Writing Emotional Intelligence for Application Essays
by Sarah M.
One of the most important ways to make your college application essays stand out is to convey your feelings and emotions. This is a bit of a new task for many students, because generally speaking, academic writing is NOT emotional. So, how should you include more of your own inner life within a college essay?
You can’t simply insert something like “I felt sad,” or “that made me angry.” This will make you writing feel clunky and obvious, and it also won’t help you get to the kind of deep self-analysis that can make your essay truly interesting.
You need to convey more sophistication, vulnerability, and above all, self-reflection. In other words, you need to convey not just emotion but emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is the ability to identify your emotions, and to manage them effectively. This is a really important quality to colleges, because it conveys maturity and the ability to handle challenges or disappointments.
Someone who has both intellectual vitality and emotional intelligence will be able to make the most of any situation.
What are some ways to demonstrate emotional intelligence in your application essay?
Successful essays are often examining the writer’s upbringing, insecurities, or aspirations. More specifically, essays that convey emotional intelligence often deal with a challenge, a misfortune, or some sort of struggle—whether internal or external.
Showing vulnerability is important here: you need to be able to demonstrate reflection, progress, personal growth. You need to be able to identify the root of a problem you have faced, and describe how you approached a solution.
Here are some specific ideas:
- A time you faced pressure, in your family or from peers, to do something that did not feel authentic to you.
- A time you faced a challenge because of your ethnicity, race, or gender identity.
- A time you made a mistake or handled something badly, and then tried to correct your error.
- A time someone or something let you down, and how you handled the disappointment.
- A time you felt very lost, and needed to take charge or change course in order to find your footing again.
Once you have chosen a topic that can reveal vulnerability, self-reflection, and growth, you need to explain the specific steps you took in order to learn from or make the most of the situation.
For example: you want to write an essay about how you were always shy, and had trouble speaking up in class or in social situations. You felt your shyness was holding you back, so you began seeking out opportunities to learn how to speak up. You joined a debate team, or Model UN. You practiced, made mistakes, felt uncomfortable, but kept going. Gradually, you gained confidence as a public speaker.
All of this is well and good, but it’s not quite enough. How do you end such an essay? First, you should resist the temptation to tie everything up neatly in a bow. If you were truly able to eradicate your shyness and become a consistently incredible speaker, that’s great—but usually, things are not quite so simple. Maybe you still feel nervous a lot of the time, but you’ve learned techniques to handle it. Maybe you still freeze up sometimes, but you’re able to let it go now instead of beating yourself up over it. It’s fine to admit these kinds of things—in fact, it makes you essay more realistic, personal, and authentic. True emotional intelligence is about navigating messy emotions, not getting rid of them entirely.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, you need to show how you have applied the lessons you learned to other areas in your life or in the world more generally. For example, perhaps you began tutoring younger students, to help them with their confidence. Or perhaps you founded or took leadership of a club or organization, in order to make use of your confidence in another area that you are passionate about. In other words, you want to show not only that you were able to make the most of tricky situation, but that you were also able to learn a lesson from that experience that you can now apply to other tricky situations that you or others might face.
So, to recap, the steps to writing a college essay that is personal, vulnerable, emotional, are:
- Pick a topic that reveals something true, personal, and challenging about your life.
- Illustrate how that thing caused you trouble, and how you decided to take action.
- Describe what you did about it, perhaps including things that you still do.
- Reflect on the broader lesson, including ways you have applied it to other situations in your life.
