A Student's Guide

College Application Essay Writing Tips

Your college essay is the most important thing in your college application. It is the thing that can tip the scales to your advantage when applying for a college. Your statistics, grades, scores are all put aside as the admission officers read your essays, your story. These essays are meant to humanize you so that you're not just a paper full of numbers for them to choose.

Numbers aren't everything. These admission officers are trying to find brilliant students who will be a great addition to their school. I know a person from high school, he was a genius, but he didn't do anything but study. I remember he complained to others that he didn't have a story to tell and that he was thinking of lying about it- which you should never do. While I, on the other hand, my statistics were subpar to his, but I did extracurricular activities and had my story. In the end, I got into UC Berkeley and he didn't.

The thing is that everything is a case-by-case basis and it really depends on the school. It's good to do some research on the colleges you want to apply for because many of them have preferences. Some require a certain standardized score, some value the extracurricular activities you did, and some value the essays more than the others. You can do your research on Reddit and Google.

How colleges usually choose students is that there are several admissions officers at a table and they go by an application one at a time. They go over your statistics, read your essays, and then discuss with each other if you're a fit for a school. Certain schools may run things differently between each other like how many officers they have, if there's a time limit, if they choose between students, or go back to change a decision.

But for this chapter, we will be focusing on the college application personal essays.

I don't know how other college applications work, but I'll be using the UC Application as my main example. For the UC Application as explained in the previous chapter "My UC Application Personal Essays", you choose four out of eight questions to answer. Other schools will have different systems such as having a prepare list of questions for you to fill out.

I'll be listing out the tips rather than writing them in paragraph form to make it easier to read and go over.

_________________________

Narrative:

It's your story: Remember that this is your personal essay, your own story. You need to take advantage that the admission officers are looking at you as a human being, not as a paper of statistics.

Become a detailed narrator: You need to be narrative in your essay. You need to move the reader and have them sympathize with your journey and story. Open up a thesaurus and get creative with those adjectives.

Choose your questions wisely: When choosing between what questions to answer (such as the UC Application), pick questions that are completely different from each other. You want the admissions officer to get a holistic look at you as a person.

[As an example, you can go over my UC App essays. Through my essays I showed that I was a leader and I did an extracurricular activity related to my intended major of Civil Engineering (Question 1), I told them I'm an accomplished writer (Question 3), I shared my bullying story and one of my written works (Question Five), and I shared another story of my passion for my intended major (Question Six)]

You can choose difficult questions on purpose: When having to choose between questions to answer, it's also great to choose the difficult questions not everyone answers. The officers will pay more attention to you since they don't receive many answers to that certain question. However, you must not force yourself to answer a question if you don't have anything to write for it. You'll hurt yourself more than you'll help yourself.