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The Wrong Way to Approach Your Admissions Essay
When my one-on-one college applications clients start coming up with possible topics for their main Common App essay, they’ll often list out particular experiences from their past or specific activities they’re involved in. They propose me ideas along the lines of: “I want to write about my trip to Botswana,” or “I want to write about my passion for debate.”
Sound familiar? Maybe you had (or are having) a similar impulse when trying to figure out what to write in your main college essay.
But here’s the thing. Although it’s theoretically possible to produce an engaging, 100% YOU piece of writing by examining an activity or experience outside of yourself, most high schoolers in this camp will manage only the second part of that equation: they’ll write about an experience outside of themselves. They’ll write at length about “Botswana” or “debate”—and not at all about themselves. And unfortunately, that approach takes the “personal” out of “personal statement”!
What’s more, writing about one “thing” on your activities list has another negative side that could keep you off the Admitted Students list come spring. What is it, pray tell? Well, it can make you appear scattered.
Huh? Isn’t it in fact more focused to write about just one activity/experience?
Well, let me explain. If you are like most of my clients, your Activities List looks something like this:
Soccer (Varsity Captain)
Softball (Club team)
Debate team (3 years)
Double-bass (Jazz band)
Treasurer of Student Government (2 years)
Peer Tutoring (helping second-graders with their Math homework)
Camp Counselor (at a fencing camp you’ve attended the past 6 years)
Pre-Med Club (this year)
Life drawing (3 years)
If I were the admissions reader looking at this (not-so-organized) list, I would think: ok….but who IS this applicant? I just don’t GET it. What makes them tick, deep down? Are they just joining clubs to “look good for colleges”? They’re…well, kinda all over the place!
That’s not the reaction that will get you into an elite institution.
But here’s the good news: if you can connect the dots FOR the person reading your file in the admissions office at your dream school, you can come off as a genuine, well-rounded person with admirably diverse interests instead of seeming all over the place. And a great place to weave all of these threads together is…your main essay.
So how do you connect the dots? It’s simple: by having something I call an “organizing principle.”
Why You Need an Organizing Principle
Most teens these days are so focused on DOING, and doing MORE, that it’s natural they’d think the key to who they “are” (and thus the key to a killer essay) lies outside of them. But the opposite is true. If you can use your essay to illustrate the basic motivation that makes you tick on the INSIDE—the overarching philosophy or personality trait or thought pattern that runs through your very disparate real-world actions—you’ve just made a case for yourself. You’ve told the admissions reader who you are, and who you’ll be on their campus. Plus, you’re showing that you’re self-possessed, thoughtful, reflective, and self-aware—all traits of the mature, responsible students that elite institutions want.
Sounds like a pretty good picture to present, right?
Example: How to Find a College Essay Topic
Here’s an example of how the student with the above, seriously all-over-the-place interests could connect those dots.
Perhaps (let’s call her) Aimee’s core personality trait is spontaneity. Maybe she’s someone who really likes to think on her feet. Her active mind never stops running, and in order to relax, she needs to expend a ton of energy on a daily basis.
Aimee’s participation in the debate team speaks to this because she has to come up with rebuttals and arguments on the spot, which feeds her personality’s core need for challenge and spontaneity. As does playing the double-bass in her school’s jazz band, where she really loves improvising her solos in the heat of the moment. Peer tutoring allows her to answer unanticipated questions on her feet while making a difference to little kids (whose company she genuinely enjoys). She is contemplating going to medical school and becoming an emergency room doctor, where she’d get to actively use this “thinking on her feet” strength of hers to save lives on a daily basis.
For Aimee, soccer and softball are amazing ways for her to expend some of her excess mental energy…plus she never knows where the ball is going to go, so, AGAIN, she gets to use her strength of taking action off the cuff and using her instincts to help her team score points.
All of a sudden, SIX of these activities make sense. The remaining ones won’t be so hard to account for. Maybe Aimee ALSO has a key personality trait of wanting to do the right thing and see justice served. That could explain wanting to be in Student Government (to keep a watch on the school’s goings-on) and being a counselor at her camp (she wants to make sure the younger students had the same positive experiences that SHE enjoyed for many summers).
Life-drawing is the only thing that doesn’t appear to relate now. And guess what? That’s just fine. Maybe Aimee just likes it (imagine that!).
So HERE’s what Aimee looks like now:
1) Organizing Principle: Spontaneity, quick thinker and problem solver
Soccer
Softball
Debate Team
Pre-Med Club
Double-bass in Jazz Band
Peer Tutoring
2) Secondary Organizing Principle: Justice, doing the right thing
Student Government
Camp Counselor
Also:
Peer Tutoring
Pre-Med Club
Debate Team
3) Random interest: life-drawing, which Aimee loves for its own sake
So Aimee’s job now is to choose a story from her past to discuss in her personal statement—a past experience that paints a picture of her need to think on her feet and solve spontaneous problems and see justice served, even if the story has to do with NONE of her activities. If she does this, and manages to make a brief nod to her interests where she applies this thought process, she is now a REAL HUMAN BEING and not a college-chasing automaton. And even better: she’s a real human being whom college admissions officers know is self-aware and intrinsically motivated. She’s looking like a pretty good prospect already. And if you follow my “organizing principle” principle, you will too!
Your next steps
For some students, the free advice in this blog post is the only help they may need to start writing. Others among you may still feel confused about how to present yourself to admissions officers. Luckily, I spend countless hours helping seniors and parents do just that. I offer one-on-one essay brainstorming, editing, and polishing services, available in several different configurations to meet your needs:
Or, if you’re more of a self-studier but want more detailed written guidance than this post is able to provide (including lots of specific examples and follow-up questions to ask yourself), you can learn about my PDF guide to Acing the Personal Statement here.
