How Important Is The College Essay?

How Important Is The College Essay? Once a student picks one or two of these to focus on in their essay, they are on the writing path to a stellar essay that describes exactly who they are and why they would be an asset to a college. Most colleges and universities look for five traits in a student essay. Think of the college application process as a video game, and the dreaded college essay is the dragon that needs to be slayed. The overall workload here is really dependent on your college list, so if your list isn’t as ambitious, some of the timelines above might not apply to you. The main point here is that getting a head start and planning your essay workload is essential to limiting how stressful the college application process needs to be. In high school, she was a National Merit Scholar, took 12 AP tests and scored 99 percentile scores on the SAT and ACT. In case you haven't finished the rest of the application process, take a look at our guides to asking for recommendations, writing about extracurriculars, and researching colleges. Now that you know how to write a college essay, we have a lot more specific resources for you to excel. Remember back in step one, when we talked about making a chart to keep track of all the different essays you need to write? Well, now you need to go back to that list and determine which essays you still need to write. While it is important to talk yourself up as the awesome student you truly are, you still have to remember that the application essay is not a résumé. You can certainly submit a résumé with your application, but your essay is not the place to do it. We want you to expand upon a few characteristics that make you great, not just give us a list with the thousand and one things that contribute to your greatness. This way, we are able to fully grasp why these particular characteristics, out of the many you could have selected, are so important to you and who you are as an individual. Besides, that other essay would go on forever, and, as I mentioned, we read thousands of these things each year. Make sure to get these done early so that you give yourself a lot of time to work on the remaining regular decision supplemental essays. If you chose your essay prompts correctly, hopefully you can use an essay or two from here for some of your remaining school essays. I quickly learned to play the clarinet and joined the elementary school band. As soon as I was physically big enough to carry around a mini Fender electric guitar, I begged to take guitar lessons. Perhaps it was subconscious at the time, but while many of my elementary school friends were playing sports with their dads, I was looking for a way to connect to my donor through music. During middle school and high school, my enthusiasm for music and performing accelerated in tandem with my talent. UC application deadlines are at the end of November, so they should be your next priority if you haven’t worked on them already. There are eight prompts to choose from, and you pick four. It doesn’t matter too much which prompts you choose, so try to choose prompts that you can reuse other essays to answer. In particular, the Common App personal statement essay is something that the UC schools don’t see, so try to reuse it for one of these essays. The main challenge here will be to reduce the word count . In addition to pursuing instrumental music, I began singing in theatre and in an a cappella group. Eerily similar to the college application process, there were many qualified donor applicants. Choosing one donor from the pool of applicants was an insurmountable task for my mom until she realized there was an essay buried in the back of each profile. After reading my donor’s essay, she chose him because he spoke so eloquently about his passion for music and the arts. Map out all essay prompts for UC applications and all regular decisions schools. Decide on schools to apply to for early admissions. When I was in second grade, I read the essay for the first time and learned the donor was a professional musician and an accomplished guitar player. This knowledge was the catalyst for me to begin exploring my own musical abilities. Craig is a college admissions coach and founder of CollegeMeister. He previously held university admissions and high school college and career counseling positions in Baltimore, West Palm Beach, and Rio de Janeiro. YouTube Tutorials Master each step of the admissions essay writing process and learn what it takes to craft a memorable submission one video at at time. Over the past five years, she has worked with almost a hundred students and written about pop culture for a wide range of publications. She graduated with honors from University of Chicago, receiving a BA in English and Anthropology, and then went on to earn an MA at NYU in Cultural Reporting and Criticism. Remember, in the grand scheme of the college admissions process, the application essay is a unique opportunity â€" and an opportunity to be unique. Don’t rely on spell check alone to catch all of your mistakes, either. Be sure you are using the correct form of words too (they’re, their, there, your, you’re, etc.). Few things will throw off an application evaluator more than misspellings and typos in the college essay â€" except when you mention the wrong college! Don’t tell us how much you want to attend XYZ University when you are submitting the essay to The College of ABC.