<p>So i want to start on my college essay now so I will have P L E N T Y of time to critique it and make it the best I can make it. Is this a good idea?</p>
<p>Also, any general tips? I'm a student whose daily vocabulary doesn't consist of "big"/"long" words. Would it be smart to use those words that I rarely use in my daily life in my essay, or be myself and write an essay about who I am?</p>
<p>excellent idea.
we just turned in a college essay in my AP Eng. Lang. class for a grade.</p>
<p>your essay: be yourself. you want your VOICE to come through. when the adcom reads your essay, they should be able to visualize who you are. little nuances will help that. the best essays are the ones that come from the heart. spend a lot of time on it, but don’t sound feigned. also: VERY IMPORTANT: you want to SHOW, not TELL. Don’t write “I am a very compassionate person who works for the common good.” Use an anecdote to express that. Don’t say “I am clever and funny.” Make your essay clever and funny. Everything should be implicit.</p>
<p>I would advise STRONGLY against this. An essay that is contrived, edited, and polished will make you sound like a contrived, edited, and polished human being. One of the main essays that got me admitted to two of the HYPS was written in the span of an hour, between about 1 and 2 am. Ditto for the short CommonApp EC essay. You never know when the idea that best helps a piece of paper represent who you are and standout from thousands of others will strike. I think you would be very well-served, though, by writing a mock college essay: going through the whole process, from brainstorm to final draft, but not actually sending that essay to colleges. Then when you do write the ‘real’ college essay over the summer or early in the fall, you would have already gone through the process once and will be much more comfortable doing so.</p>
<p>At lot of this decision is going to hinge on what your senior year is going to look like. My S is going to have 3 APs plus a college math class and a heavy EC, plus mock trial, taking up a lot of his time fall semester. So yeah, I an going to encourage my S to work on essays during the summer, and to start thinking about the prompts now.</p>
<p>Will the prompts be the same for 2010?
My S himself suggested working on his essay this summer, and possibly applications in general. I agree it depends on what senior year will look like. He is a full IB diploma candidate and will have a lot of deadlines in the fall, and is planning on 3 or 4 EA submissions.</p>
<p>Definitely a great idea. A couple quick tips:</p>
<p>-Pick one aspect of your life that really says something about the kind of person you are…trying to write about too much or conveying your whole life in two pages isn’t going to work.</p>
<p>-Stay away from cliche idea like sports victories or community service. While they’re certainly admirable, it’s very difficult not to make these essays sound like something admission staff have heard thousands of times before.</p>
<p>-This is oversaid, but be yourself! It’s not all about using fancy words and constructing the epitome of a perfect essay. Let them know who you are, not what words you can look up using Microsoft Word’s thesaraus.</p>