything. Your résumé is already doing that for you. What they really want is to learn who you are and how you think. They want to hear your voice and get a sense of the person and student their campus would get if they sent you an acceptance. They want to know what qualities you’d bring to their community. And, believe it or not, when they ask what you want to study, they don’t expect you to know now that you want to get your PhD in aerospace engineering so you can work with NASA to make Mars habitable for humans. If you know you want to do that, great—but most people your age don’t. 

What are you curious about? What problems engage you? What would you like to learn so you can help address those problems? What lessons have you learned that will help you succeed in an undergraduate program? For most college admissions teams, showing the sort of student you will be is more important than showing you’ve got your entire career planned out.

Trust the power of stories.Sometimes the best way to answer an essay question is with a story. Questions that begin “Tell about a time when….”? Yeah, those are pretty obviously asking for stories. To answer those questions well, you need to ask yourself “What do admissions officers hope to learn from this story?” Well, they want to learn the sort of qualities you possess, so they can tell what you’ll bring to their school. Grit, intellectual curiosity, problem solving—these are just a few of the traits that might make an admissions committee think, “Yes, we want this student.” 

If you’re having trouble thinking of stories from your life, you might jog your memory by making a list of the qualities an admissions committee is likely to appreciate in applicants; then consider each quality in turn, and ask, “Is there a story in my life that shows I have this quality?” By the time you’ve made it through the list, you’ll probably have one or more stories you could share in a personal statement.

Pay close attention to deadlines. I recommend setting up a Google Sheet for yourself that lists the colleges you are applying to and all their important deadlines: early application deadline, regular deadline, financial aid deadline, honors program deadlines, FAFSA deadline. Also include the type of application each school accepts (common app, universal app, universal app, school-specific apps, etc.) and a list of any additional essay questions each school wants you to answer. As you’re scouring websites for that information, be thorough, especially if you want to be considered for scholarships. 

Some schools streamline their scholarship application process so your application to college makes you eligible for scholarship consideration. But simply applying may not make you eligible for ALL the scholarship opportunities a school offers. I knew a smart young student once who, because his grades were middling, decided not to apply for the honors college in his chosen major. He arrived at orientation to find that the only people who had received merit scholarships from the department were those who had applied to the honors college; it turned out that applying to it was the prerequisite for being considered—a fact he would have known if he had spent more time scouring the department website. The moral of the story: Make sure you know what you have to do to be considered for scholarships from your university AND from your intended major, just in case those requirements are different.

That’s probably enough to get you started.