As someone who spent all of Thanksgiving break wrapped up in a comforter with a laptop, Netflix and microwave popcorn, working away on college essays, I consider myself a bit of an expert on trying to make yourself sound impressive.
So whether you are in the cramming stage or still have plenty of time to iron out the details, gather around and hear the lessons I have learned through trial and error to make your essays and supplements masterpieces.
- Give yourself lots of time
I know I said these tips would be for people in any stage of the process, but even if you’re cramming the writing process is going to take a lot of time. You need to have the idea, and then get all your great thoughts down in a coherent statement.
And then you need to rewrite. And rewrite again.
If you think your essay is perfect on the first draft, then you are either the greatest writer that has ever lived, or you’re not looking at it with enough of a critical eye.
Share your essay with other people, and get them to tear it to shreds. Rip it to shreds yourself, and be creative and playful with new ideas.
Which brings me to my next point.
- Get other people to read your essay.
Be really annoying. Ask people who you don’t think will say yes.
Your English teacher can check out the grammar, your friends can check if it’s true to you, and both of them can catch dumb mistakes or ideas that sounded great in your head but terrible on paper.
Make flyers and hand it out to people in the lobby if you need to. Your objective is to get as many eyes on it as humanly possible.
Some of the people may just say, “Yeah it’s good.” But the best editors are often people who won’t just edit your grammar or make a comment or two, but people who will edit your ideas and push you to be more creative of what you’re trying to say.
If some says, “Yeah it’s good,” ask why? Ask what isn’t good? Ask their favorite and least favorite sentences? Be really annoying.
- Don’t be a pushover.
Other people who read your essay will give you some really good ideas. And maybe some bad ones, too.
But even some of the good ideas might not be true to who you are or representative of what you want to say. In the end, this is your story to tell, and the essay should be your ideas.
If someone makes a suggestion you don’t like, listen to what they have to say, genuinely try and make the edit and see how it goes. If you don’t like it once you’ve tried it, you can always go back to the way things were.
Take other people’s edits seriously, but stay true to you.
- Don’t stress over being unique.
I originally spent so long trying to come up with a unique idea that admissions people had never heard of that I didn’t think about what was important to me.
If you have a unique angle or a part of your personality that will make an excellent and different essay, run with it. But don’t feel like you have to come up with something crazy to tell a good story.
Yeah, sports are a popular, perhaps overdone, topic. But if you can bring a fresh perspective to a topic and tell a well-written story that means something to you, that’s so much better than writing about something strange you don’t really care about or isn’t as important to your life.
So good luck to everyone who is applying this semester.
Unless you are applying to any of the same schools I am. Then it’s game on.
