Getting Accepted into College, Part 1

How to Write a College Application Essay

Getting yourself ready is step one of how to write a college application essay. Once you are ready, it is time to focus on the writing. For information on college application essay topics or your college application essay format, look no further than the colleges to which you are applying. If they do not have specifics, look at schools like yours (for example, if you are applying to a state school, state schools of a similar size in the same state) for good guidelines.

Preparing Yourself

Before you start writing, clear off your work area and make yourself a few healthy snacks that you can nibble on without having to stop and prepare them. Healthy is not a euphemism for low calorie or fat free. Trying to think and do important work while you are hungry or nutritionally deprived is not a foundation for excellence. You can certainly have a Diet Coke while you work, but make sure that you have nuts, fruits, and vegetables, too.

Get a fresh glass of water, as well. While you do these things, take big, deep breaths, and clear your mind of worries by focusing on a soothing image or thought. Sometimes students describe how they started off bragging about the stress but it ended up being a habit that increased their stress. Start letting go of that habit today.

Stress is a natural part of the process, and it’s a good idea to learn to live with it. It is not a monster to kill or an angel to revere. You don’t have to love it or hate it. Let it be a tool to motivate and focus you.

If the stress starts building up, relieve it with 5 minutes of whatever works for you. Dance to your favorite song, take a quick shower, play with your pets, or whatever else helps you re-center yourself.

Preparing the Essay

Chances are that your school has a specific question that they want you to answer. Sometimes, instead of a question to answer, they call it a prompt and ask for a response. The goal is the same, to get you talking. If your college does not have one, look for topics or questions presented by other schools and use one of those. Of course, if you have a great idea for your own essay that is also an option.

Once you have your topic, put it in bold at the top and bottom of the paper, then paste it into the body of the page as well. You want to be able to refer to it easily, so that you can remind yourself when your thoughts start drifting. If your notes get long, you should still be able to see the prompt on your screen, so you may end up with it pasted in a few times.

Break the sentence or sentences down into phrases and get cozy with each one. You can use the sentence sections or phrases as the basic outline for your essay. For our example, we will use an essay question used in the past by Purdue with their undergraduate applications: Recount an incident or time when you experienced failure. How did it affect you, and what lessons did you learn?

The breakdown might look like this:

• Recount an incident or time
• when you experienced failure.
• How did it affect you,
• and what lessons did you learn?

Be practical and methodical. This advice differs from much of the advice to write with passion or emotion, which is so common to writing advice. That is not an accident. The advice to focus on emotion sounds good, but it is a terrible place to begin writing a personal essay. Your emotions are already running high, it is better to steer yourself toward the practical and let your emotions emerge naturally.

Make notes in each section about your most prominent responses. Once you choose an event, think about it calmly. Be honest about your role in the failure. Do not pretend that you didn’t do anything wrong if you did. By the same token, don’t take responsibility for things that are not your fault. Showing that you can assess a situation like this honestly will help you stand out as someone responsible.

Many students panic about word length. Again, be practical and methodical. If you are required to write a one page essay, that is about 300 words. In that case, you want to dedicate 50 to 70 words to your introduction and about 50 for your conclusion. That leaves 180 to 200 words for the body of your essay. Look at the question being posed by the school and break it down. They are usually two- or three-part questions, meaning each section would get about 60 to 100 words.

Write as much as you can in each section. If it is long, think of that as a good thing because it means you have a lot of material to work with. When you have written everything you can think of, you can now go into the essay and start removing areas where you are repetitive or get off track.

If you are required to write a two-page essay, your introduction can be up to 80 words but a two or three sentence conclusion of about 50 words is still plenty. You can again break down how many parts each question has and determine how many words to devote to each section from there.

Summing Up

Approaching your essay calmly and systematically is a great way to achieve your best. As a busy and sometimes overwhelmed high school senior or junior, it is not always easy to be calm and systematic. If you find yourself struggling, take a break and come back with fresh eyes. If that doesn’t work, it might be time to consider outsourcing your application essay to a ghostwriter.