Many applicants to the most selective university programs share high grades, high test scores, solid recommendations and generous doses of community service and volunteer activities. Yet, if they want to set themselves apart from the pool of exceptional students, a significant research experience in STEM or the social sciences helps.
A good way to gain a sense of how to approach this type of essay is with samples of essays that have successfully addressed this question. Here are portions of successful essays to give you a taste of some effective approaches.
There are no wrong approaches as long as the essay matches your interests with what the school is offering in a particular major. Make that connection well and you’re well on your way.
The 2,600 four-year colleges in the United States are a mish mash of public, private, religious, and secular schools with their own unique, independent admissions requirements. Consequently, distilling a list of factors that might provide uniformity across their admissions practices is not easy, nor uniformly accurate. Regardless, the NACAC (National Association of College Admissions Counselors) periodically performs such a survey across this vast collegiate universe and posits the most important factors into a list called the ‘Factors in the Admission Decision.”
If you go to the ‘California Colleges’ website dedicated to perfecting the Personal Statement for the UC Application, http://californiacolleges.edu/admissions/university-of-california-uc/personal-statement.asp, you’ll be told that
“The UC personal statement is a preview to the kind of writing you'll be doing in college and on college placement exams.
Unknown Audience: You will be writing for a community of strangers.
Writer-Determined Topic: You will pick the topic for your response.
Dig Deeper: Analysis and reflection are keys.”
Writing a decent college essay is not an easy task. Sometimes you run with an idea and, in the end, it doesn’t work as expected. You’re going to have to revise. Don’t fret: writing a good essay takes time and, by its very nature, it demands revisions. This is all part of the process. Even Harvard recognizes and stresses the importance of revisions. Revising is as fundamental as writing the introductory paragraph.
Laura Saltz of Harvard’s Writing Center has a handout that you can obtain online: http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~wricntr/documents/Revising.html, and it is indeed a useful tool as you go about revising your college essays.
There are students who go through the grueling months of SAT preparation, take full loads of AP classes, and pull together summers of impressive extracurricular activities. However, when it comes to the actual task of writing college application essays, these seeming stars fade away, avoiding writing their essays until the last possible moment. This is very unwise. Procrastination can have a deadly impact on one’s candidacy. If you’re a borderline candidate (and who isn’t at Stanford, Harvard, or Princeton?) your essays can be the ultimate deciding factor. They’re one of the few things you can actually control, but only if you’re willing to devote the necessary time and effort to perfect them and breathe life into them.
Your college application essays must pull you off the page in three dimensions, and that is not an easy thing to do. Goethe, among the best writers in the world, said Shakespeare was the master of creating characters. After a handful of lines you know who Hamlet, Lear, and Falstaff are. They are flesh and blood characters, as real today as they were 400 years ago in the late 16th and 17th century English theater. You might not be another Shakespeare or even an F. Scott Fitzgerald, but you might as well use the same tool they used to pull Gatsby and Nick Caraway, or Lady Macbeth and Romeo off the page: action. Fitzgerald wrote in his notes, while working on his unfinished novel, “The Last Tycoon” that “ACTION IS CHARACTER.” Similarly, admissions officers are attempting to discover your character.
Look at the following prompts from some of this year’s supplements to the Common Application:
“…explain why you have chosen Carnegie Mellon?”
“Tell us how you will utilize the academic programs in the College of Arts and Sciences [Cornell University]?”
“Write about subjects and learning situations that interest you most, and how you intend to use your autonomy here [University of Rochester]?”
They are all asking pretty much the same question: What do you expect to gain by attending our school?
The 6 May 2009 Wall Street Journal ‘turned the table’ on a group of college presidents from some of the most elite colleges in the country, including the University of Pennsylvania, Pomona College, Wesleyan College, and the University of Chicago. The article entitled “Holding College Chiefs to their Words,” (6 May 2009, Wall Street Journal, p. D1 and D6, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124155688466088871.html) featured each president tackling a challenging essay question from his or her school’s supplement to the Common Application (all the schools use the Common Application).
![“Why Carnegie Mellon [or any other school you are applying to]?"](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/56bcde7df85082b0eecac2e5/1458943991480-OMJ9B7KWB2NM2GD3SFBV/Hamerschlag_Hall_CMU.jpg)
