Writing an Interesting College Essay for Jaded Readers
Image by Michelle Raponi from Pixabay
by Lillie W.
By now, you may very well be sick of hearing that your college application essays should make you “stand out,” and just as sick of staring at your laptop screen trying to figure out how in the world you’re going to do that. Here’s some great news: you’re more outstanding than you think. You may just be looking at the wrong parts of your life to alight on what makes you exceptional.
Chances are that because you’ve lately thought so much about getting into college, you’re hyper-focused on your scholastic and leadership coups. What you may not realize is that the essay reader in the admissions office of your dream school has seen hundreds, maybe thousands, of earnest Personal Statements promoting the applicant’s devotion to academic achievement and “lessons learned” – and they make his eyes glaze over. Are you a great student? Your transcript will testify. A born leader? The club you founded, well described on your extracurriculars list, speaks volumes. And that important life lesson you learned from losing the big game? All your thoughtful teammates learned it, too – which is why you should not write about it.
Understanding this premise is truly liberating, because now when you start scouring your universe for Personal Statement ideas, you’ll be viewing yourself and your life through the kind of wide-angle lens that includes so much more than school. And believe it or not, the admissions readers will prefer the more unusual, personal topic, as long as your story is genuine, heartfelt, and well-written. Imagination, passion and spunk nearly always gets more kudos than shiny shoes on a good soldier.
To be blunter: Resist the temptation to write about school or your scholarly feats, even if you think your grades are the best thing about you. Because as most of the adults you admire will tell you that in all honesty, they’re not. And that reader in the admissions office who dives into your essay – most likely one of two dozen or more he’ll read that day – knows you would not have applied to his marvelous, selective school unless you had the academic right stuff. The magic of the Personal Statement is that it can give the school a glimmer that you have the right stuff in ways they have not yet imagined. You can show them you’re a fascinating creature by writing about….what? Well, let’s just float a few truly silly examples, for the fun of it: your shopping trips in a big box store? How much you love to order pizza? Why you started hating a letter of the alphabet?
Oh, you caught that! As many of you already know, those three Personal Statement topics are now iconic writing samples, examples of essays that famously vaulted their authors into the nation’s most elite schools. Yet the topics were all pretty silly, at least on the surface. What made them winning essays was not the loftiness of their topics, but the original and revealing way the essayists approached them. In other words, their success boiled down to the “how,” not the “what.” If you’ve seen the memorable essay about a lifetime of shopping in a particular big discount chain, you were probably delighted to hear about the author’s Christmas hickory ham, which turned out to be a lot more likeable and tender than Andrew “Old Hickory” Jackson. If you read that essay about loathing the letter s, you know how deftly the author used a linguistic custom to highlight a cultural assumption, such as the ubiquitous s included in document questions about “parents.” And it’s worth noting that one Yale reader who gold-starred the pizza-ordering essay actually wrote the applicant a note about being a pizza-lover herself who “absolutely loved reading your application.”
That’s the key to “standing out”: picking something you genuinely love – or hate – and writing about it with passion and originality. No need to go searching for a subject that makes you sound worthy or impressive. Think about the things you enjoy, cherish, or detest the most, then find a novel spin on one of them. Controlling and honing that spin is the key to your essay’s execution. Your launching point is somewhere in the broad swath of things that really matter to you.
