Need Help With Your College Admissions Essay?

It’s that time of year when high school seniors everywhere start working on — or at least contemplate working on — their college applications. And for many students, it’s the personal essay that’s the trickiest part. When is humor okay? Are any topics off limits? Is it ever acceptable to use AI? We’ll get tips on how to craft a personal essay that admissions officers want to read, and we’ll hear from you: what was your college essay about?

Interview Highlights:

The Importance of the College Admissions Essay

The college admissions essay is often the most dreaded part of the application process, but it’s also the best opportunity for students to distinguish themselves, according to Anna Esaki-Smith, author of “Make College Your Superpower.” She describes the college essay as “the treat for the application reader” and a way for admissions officers to get a glimpse of an applicant’s “heartbeat.”  Allie Volpe, senior reporter at Vox, notes that the essay allows students to distinguish themselves especially amid grade inflation and the option to go test-optional.She says the essay can reveal more about the authentic person behind the perfect GPAs and SAT scores.

Advice on Choosing an Essay Topic

Admissions officers are not necessarily looking for essays about trauma or hardship. “I think for a really long time, certainly when I was applying to college, there was this idea that you needed to write about the worst thing that had ever happened to you,” Volpe says, “but I think that’s been overdone.” 

Both guests recommend writing about unique experiences or perspectives that reveal one’s authentic voice and outlook on life. “I think the student needs to think about what makes them unique,” Esaki-Smith says, “whether that be something that’s traumatic or something that’s quirky, or something that is sort of revelatory about a student’s life.” A listener named Cynthia shared how she wrote about her experiences as a competitive figure skater, a topic that “checks a lot of the boxes” by being both specific and relatable.

Exercises like listing 10 possessions that spark memories or chronicling a typical day in great detail can inspire compelling essay angles. Multiple callers echoed this, with one sharing how an essay about bonding with her mom during drives to gymnastics practice resonated deeply with an admissions officer. 

Elements of a Compelling Essay

Don’t try to sound overly sophisticated or rely too heavily on outside help. The key, as articulated by a caller who taught memoir writing, is “rocking your own voice” rather than trying to manufacture a persona.

Listener Herman shared how his humorous lead line about the 70s – “whether you’re a mother or whether you’re a brother, you’re stayin’ alive” – may have helped his admission to UC Berkeley.

Caller Kelly noted the importance of “including the writer’s feelings, thoughts, perspectives, interpretations, how they grew as a person as a result of the experience.” Volpe highlighted the importance of “setting the scene” and “showing, not telling” through techniques like dialogue to add “color to the piece.” 

A listener named Mitch, who was involved in medical school admissions, said that he was always looking for authenticity and an indication the applicant was open to learning – that they’re “ready to be a scholar or a student.”

The Role of AI in Essay Writing 

The use of AI writing tools like ChatGPT was a major discussion point. While the guests acknowledge benefits for tasks like grammar checking and summarization, they strongly advised against using AI for generating essay content.

Esaki-Smith warns, “There’s always a danger that two students will take one of the prompts… and come out with the same output and then copy and paste.” She says schools do use detection software and added that AI could “eradicate a student’s personality” and make essays sound generic.

Volpe says that experts she consulted said AI-generated essays often have “a weird cadence, some certain phrasing that it becomes very apparent that an AI wrote this, that you did not write this.”

Handling Rejection

The guests addressed the difficulty of receiving rejection letters, even with strong essays and qualifications. Esaki-Smith advised keeping perspective: “University is one tent pole in a lifetime… If you get into a university in the United States and you’re a focused resourceful student, you’re gonna get a great education.”

Resources for Essay Writers

– The “How I Got Into College” episode of This American Life

– Fresh Air interview with J.R. Moehringer about writing a personal statement

– KQED’s “Perspectives” youth commentary series as examples of voice and concision

– Reddit forums like r/CollegeResults and r/ChanceMe to view successful application profiles

This content was edited by the Forum production team but was generated with the help of AI.