essay advice?

College Essays
1

<p>Preface, yes this is a true story. </p>

<p>What I wondering is if it says enough about me? And is it too much? ugh. Don't be too hard on me.</p>

<p>Common app ethical dilemma. </p>

<p>Katie, Sarah and I were more than best friends, we were family. We laughed, cried, and whispered as one. We comforted each other after failures and rejoiced in our successes. I remember playing with Barbie’s in secret and having weekly sleepovers in the summer. We were in an impenetrable bubble filled with laughter, late night whispering, popsicles and days at the lake. We were there for each other no matter what. We were convinced we would be friends forever. My heart still aches when I think of how much I loved them. I didn’t know how fragile our friendship was until it was broken.
One summer day, in the coolness of the basement, everything changed. It turned out there had been one secret that we hadn’t shared, one experience we hadn’t cried over. Sarah told us that she had been repeatedly sexually abused as a child. We were the first people she had told and she made us swear we would never tell anyone. All of a sudden I was lost. I was frightened and confused. It seemed impossible and far away in reality. Her words seemed to leave a gaping whole in my heart. At thirteen I was more sheltered than most teenagers, so this news really touched my core. Sarah went explained that she was sick, involved in tests at the hospital and she was afraid that it was due to the abuse. Fear ignited my already vivid imagination. I was convinced that Sarah had an STI, she was emotionally damaged, and she was probably going to die. This was the biggest and scariest thing that I had ever dealt with.
Once home I was wracked with indecision and guilt. The burden of such an important secret weighed heavily on me. Alone in my room, I worked myself into a frenzy. I knew this was a big deal. Sexual abuse was not something that went away if ignored. If she didn’t get the help she needed, her life might never be the same. My thoughts were full of deadly sexually transmitted diseases and irrevocable emotional damage. I knew that if I told my mom our friendship would not survive, but I also knew that the naive friendship that I treasured was already gone. I eventually decided that the risks were too high; the fear of losing Sarah’s friendship was not enough to keep me from doing what was right for her. The next week I steeled myself and gave her an ultimatum; either she would have to tell her parents, or I would tell my mom. When she refused, with numb fingers and heavy heart, I told my mom everything. She held me as I cried for Sarah, for our lost friendship and for the innocence of young girls.
Looking back, I know I made the right choice; I did what many would be unable to do. I sacrificed my relationship with her in order to help her. It was pivotal to the transition into my teen years. In the space of that one week I became more mature and grew more emotionally than I had in any of the previous years of my life. It has been four years and I still feel a dull pain when I think of my lost friendship, and my lost innocence. Although I still have the optimism of my childhood, it is now balanced with a consciousness of the suffering of others.</p>

2

<p>ok good essay, but ive always found dramatic college essays are terrible essays. your a teen how dramatic can ur life be? i think many HSers fall victim to this trap as it seems the best books, movies, etc are all dramatic. try doing something silly or funny. lets face it humans are more inclined to like funny things than essays on people dying from cancer or AIDS. i mean its just human nature. i think you have potential to write an amazing essay, but this just doesnt do it for me. its just no memorable seems as if it were taken from a chapter of Teenage Blues (not a real book for the record). </p>

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3

<p>“Barbies” is plural and doesn’t need an apostrophe. Actually, it would be more grammatically correct as “Barbie dolls.”</p>

<p>I am interested to know what ‘deadly’ sexually transmitted diseases your head was full of, since the vast majority of STDs are not deadly.</p>

<p>This is coming from the standpoint of an adult, someone who has worked in reproductive health as well as someone who’s edited a lot of college essays.</p>

<p>First and foremost, I don’t think this essay really says much about you and your growth as a person. It seems like it does, but you didn’t do anything…gargantuan. Not to say that telling your mom about your friend’s issue wasn’t hard, but the essay that you wrote made it seem much more dramatic than it actually was. I expected to see that you sat with her for hours talking and reassuring her and it turns out that all you did was tell your mother. And I think you’re being super-dramatic when you talk about “lost innocence”. Actually, you kind of don’t seem very sympathetic for Sarah at all.</p>

<p>Second of all, I’m not sure that telling your mother was necessarily the best choice at all, anyway. Sexual abuse is very traumatic, and it may have taken Sarah years to work up the nerve to tell you in the first place; forcing her to tell someone else could’ve been even more traumatic for her, and only giving her 24 hours? If it took her years to tell you, her best friends, why did you expect her to work up the nerve to tell someone else – a stranger – in just 24 hours?</p>

<p>In general, though, the essay just seems too dramatic and overblown, and it’s more about Sarah than you. I’d go with a completely different topic overall.</p>

4

<p>thanks, yeah I think your essays were very good. I had a but I also think that not everyone is a comedic writer, so you should play to your strengths and not try to be something you’re not. But it does definitely pay off to take some risks, as it certainly did for you.</p>

