A significant factor in the college admissions decision is your essay. Every student is reduced to numbers and letters by your GPA, class rank, grades and standardized-test scores. Your college admissions essay gives you the opportunity to become human to the admissions committee by going into greater depth about yourself and your values than you can on your resume.
What is Important to You?
For most college admissions essays, you have the option of writing about almost anything, so the topic you chose indicates to the admissions office that it is something you care about. If you choose to write about your Barbie or Hot Wheels collection, you are telling the admissions committee that those are still important to you. If you are struggling to come up with an essay topic, write down three things that are important in your life, and then list activities or events that you have done that show how you value them. For example, if making a varsity sports team was important to you, you might write about the extra hours of practice that you put in. If your family is important to you, you could write about how you gave up playing a sport to work to help make ends meet.
What are Your Best Qualities?
While there are some qualities that come through easily on resumes, such as academic ability when you have a perfect 4.0 GPA, there are others that are much harder to convey with just names of activities and accomplishments. Take a while to write down what your best qualities are. If you are struggling, ask others how they would describe you. Then find an event that demonstrates these qualities. The event should be specific; you do not want to rehash your entire resume in essay form for the admissions committee. For example, if you want to show your work ethic, it would be better to use your essay to write about one example, such as your first year on the cross country team when you had to log extra miles to keep up and it paid off at the conference meet. That's better than trying to explain that you worked hard in every activity that you participated in since the day you were born.
How Do You Address Problems?
Everyone has had to make some decisions for themselves by the time they are applying to college, even if it's as simple as what you believe about a current political issue. The way you go about solving problems will tell the admissions office how you process your thoughts and at what level you think. If you write an essay about how you picked a name out of a hat to decide which high school to go to, you are not demonstrating a capability for higher-level thinking. Most colleges want students who already have higher-level thinking skills, so it is beneficial to your application if you are able to show off these skills when you write your essay. If you can show that you spent time researching choices, seeking advice and processing your decision in a logical manner, you will be better off.
Tags: write about, admissions committee, your essay, admissions office, college admissions, higher-level thinking, write down