It’s as simple as that. Though I did well in admissions last year, I’ve learned something this first semester of college and am transferring out in hopes of going to Harvard, Stanford or Brown.
People are under the false notion that they need to write as PERFECTLY as possible, and explain themselves as CLEARLY as possible, but it gets to a point where after enough editing you realize that you don’t speak like your writing and quite frankly most people seem to be robots in their text. I’m not saying you should embrace tpying laik dis, but you should type your thoughts. You should speak your mind. You should embrace the voice YOU carry, and the voice that comes out of YOUR mouth. Colleges look for that. So many people go into admissions not knowing what the hell they’re doing because they don’t know what to expect of college and they work their best to get the best essay possible, but then they realize they lost all their voice along the way. This makes up the majority of applications, and with that, you just lost the one thing that makes you unique and you’ve gained what puts you in the huge pile of applications that are, generally, the same.
Embrace the way you speak. Embrace the way you think. Embrace who you truly are and write that way. Yes, maybe your essay won’t look as “perfect” by grammatical standards, but your voice stays intact and colleges want to see that. Colleges want to see that one oddball who writes his heart out into the essay instead of the person who writes what they think should be written and then refines it to a point without voice. Take your experiences, put them into context, evaluate what you’ve accomplished, and most importantly write it all with your heart.
Is it risky? Most would say so. They have good reason to think so. You’re writing out of the norm of what you’ve seen goes into a general college essay, but a college admissions essay is not a paper you’re handing into an english professor to grade with hopes that you’ll get a 100. Your college admissions essay needs to speak out to the reader, so that they think “Wow, now this guy… this guy…” It’s not a risk to embrace your voice. It’s you being you. Don’t fall for the need to achieve the social acceptance of what a college admissions essay should look like. If you’re aiming for that, then you’re aiming for the wrong pile of essays in the admissions offices.
I’ll finish off by saying one of my very good friends got into MIT and his essays had a fair amount of “:), :(, xD.” I, personally, wouldn’t include smileys in my essay because that isn’t my voice, but it seemed to work for him. Embrace your voice and don’t fall for the voice of a robot.