Conquer The College Essay

Conquer The College Essay There's no formula, no trick, no strategy, says Harry Bauld, a former Ivy League admissions officer. But with acceptance rates at all-time lows, just being yourself in an essay means understanding your readers and the unique form in which you are writing. It’s important to get a good chunk of regular decision essays done in November, otherwise December is going to be a mess. Your goal in a college application is to stand out. Use your uniqueness to your advantage, not as a hindrance. Writing your college essay can be a daunting task. These 650 words or less â€" your personal statement to colleges â€" will be one of the most important pieces of writing you’ve done in your life up until this point. Your personal statement essay is the face of your application and one of the only ways to show your personality. Make sure to get feedback from not too many and not too few people. Schools like Stanford require answers to 6 short answer questions , an extracurricular essay , and 3 short essay questions . Although they are all quite short, that’s 10 questions to answer in a thoughtful, efficient manner. These essays are usually for some of your top choice schools, so make sure to spend a lot of time polishing these essays and getting feedback, similar to your Common App personal statement process. Many of these essays will also be reused for other prompts later on. Students applying to a number of top 20 reach schools for regular decision will have the majority of their essay work ahead of them and not a lot of time to ensure they’re writing their best possible essays. Getting your early application essay work done this early helps you to space out all the regular decision application work later on. This is a great tool for demonstrating interest and learning details about your intended programs that you can’t find on the website. In addition, conversations with faculty at your early schools can give great tidbits that you can use for a “Why Us? This is a really important decision for your application. Remember, your disability is part of who you are but not all of who you are. Do not fall into the trap of describing your disability in great detail. Do not write a textbook explanation of your disability. Disclosing your disability may be important, but explaining every aspect of it and how it affects your life might be more than what the college admissions expect from you. You could describe a situation from your unique point of view , mention it in passing, or tell a specific story about a situation in which your disability affected the outcome. While the Common App only requires one essay, we do suggest that you draft at least two different essays with different topics so that you have some options later on. Unused essays can easily be used for other essay prompts down the line. Most students are in the middle of AP exams throughout this month, so they usually don’t have time to do much more than this. Every college applicant will have varying essay workloads, depending on their college list. Students with high aspirations for top colleges should be prepared to write A LOT of essays. Too much feedback will give you a lot of contradicting opinions while too little feedback could miss some glaring problems if that person isn’t experienced in college essay writing. A good number of people to get feedback from is about three or four different people. These should be people who know you well and have experience with personal writing.