How To Write A College Essay

How To Write A College Essay Be sure you are using the correct form of words too (they’re, their, there, your, you’re, etc.). Few things will throw off an application evaluator more than misspellings and typos in the college essay â€" except when you mention the wrong college! Don’t tell us how much you want to attend XYZ University when you are submitting the essay to The College of ABC. While it is important to talk yourself up as the awesome student you truly are, you still have to remember that the application essay is not a résumé. You can certainly submit a résumé with your application, but your essay is not the place to do it. Map out all essay prompts for UC applications and all regular decisions schools. Decide on schools to apply to for early admissions. We have found that the #1 reason for essay procrastination is that students don’t feel confident in getting started â€" i.e. they aren’t sure what to write about and how to structure it. Here are 5 essential traits of a compelling college essay. We want you to expand upon a few characteristics that make you great, not just give us a list with the thousand and one things that contribute to your greatness. This way, we are able to fully grasp why these particular characteristics, out of the many you could have selected, are so important to you and who you are as an individual. Harry Bauld has been a writer, teacher, and speaker for thirty years. He has worked in admissions and college counseling at high schools and universities, including Brown and Columbia, and is currently an English teacher at Horace Mann School in New York. A thoughtfully crafted essay and a clean, clear application can make a tremendous difference in the college admissions process. This essay is an example of how to tell the story of moving to America in a unique way. This is especially true if you are an experiential, hands-on learner who values testing ideas. Be prepared to provide evidence of this learning style in your supplemental essays. In particular, the Common App personal statement essay is something that the UC schools don’t see, so try to reuse it for one of these essays. The main challenge here will be to reduce the word count . Besides, that other essay would go on forever, and, as I mentioned, we read thousands of these things each year. The overall workload here is really dependent on your college list, so if your list isn’t as ambitious, some of the timelines above might not apply to you. The main point here is that getting a head start and planning your essay workload is essential to limiting how stressful the college application process needs to be. This student focused on a single question â€" where is home? â€" and showed the reader a lot about who he is as a person. The essay is a joy to read, sharing a detailed glimpse of the student’s personality without feeling like it’s trying to list positive personal qualities. Remember, in the grand scheme of the college admissions process, the application essay is a unique opportunity â€" and an opportunity to be unique. Don’t rely on spell check alone to catch all of your mistakes, either. Make sure to get these done early so that you give yourself a lot of time to work on the remaining regular decision supplemental essays. If you chose your essay prompts correctly, hopefully you can use an essay or two from here for some of your remaining school essays. UC application deadlines are at the end of November, so they should be your next priority if you haven’t worked on them already. There are eight prompts to choose from, and you pick four. It doesn’t matter too much which prompts you choose, so try to choose prompts that you can reuse other essays to answer. Your essay doesn’t need to have all 5, but college admissions officers look for at least one of these traits or possibly two. Once a student picks one or two of these to focus on in their essay, they are on the writing path to a stellar essay that describes exactly who they are and why they would be an asset to a college. Most colleges and universities look for five traits in a student essay. We've cooked up a bunch for you, based on, uh, who you are slash what you care about. If you're applying to an Ivy League school, or in fact, any school at all that is selective, then you need to pick up this book. Not only is Bauld knowledgeableâ€"I learnt far more than I thought conceivable from a volume this thinâ€", but he is also a tremendous writer. He illustrates the nature of admissions offices by simple dialogue, and exposes the mindset with which admissions officers often make life-changing decisions.