When you are writing your essay, what do you do if you don’t have a deceased family member, or if you are not an immigrant who came to America looking for a better life or if you are not a minority?
<p>How do you stand out from the other applicants??</p>
<p>^Actually those are pretty cliche topics. The trick is to take something important to you and write about it. The easiest way is to pick the EC on your list that you've spent the most time doing and explain why it's important to you and how it's impacted and shaped your personality.</p>
<p>Making yourself stand out from other applicants depends on what you've done. If you're not a famous model or writer or soemthing, and your ECs are pretty common and bland, then your focus should be presenting those ECs in the best light. It's like a marketing scheme. I won't give you tips because chances are, you're probably my competition lol.</p>
<p>i'm a rising junior</p>
<p>Being different is difficult. Especially since society practically forbids us from being different in everyday life. The secret is that there is something about you that is unique, and that you probably look at it as the most normal thing in the world. It's probably not an EC, unless you formed your own, and even that can be clique depending on the club.</p>
<p>Delve into the details of your life. Is there something you like to do that's alittle offbeat, maybe something you keep as a secret even from your friends... I'm sure that the activity has either influenced you or represents you in some way. Do you have any strange habits that you can explain in an entertaining BUT illuminating way? (Don't forget that it has to answer whatever question the application asks as well). It may not be your friends, or the subjects you like, or your ethnicity that makes you different. But there must be something that does (or that's what I've been lead to believe), and you can make it show how you are corageous, or hardworking, or... whatever you want them to see about you that your test scores don't show.</p>
<p>I wrote about gym class, because both of my best friends were in it. Both grew up in a foreign country, so they didn't understand the rules of the sports. And I didn't understand their language... so we traded. And if that sounds very unique to you, it is! But it wasn't the first essay I wrote (I didn't even send it to my EA schools). But there is something like that about everyone, and you have plenty of time to discover it. Or, actually, to create it. So let yourself be different, embrace the differences between you and everyone else, and, with time, something will probably suggest itself to you.</p>
<p>If youre a rising junior yu have some time to do this. Make a view book of yourself in high school, like the best college view books. Short blurbs and pictures of you in classes, with your friends, doing the things that you like to do. Include stuff that relates to your essay topics or the 2 or 3 key extra currics that you want to focus on. It's marketing. If you don't think just words will jump off the page, use pictures. It's like the art portfolios that art students send in to colleges, but this would be a portfolio just about you. Doesn't matter that your colleges didn't ask for it. If it's good they'll look at it. and remember you.</p>