Tips on Writing an Admissions Essay

Writing an Effective Application Essay

To differentiate you from other candidates and receive serious consideration for admission and/or a scholarship, you need a strong application essay. It is important to plan carefully and set aside sufficient time to write the best possible essay. How should you proceed?

1. Understand the question[s] being asked in the application. While each school wants to know about your goals and qualifications, there is no right answer or generic essay to fit each application. The Common Application essay can be the foundation for your efforts at many schools, but since each school wants supplemental essays it is important that you treat all of the essays, both the long and short ones, with equal attention and thoughtfulness, and that you set aside enough time to not only write the essays, but to review them as well.
2. Do the research and understand the strengths of each school to which you apply. If you do the research, your essays will be grounded and your application focused. Specificity matters and schools want to know that you are applying to them because you understand what they offer as well as what you have to offer them.
3. Make a comprehensive list of your personal and academic assets. Write separate short paragraphs about your academic experiences [honors and awards], about how your leadership skills affected your development, about how Ms. Smith, the best teacher you ever had, inspired you, about the synergies created by the courses you have taken, about your hobbies, your ethnic background, the last trip you took with your family…in other words, what has made you you that a college wants to know about. You might not use everything you have written, but these individual facets of your life are components in a just-in-time manufacturing process that you can incorporate with modifications and variations as you think about your goals, qualifications and what has inspired and excited you and what you might be looking forward to in college. This inventory is a source of concrete examples that you can mine as you write your essays, not cookie cutter examples to fill your essays. If you carefully review your life over the past few years you will find a wealth of insightful and exciting information to energize your application essays.
4. Address any problems in your high school career [a semester of poor grades; a year of interrupted study] directly and succinctly. Don’t whine and move on to your accomplishments.
5. Make sure you have a strong opening paragraph. Sitting down to 'write a srong opener' as a first step in the writing process is not an effective strategy. The last paragraph of your essay, the one you write after you have digested and understood the essay you are creating, may actually hide the seeds of the strongest opening. So don't worry about the opening until you have finished the essay.
6. Spell check. Cliché check. Be concrete, direct and vivid. Avoid obfuscation and pomposity [they know you are smart... they need to know who you are!]. Edit, edit, edit. Back up your essays on your computer each time you make changes.
7. Get feedback from an objective, experienced person — not your aunt or your roommate.
8. Assemble each application with care. Your essay for the University of Michigan should not be sent to the University of Minnesota.

These guidelines should make the process of applying to college less painful, more creative and more successful!

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