College Essay Examples

College Essay Examples After reading links on the things that interest you, you’ll understand it almost as well as someone at the school! Statistical websites like College Factual are tremendously helpful here as well, as are blogs from current and former students, Vlogs, Instagram feeds â€" anything and everything is fair game. Cite a wide range of sources in your essay to show the depth of your research. However, if you’re applying to an Ivy League school or a smaller liberal arts college, then they’re really looking at the whole package and the essay can be very important. At some of these schools, there are very few students who don’t have near-perfect test scores and GPAs, so how do you stand out? When I say they are “not very good”, I mean they are either boring, impenetrable, melodramatic, or all of the above. Don’t turn in your essay without someone else reading through it, Corner advises. Grammar or punctuation errors are the most unnecessary â€" and unfortunately common â€" mistakes that appear on The Common App. Every year, a student will address the essay to a specific school and not realize the application is sent to every school the student applied to, she said. College admissions officers comb through hundreds of essays a year, so you have just a few minutes to catch their attention. Given volume, staff sizes, and compressed timelines between application deadlines and decision release, that seems at worst a blatant lie, and at best an incredibly inefficient process. Here are a few pieces of advice to consider as you write, revise, and submit your college essays. DEEP WEB RESEARCH. This should be the heart of your essay, as well as the meat and potatoes. 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. In our College Essay Clichés to Avoid post, we advised students against writing about moving to America from a foreign country. Reading the school’s website is not a bad start, as it will give you a basic overview of what’s on offer. Keep an eye peeled for course listings, recent news events, maps and descriptions of important campus buildings, student run organizations, and other key terms. Then take those terms and plug them right into Google, Youtube and Linkedin! Open with an anecdote (If it’s funny, even better.) that will hook them in the beginning and keep them reading until the end. Or go for their heart â€" trying to move an admission officer with emotion isn’t a bad idea, either. Some schools will tell you that two separate readers evaluate every essay in its entirety. They’re looking at your essay, recommendations and activities to understand the whole picture of you. It all depends on where you’re applying, your grades and your test scores. If you’re applying to a large state institution, and your numbers are strong relative to their average student body, then you’ll get in on the strength of your four years of hard work. The bottom line is that they may be getting 25,000 applications, and they simply don’t have time to sift through essays and recommendations. There are so many terrific free resources online â€" just google “brainstorming college essay” and you’ll be pleased with what comes up. Also, look at the Common Application essay promptsâ€" one of them will speak to you, but you need to really read them. Kids are quick to eliminate a prompt, but I always ask them to go back and rethink. All in all, we see a student who is a skilled writer with a warm heart â€" positive traits, to be sure. This essay is an example of how to tell the story of moving to America in a unique way. This student focused on a single question â€" where is home? But the same is true for college essays, as Orwell doubtlessly would have realized if he were reanimated and handed him a sheaf of Common Applications. The sad truth is that most college application essays are not very good. Ask smaller questions around the prompt to get at exactly what you want to write about. This essay doesn’t share many life-defining revelations; we learn, as a brief aside, that the author often cared for her younger siblings, but little beyond that. Yet despite its relative lack of major information, it reveals a lot about who the author is. We learn that the author knows how to turn a phrase, the author is a warm and caring person, the author has a sense of humor, and the author will bring us cookies if we admit her to our imaginary college.