<p>I wrote mine in about an hour, hour and a half. Then I left it there for a few hours while I was at baseball, came back and edited it for another hour.</p>
<p>This sounds really awful, but I wrote both Deerfield essays the day of the deadline and submitted them at 11:45 PM. I just couldn’t find inspiration without the pressure. But I wrote most of my other essays on one day about a week before they were due. I reread all my essays over and over though, so it’s not as awful as it sounds.</p>
<p>Mine took a long time but mostly done over my two weeks of Christmas break. The “long” essay took about four hours to write but I was able to use edited versions of it for all four boarding school applications. The short answers were the hardest because there wasnt a lot that could be reused. I have spent at least 20 hours so far on St George’s and am just about ready to give up on it. I feel like it will never be good enough and knowing how few spots there are for the grade, it just seems pretty hopeless.</p>
<p>I spent a day for every essay. And then it took me a lot of hours to revise it. An Exeter student once told me that he had revised his application essays for twenty times.</p>
<p>I spent a very long time on each one. However, I did it very gradually. Starting on Thanksgiving break, I would sit down and write a little bit of each essay. I tend to get bored if I stick with the same task for hours, so alternating between essays helped me stay focused. The best thing that I did, though, is I would write a draft, wait a few days, and then go back to edit it. A few days later, everything looks different, and a turn of phrase that might have originally sounded clever can now sound just bad. I repeated that waiting and editing process until around the middle of December, when I started to get edits from my mom, who knows a lot about how to write a great essay due to her years at the University of Chicago, and my aunt, who went to Columbia and now teaches English. What I would do is email my essays to my mom, she would highlight things and take things out and write notes, and then email it back to me. I read through her edits, made the changes that I agreed with, and then emailed them to my aunt. And repeat. And repeat. I must have done that around 8 times, no joke! Anyways, the whole thing took ages, but I am very proud of my essays :)</p>