3 Tips to Make Your Essay About Technology More Understandable
by Kathleen M.
You had a wonderful summer internship or extracurricular where you learned a lot about tech or STEM, and you would like to showcase that as part of your college application essay. Perfect! Now take a minute to remember that the audience for your personal essay and the audience who might understand what you did related to CS or programming or AI may not crossover.
Here are 3 tips to make any application essay related to technology more understandable.
Tip 1: Highlight a specific skill instead of mentioning everything you had done in a project or activity.
So instead of:
While interning with a project manager, I assisted with using both project management methodologies – Agile / Waterfall, depending on the project requirements. I created realistic timelines with clear milestones and deadlines, ensuring projects stay on track. I also established clear communication channels to keep stakeholders(others) informed about project progress and any changes in priorities.
Break it down to focus on the key skill that you want to highlight with a value:
While interning with a project manager, I assisted with using both project management methodologies – either Agile or Waterfall depending on the project requirements. This helped me develop more flexibility in thinking and judgment on the strengths of both methods. (It would probably also be helpful to specify what the kinds of project requirements were and how you decided.)
Tip 2: Translate specific terms
As one example:
For a summer project, I worked with an electrical engineer and learned that the switchboard overcurrent protective device is designed such that it coordinates with both upstream and downstream devices.
You could translate for your non-engineer readers:
For a summer project, I worked with an electrical engineer and learned that the protective device that prevents a chain reaction power outage is used in multiple ways within rooms, in homes, and on streets.
Tip 3: Mention the clear applications of what you worked on
This description can sound a little vague and hard to understand:
During my IT internship, I worked on efforts in monitoring, detecting, and responding to security threats and incidents.
You could enliven this language and really inform readers:
During my IT internship, I worked with the “spam” team to try to help staff learn not to click on phishing emails. We designed particular emails to test the staff and used the information to improve practices.
Summer internships and projects about tech can be valuable to discuss in a college essay, and will be appealing to college admissions staff – if they can understand what you are talking about!
