How to Write a College Essay
- Melchior Antoine
- Nov 21, 2024
- 8 min read
Updated: Jan 3
The college essay is one of the most important parts of your college application. It provides you with the chance to stand out from the competition. A college application reveals things about you that your grades and transcripts won’t be able to.
The focus should be on capturing the attention of the reader and telling a personal story that is compelling while showing that your values align with those of the college that you are applying for.
What is a college application essay?
A college essay is a written personal statement that you submit as part of an application to a college or university. Sometimes, it is referred to as a statement of purpose. It is a big part of the admissions process, especially now that more and more schools are using a holistic review approach.
What is a holistic review approach? This is an approach to admissions where college admission officers don’t just simply consider applicants’ grades and test scores. Instead, they focus on the totality of the individual. This means they are looking at the following questions when judging an individual?
What unique contributions can this individual make to our institution?
How is this person’s story original?
What struggles has the person gone through?
A college application essay doesn’t have a specific format. It is not a formal academic essay. Instead, it is an opportunity to creatively express yourself and convince college admission officers that you should be allowed into your college.
However, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use a clear template. The appropriate template to follow will soon be described.
What is the purpose of a college application essay?
The college application essay serves a number of purposes. These include 1. Showcasing your voice; 2. Demonstrating your writing skills; 3. Telling your personal story; and 4. Showing how your values align with those of the college. We will take a look at each in the list below.
1. Showcasing your personality and voice. It allows applicants to express their unique voice, personality, and values. This can help the admissions officer to view you as an individual and not just a collection of grades and scores.
2. Demonstrate your writing skills. The essay highlights the applicant’s ability to write clearly, coherently, and creatively. This is an essential skill in college. The fact that your college essay has 250–500 word limit means that you have to be concise and effective in delivering your message in a limited amount of space.
3. Telling your story. A college application essay provides a chance to tell your story. You can explain special circumstances, challenges, or experiences that has influenced your life and that has shaped your academic journey.
4. Explaining how you fit in with the values of the college. The college application essay offers you the opportunity to convey why you are a good match for the college and how the college aligns with both your goals and values.
Common Essay Prompts
Many colleges use prompts from the Common Application or similar platforms. To ensure that you write a proper essay, you should familiarize yourself with these prompts. Examples of common prompts include:
Reflect on a time when you faced a challenge or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn?
Describe a topic, idea, or concept you find so engaging that it makes you lose track of time.
Share a meaningful experience that shaped your identity.
These prompts should be carefully read before you begin writing the essay. Better yet, you should find college application essay samples that you can read for inspiration and which you can use as a model.
Tips for Writing a Strong Essay
1. Be authentic. Write in your own voice and share a genuine story or perspective. Your story can be strage or quirky. However, do not choose strange or quirky stories for the sake of being different. It should tie in to the other aspects of the college application. For example, how you match with the values of your college.
2. Start early. Give yourself enough time to brainstorm, draft, revise, and edit. The final version of your college essay will look nothing like what you begin with. Therefore, give yourself time to ensure that you can get the best possible version of your essay.
3. Be specific. Use vivid examples and details to bring your story to life. No one will spend time reading a generic story. Your college application is not academic writing. It's more like creative storytelling. The more unique and specific details you add to the story, the more compelling it will be.
4. Have a strong hook. You have to captivate your reader from the very first sentence and introductory paragraph of your essay. Because the essay is so short, you have limited space and time to impress. This means every sentence should count, including your first sentence. Below, we provide a sample college essay from the Khan Academy and an analysis of what works and how it could be improved.
An example of a college essay |
Prompt: Evaluate a significant experience, achievement, risk you have taken, or ethical dilemma you have faced and its impact on you (500-word limit).
College Essay
A misplaced foot on the accelerator instead of the brakes made me the victim of someone’s careless mistake. Rushing through the dark streets of my hometown in an ambulance, I attempted to hold back my tears while two supportive Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs) comforted me. Although I suffered a minor knee injury, the trauma of that accident still lingers.
Fast forward six years to the present. Now I am sitting in the back of the ambulance, a rookie EMT, with my purple gloves on, stethoscope around my neck, and a red medical bag in hand. I am also making sure we have the proper medical equipment stocked, including neck collars and long body boards. As I step out of the ambulance, a bitter breeze nips at my face. Shattered glass, two crushed car hoods, and traffic everywhere, the scene is put into perspective as I can finally see what is happening. I stop in my tracks. It is my accident all over again.
