What To Say In A College Essay

This stuff matters…but it doesn’t make you special.

This is especially important to note if you’re aiming to attend a very competitive school – everyone applying is going to have a high GPA, a laundry list of advanced classes, and will have been president of every student organization since the dawn of mankind. So treat a college application essay as a tool for standing out in ways the robots can’t.

Standing out from everyone else could put you in the running for additional scholarships and will also simply make a good impression, which never hurts.

It’s impossible to write an article covering every possible essay prompt you could encounter in the college application process. S., the types of questions vary somewhat among different schools – to say nothing of what you might encounter at schools in other countries. For some good examples, here are the five questions from this year’s Common Application (a kind of “master application” accepted by many U. colleges and universities): As you can see, these questions are all very open-ended. Colleges want to give you as much freedom as possible to show them who you are.

Just take a blank document or sheet of paper, set a timer for 10-15 minutes, and start writing.

The point of this exercise is twofold: These are all jumping off points for the essay.

Speaking of obvious ideas, the biggest piece of advice I can give about writing college essays is this: avoid the obvious.

There are so many ways to succeed at these essays, so long as you keep your approach interesting.

And the best way to be interesting is to avoid boring, overused answers that admissions officers will have read literally thousands of times.

Here are a few things to avoid writing about: Really, the success of your essay will come down not to what you write about, but how.