| College
Admissions Essay Strategies |
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What
Do "They" Look For?
Admissions officers
review numerous applications, frequently reading as many as fifty per day.
Although it's impossible to
predict exactly what a particular college is looking for in its applicants,
colleges generally want to admit a mix of students who can handle the academic
workload and make a positive contribution to the college experience--for
themselves and for their classmates.
To get a favorable reaction from admissions
officers, your application should demonstrate:
- Serious intent to pursue a college-level
education
- Genuine desire to attend the particular college
- Correspondence between your abilities and
interests and what the school needs and has to offer
- Ability to think clearly, logically, and
creatively
- Ability to write engaging, thoughtful essays
that keep your reader's attention and differentiate you from the other
applicants
What Admissions
Officers Look For
You - The person behind the GPA, the
test scores, the extracurricular activities, and even the mailing address.
Surprise - An unexpected angle on your
topic, even if the experience you're writing about seems ordinary.
Genuineness - Writing as yourself, without
pretension and without taking yourself too seriously; relying on your own
vocabulary, rather than the thesaurus or the words your parents think you
should use. Simply stated, lying can provide grounds for automatic rejection.
No matter how confident you are that you won't get caught, never fudge
the facts in an essay or on any other part of your application.
Thoughtfulness - Consideration of your
experiences and their meanings, both to yourself and to others, and showing
through your reflection that nothing is lost on you.
How To Help Them Find It
Think About Who Your Audience Is - Five or six recent graduates of
the college you're applying to and an experienced director of admissions,
all of whom have spent the last month reading thousands of applications.
This is an overworked audience on whom your essay needs to make a vivid and
memorable impression.
Think About Your Purpose - Not ''selling yourself '' or ''getting
in,'' but simply being yourself--which usually means writing about yourself
in human, rather than superhuman, terms. For example, if your transcript
reveals that you are a stellar student of French, you might write about the
time a Parisian pointedly responded in English to your request in French
for directions to the Louvre.
Focus - Instead of generalizing about your experience (e.g. "I
enjoy sports"), be as specific as you can be. Write about the thrill of
catching a fly ball deep to centerfield just before it became a home run, or
of a Little League career spent waiting for someone, anyone, to hit the ball
to your position so that you could stop studying the grass and watching the
butterflies.
Use Precise And Economical Language - Imagine that each word you write
costs you a dollar, and that you don't have unlimited funds. Instead of writing
''On a yearly basis, we would spend five hours driving to the lake, where I
never gave up the hope of meeting the boy that would be my Prince Charming,''
write ''Every August, we trekked to Lake Apponaug, where I always hoped to
meet my Prince Charming.''
Give Your Essay Momentum - Make the parts work together and move toward
a thoughtful conclusion. In an essay about the summer you spent working in
a marine research laboratory, a paragraph on the unreliable bus that took you
there each day should be eliminated.
Use Correct Grammar, Spelling, and Punctuation - Don't distract your
reader from what you're stating by stating it incorrectly. Misspellings, typos,
and grammatical errors--such as subjects that don't agree with verbs--make
the reader's task more difficult and suggest that you don't care much about
the impression you make. Although nobody's perfect, strive for perfection on
your application. Unfortunately, your reader may interpret your mistakes, no
matter how innocent, to be signs of laziness, indifference, or even dishonesty.
 EssayEdge.com Admissions Essay Help - Put Harvard-Educated Editors to Work for You! View 300 free sample admissions essays!
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