“Get the collars and boards, there is a possible back injury,” my partner whispers to me. I fetch the items, still attempting to deal with my conflicting emotions. Using the help of five other EMTs, we extricate the victim from the car and secure him to the stretcher. While in the ambulance, I realize now that circumstances have been reversed. This time, clutching the patient’s hand, I tried to soothe him, and he slowly calms down. I keep my composure and actively tried to help the patient feel as comfortable as I did. Keeping all of his personal belongings close to me, we wheel him into the busy emergency room and transfer him safely. As we leave, he looked into my eyes and I could feel his sincere gratitude. Rather than being an innocent victim, like the current patient was, I am now the rescuer.
Even though I felt the horrid memories rushing back, I kept my duties as a rescuer in the forefront of my mind. Keeping my cool in the face of extreme pressure I came out of the call a changed person: someone who can see a problem, regardless of any bias I may have, and focus only on what is happening at that instant. Confidently facing my own terrors, I felt as if conquering my fears allowed me to face my duties with a grounded and compassionate outlook.
Tears stream, limbs hurt, children cry: I am there, with a smile on my face, a stethoscope around my neck, compassion in my heart, happy to help and proud to serve.
The essay is well written. It is specific, and it provides quite rich detail. The writer transports us into a traumatic event, which they turned into their inspiration to become an EMT. It is a story of overcoming one's fears to contribute to the greater good. However, the writer provides too much detail about the nature of her work at the expense of something just as important: connecting personal values to those of the institution that they're applying to.
How does this individual's passion or mission to become an EMT translate into a positive presence or contribution to the university that they're applying to? The answer to this could take several forms. For example, 1. Volunteering to teach first aid on campus; 2. Selecting a medical course related to the field of EMT; 3. Bringing the ethos of community service as an EMT to contribute to a vibrant civic spirit on campus.
A college essay is only complete when you link your specific interests and values to those of your target university. To learn more about the importance of this, take a look at what a college admissions officer had to say about this application in the video above.
Is trauma dumping an effective strategy?
Several essay prompts may make students believe that they are required to write about traumatic experiences. For example, many essays may ask you to write about a challenging experience that you were able to overcome. In the example given above, the student writes about the trauma of being involved in a car accident and how that inspired them to become an EMT.
This is acceptable. However, going too far is not advisable. There is limited space to write in a college application essay, and dwelling too heavily on your trauma may result in the wrong aspect of your experience being emphasized. Always remember that the most important thing is to ensure that the experience you highlight proves or shows that you are capable of contributing both to the wider community and the educational institution that you are applying to.
In short, it is OK to include traumatic experience as long as that experience is coherent with the wider strategy of showing how your experience and values make you a proper match as a student in the college of your dreams.
Should you use LLM chatbots to write your essay?
LLM chatbots have grown in popularity among college students; however, they should definitely not be used in any way to write or even edit your college essay. The point of a college essay is to tell your unique story and stand out from a field of competition. LLM chatbots will have the opposite effect. They are notorious for simply spinning content that is average and reads like everybody else.
LLM stands for large language model. These are programs that work by scraping vast amounts of content on the Internet and creating what may be seen as an average of what they believe is a proper answer to your prompt or command. More than that, they are also guilty of hallucinations, which means they make things up.
More importantly, LLM chatbots like ChatGPT are more or less robots, and they sound like it. Most people, including college admission officers, are able to recognize an AI-written or enhanced essay at first glance. A proper college essay application must ring true with your authentic voice. This is because you want to impress college admission officers with your honest effort and experience: having a chatbot write or edit your essay eliminates any chance of this happening.
How EminentEdit helps with your college essay
EminentEdit provides editing and commentary to make sure that you end up with the best possible version of your college application essay.
Our editing services include both extensive commentary and corrections and are based on our deep and extensive familiarity with the standards and conventions of college application essays. We have edited 100s of college application essays. So, we know what it takes to convince college admissions officers.
EminentEdit provides editing and proofreading services that are:
More importantly, we are adaptable to your specific needs. | Contact one of our representatives for help in editing your college essay We know what you want to say. We help you say it better. |
EminentEdit’s proofreading and editing services for college application essays include:
Editing for tone of voice
Critiquing your work with useful commentary and suggestions
Substantive editing to improve the quality of your writing on a sentence level
Proofreading to make sure your writing is grammatically correct with proper spelling and punctuation
Commentary to point out areas of improvement
Do you need help in editing and proofreading your rhetorical or literary essay? Contact us today: CONTACT AN EMINENTEDIT REPRESENTATIVE
Cite this EminentEdit article |
Antoine, M. (2024, November 21). How to Write a College Essay. EminentEdit. https://www.eminentediting.com/post/how-to-write-a-college-application-essay |
