Applying To College

College Essay Writing and Interview Skills

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Who Should Read Your College Application Essay?

When I was speaking last week at the Mark Twain Library in Redding along with Matthew Dempsey from Fairfield University, we both addressed the question of who should read a student’s college application essay before it’s submitted.

Here are our suggestions:

Ask more than one teacher, preferably an English teacher, to read your essay. Why more than one? Because different people see different things. One teacher might flag your grammar and sentence structure while another might focus more on your story telling and organization.

Try to find someone who knows what’s expected by a college application essay. College application essays are different beasts. Unlike the usual high school essay, this essay has to reflect you —  your interests, your insight, and what makes you unique.

Parents can be good readers, too. Parents may not be your most objective audience (which is why teachers are important), but they know you, and can tell if there’s enough “you” in your essay.

Hire a college essay coach when you need one.

  • College coaches know what colleges expect.
  • College coaches can see the weak points in an essay and provide detailed suggestions on how to strengthen them. They have many tools and teaching techniques at their fingertips.
  • College coaches can relieve family tension. They’ll handle time management and deadlines, so parents don’t have to worry (or squabble with their teens).

Find people you trust to read your college application essay. It’s an important part of the writing process.


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Writing College Application Essays: Overcoming Procrastintation

So it’s almost the end of October and your college applications are due soon. You’ve written some of your short essays, but haven’t started the long one. You know it’s got to be done — it’s niggling away in the back of your brain, slightly annoying, starting to become more and more persistent, but you keep pushing it back, thinking you’ll start it tomorrow, or the day after, or sometime after that. So when are you going to start writing your college application essay?

Let me ask that question another way. Why haven’t you started? Here are some common reasons I hear:

1. Too busy
2. No topic
3, Too nervous
4. Writer’s block

Let’s tackle these problems one by one:

Too Busy? Divide your essay writing into manageable pieces. Do it in small bites. Take a look at your schedule and see where you can give yourself a half hour at a time. Then divide up what you need to do. The first half hour choose a topic and jot down some thoughts.  The next make an outline. The next begin to flesh it out, and so on. You’ll have an essay before you know it.

No topic? Try these exercises:

  1. List 3 or 4 people who have influenced you. Then write down what you’ve learned from them and how that’s made you a better, more interesting or different person in your life.
  2. Ask your family to help you try and remember a time when you struggled with something that you learned from or helped you grow as a person, and then jot down some of your own feelings about that time.

After you’re done, take a look at what you’ve written. You’ll probably find a good college application essay waiting for you in one of your answers.

Too Nervous? Nerves are common, but too many nerves can stop you in your tracks. The trick is to start writing. Even if you don’t have a topic, just write. Don’t know where to start? That leads me to the last problem:

Writer’s Block: Writer’s block can be caused by lots of things, including nerves, but if you’ve got it you’ve got to find a way to get rid of it. I like free-writing. Go to a quiet place and write for five minutes.  Don’t put any pressure on yourself about what to write, just do it. It can be about anything, or nothing. You can write about the pieces of lint on your carpet or how your little brother is annoying or anything that comes to mind. The trick is don’t stop. If you’re writing and draw a blank, write the last sentence over again until something new comes to mind. Have fun and try to enjoy it. After you’re done, free-write again, this time about the topic you’ve chosen for your college application essay. But don’t write your essay. Write about one aspect of your topic, one detail, or one emotion. When you’re done, look it over. If it’s awful, toss it in the trash. It’s okay to do that. Not everything we write is for keeps. But keep on with this process and you can be well on your way to overcoming your writer’s block and moving ahead.

Figure out why you’re procrastinating and you can get on with the business of writing your college application essay. I hope these tips help speed you on your way!


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Writing College Application Essays: 5 Editing Tips

You’ve chosen the topic for your college application essay and written a draft or two. It’s a bit longer than you’d like and feels like it rambles in places. Now what? Edit.

Editing your college application essay will help make your thoughts flow more easily and your ideas stand out. It will certainly make it a more enjoyable reading experience for the college admissions reader.

Here are 5 tips for good editing:

1. Be objective. Take a step back and pretend you’re the college admissions reader. You’re looking for how well the student (you) writes, organizes your thoughts, and presents a picture of what makes you unique.

2. Don’t fall in love with your prose. You may have written the best sentence of your life in your college application essay, but if it doesn’t fit it has to go. Just to be clear: If it’s not helping you make your point, let it go. Cutting a great sentence can be painful, but take heart in knowing that you’re not alone. All writers have had to press that delete key, and hesitated a long time before doing it. It’s tough, but it’s necessary. Just remember, it’s the strength of what’s left that counts, and how your essay finally comes together as a whole.

3. Read your essay out loud. Reading your essay out loud is a great way to see where you need editing. You should be able to read your college application essay easily, without stumbling or stopping. If you stumble it’s possible your sentence structure is too formal. Or perhaps you’ve gone overboard with a string of adjectives, or used words that sound like they came from a thesaurus instead of directly from you. Take note of the rough spots, work on those areas, and then read it out loud again. This is an editing tip that works wonders.  (For more tips on how to write in your own voice, read my previous blog post, “Finding Your Authentic Voice.”)

4. Editing can be about adding as well as subtracting. Often we think of editing as removing something that’s not wanted. But when you re-read your essay you might find that an idea or transition doesn’t work not because there’s too much prose, but because there’s too little. If that’s the case then you need to add a sentence or two. If you’re not certain, ask someone who hasn’t read your essay to read it and make sure they understand the points you’re making. If they’re not as clear as you’d like them to be, you may be missing something.

5. Sleep on it. Put at least one night’s sleep between you and your college application essay. Then go back and read it again. It will do wonders for your objectivity and your editing.


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“Can I Write About Abortion?” and Other Controversial Application Essay Subjects

A few days ago a student I was working with from Stamford asked me if she could write about abortion.  Half an hour later she was back on the phone asking if she could write about drugs.

Should you write about controversial subjects in your college application essay? I don’t recommend it. You don’t know who’s reading your essay. He or she might have a real problem with the subject matter or the side of the topic you decide to take. You just don’t know. Why take the risk when the process is already so competitive?

If you still want to go ahead, you have to cover your subject matter maturely, from both sides. That’s not to say you can’t have your own ideas. You can and you should. But there’s no room for petulance.

Why, by the way, are you writing about this subject? Are you passionate about it? Do you have a personal experience dealing with it? Does it somehow reflect (or affect) your sense of self in the world,  your sense of right and wrong? I asked the young woman who called me, and she gave me an interesting answer. She said that lately some of her struggles with her parents had been over their differing ideas of right and wrong. She extrapolated from that, and ended up at abortion and drugs.

What had happened was the student started with a personal experience, and then, feeling she had to have a “big topic,” chose one that she actually had very little connection to.  The connection she had was to her own experience, her own sense of right and wrong. I asked her to think about that and perhaps develop it into what could be a compelling essay — a true personal statement.

Every college essay has to reflect the writer — who you are, your interests, your goals and personality.  If you’re going to write about a controversial subject you’re taking a risk. But ultimately the subject has to boil down to you.