5

<p>^^ </p>

<p>@ STI-I was trying to portray that I was young and didn’t really know what was happening but my imagination took hold.</p>

<p>It was really hard to depict the whole story in less than two pages, I didn’t want to get into all the details about what happened. Suffice to say that it was weeks before I told my mom and that I did spend many nights talking it over with her. I think it’s a little unfair for you to assume you know the whole story by reading my 500 word essay. I realize that this i your standpoint as a reader, but seriously. </p>

<p>It was also hard for me separate the immaturity and emotion of me when I was like 11 and how I am now. </p>

<p>I will definitely work on showing more how it effected me. If not I’ll have to scrap it. Maybe it is too big of a topic for a short essay. </p>

<p>Thanks for the input.</p>

6

<p>But see, that’s the whole POINT of an essay. You have to be able to convey a story to a reader in 500 words or less. If you give a reader the wrong impression or they can’t pick up the entire story from your 500 words, that is your fault, not the reader’s. You have little space, but you must convey a COMPLETE story within that little bit of space. It does not serve you to write an incomplete story and then when someone honestly evaluates it with the little bit of information that you gave, to get upset and claim that they don’t know the entire story. I never assumed that I knew the whole story - I gave you my opinion based on what you wrote.</p>

<p>And you should know that what you wrote will stand on its own. No one, especially not admissions counselors, has the time or the prescience to go wondering “I wonder what she left out?”</p>

<p>The reason I even told you how I felt about the essay is because that I was warning you that this is the way that other readers (including admissions officers, who are human) may take your story. How on Earth can you expect me, or anyone else, to know that it was weeks before you told your mom and that you spent many nights talking it over with your friend? You didn’t say any of that in the essay. Who do you think is reading your essay, clairvoyants? Most admissions counselors, in my experience, are in my age range and have had roughly similar experiences. They can’t understand what you’re saying unless you say it.</p>

<p>In my opinion, those are extremely important details to include in an essay about this topic. If you expect people to understand where you’re coming from, they need some details. If you don’t “want to get into all the details” then perhaps you should select a different topic.</p>

<p>Beyond that, the vascillation you experienced could quite potentially be the MOST IMPORTANT part of the essay, and its omission is egregious. If you want people to know how hard this decision was for you, it’s in your interests to talk about how difficult it was, how you spent weeks thinking about it, etc.</p>

<p>And if the point of the essay is to show how you have grown and yet it is hard to separate the immaturity and emotion of 11 from how you are now, than perhaps you shouldn’t write your essay on this issue. At the very least, you should note how old you were at the time somewhere in the essay. I had no idea reading it whether this happened at age 5, age 10, or age 15. This essay means very different things at each age.</p>

<p>If you want to write about this topic, you need to flesh out the essay. Rather than trying to keep it within 500 words off the bat, just begin to write. Write as long as it takes you to get it all out on paper and make sense. After that, then edit it down. If you are finding that you cannot edit this story down to 500 words without scrapping something that’s vitally important, then it might be time to move onto a different topic.</p>

7

<p>Again I completely realize that this is the impression that you are getting from reading my essay, many of your comments have pointed at holes where I need to explain the situation more. So thank you for that.</p>

<p>I also understand that you, like an AO might miss some of the parts of the essay and make false conclusions. Like my age, which was around 12 maybe 13, the period of time that the incident spanned, (To be fair I only hint at it. ie. “The next week” “Eventually” etc.) and the fact that I was not asking her to tell her “a complete stranger,” but instead her parents. These are details that I need to make more clear for my scholarship. </p>

<p>I was not being defensive about the merit of my essay and I will take your helpful suggestions to heart. I was however being defensive about my decision to tell my mom (who by the way is a social worker and told me I did make the rght decision as did my friends parents). A decision that I think it is unfair for you to weigh in on as an outsider. Criticism of my essay I can.</p>

8

<p>it could be a good essay, but it seems like youve written too much unimportant stuff, and therefore not managed to get in all the facts… just needs a bit of revising :slight_smile:
good luck</p>

9

<p>i agree with julliet…it seemed to talk more about your friend…i think college admissions people want to learn more about you than other people, even though they might have played an important part of your life. Make yourself the main character.</p>

10

<p>Your essay needs to be about YOU, not Sarah. Open more actively if you want to discuss this topic. Instead of describing your history, just start with the what, when, why, etc of that moment in the basement. In any case, I bet there is something else you can write about that will convey the same qualities about yourself that does not involve Sarah’s sexual abuse. As a matter of fact, the only quality I can remember without re-reading it is that you state you now consider other people in addition to yourself. Not to be harsh, but I think you should try to come up with a more positive and active topic. Talk about a hobby or anything else that will help them feel like they KNOW you. Hard to do in 500 words, but not impossible. Good luck.</p>