Many – a million? – juniors, about to be seniors, have, or soon will, an incessantly irritating monkey on their backs: the need to complete that breathtaking, scintillating college application essay that will clinch a spot at Extremely Desirable U. “This summer you need to get your college essay done and it needs to be really impressive.” Agony for all parties, almost for sure.
One thing that helped us with our second and third children (our first did not get much help from us on this point, honestly) was to learn, and then remember, that their essays did not need to be breathtaking and scintillating treatises about conducting Nobel Prize-level research alongside writing an opera that was recently performed at the Met.
Your kid does not need to write like Shakespeare or Vladimir Nabokov. Your kid does not need incredible accomplishments as subject matter. Your kid does need to produce a well-written essay that communicates something distinctive that is not clear from the information the college already has. They have seen thousands of essays about being captain of a high school sports team, president of the senior class, or any of a number of other subjects that students seem to think they are supposed to write about; don’t write about those unless you have something really unusual to say (and truthfully, do you?). The essay is a chance – perhaps the best chance and maybe the only chance – to discuss and display characteristics that make your child special and attractive (Maturity? Insight? An interesting point of view? Warmth? Adventurousness? Kindness? Enthusiasm?) This can be accomplished with quite ordinary subject matter – a part-time job, for example.
How did we figure this out? By reading actual essays. Liberating! A friend lent us an earlier edition of this book:
That kid got into Harvard with that essay about not much in particular? OK, my child can definitely produce something comparable. At the time, there were only a handful of such books; now there are dozens. Not saying this is the best one, but it worked for us.
You almost never find out why your child was accepted. We feel fairly sure that our son’s essay was an important element, and possibly a decisive one, in his acceptance by the college he ultimately attended. Yes, he wrote about a part-time job. In so doing, he got across important personality characteristics that could not be demonstrated by the usual array of application credentials and materials.
Do NOT directly mimic any of the essays! Rather, take to heart the lesson that the path to success is somehow to put your unique, wonderful self down on paper. That’s still a difficult task, but not an impossible one. It could even be enjoyable.
Would you like to see how this actually works? Click below to get an article that describes how I worked with a student to improve his essay; your student could emulate this.
