Mastering The Why This College? Essay

Mastering The “Why This College?” Essay Gail Berson, the dean of admissions at Wheaton College, shares a story about an applicant with excellent grades and test scores who wrote a graphic essay about a violent video game. The admissions team found the essay off-putting, and the student was rejected. Had he chosen a “safer” topic, he would have received an acceptance letter. The college application essay is your chance to help admissions officers get to know you. For this reason, you should avoid topics that put the focus on someone else. Emphasize to students the importance of writing an informed essay. For example, they should not write about a fantasy meeting with a famous artist and get the titles of the artist’s paintings wrong. Additionally, these types of essays frequently present the student as some type of savior, who is privileged enough to spend the money to fly and participate in an activity overseas. This “savior” trope could irk the admissions officer. Remember, you want to sound genuine, not sanctimonious. Both students and parents tend to think that writing about overseas volunteering or charity trips is a sure-fire way to impress admissions officers. For the same reason, we recommend avoiding profanity and graphic language in your essays. To avoid writing your essay on a topic that might earn you a rejection letter, check out the five topics you should never write about in your college essay below. Your encouragement, ideas and overall support can go a long way in helping your students write their essays. Some colleges will choose only to look at your GPA, Course Rigor and SAT/ACT scores. If you GPA and Test Scores are high enough, they may not feel that and essay is necessary. Imagine an admissions counselor reading that in your college essay. While it seems like an interesting story, the excerpt above is a complete lie. The reader should never think about fact checking what you’ve written. Some campuses have a pool of reviewers, while others are more specific. For a small college, there is a chance that you essay will only be read by a couple of individuals, but for a larger school it can make its way through several hands before being put down. While essays don’t weigh as much as grades or course selection, if you are applying test-optional or to a smaller school, more attention will be given to this section of the application. Your essay should be genuine and based on fact, not fiction. You don’t have to pull out all the stops to impress the reader, you just have to be authentic and creative. There should be no mention of how miraculous your life is and how profound you can be. You can be certain that you did not spend all that time crafting the perfect essay in vain. How much weight a college puts on that portion of the application may differ. Just how many readers digest your words can vary as well. Still, don’t waste the opportunity to put another dimension on your application file. Usually one to two admissions officers read an essay. The Common App asks students to submit one long essay, no more than 650 words. Some Common App schools will require additional supplemental writing. We’ve helped with over 100,000 college essays â€" so we’ve seen it all and we know what works. Grades alone won’t get you accepted to your dream school. Good writers do a lot of editing and rewriting to say more with fewer words. If you really can't find any length guidelines anywhere on the admissions website and you're at a loss, I advise calling the admissions office. They may not be able to give you an exact number (in fact, they probably won't), but they will probably at least be able to tell you how long most of the essays they see are. (And keep you from writing a panicked, 20-page dissertation about your relationship with your dog). So even though there's no word limit, they'd like somewhere in the 4-10 pages range. High school students are not usually writing papers that are longer than 10 pages anyways, so that isn't very limiting.