Okay. Now I understand your recommendation to “give schools what they want”. To me, that is akin to “follow the prompt”.
It is clear from the rest of your comment above in post #19 that you understand.
Thank you for the clarification.
Oh, no. The schools did not write the Common App prompts. This is the one situation where the prompts should be considered VERY loose guidelines. Hopefully your personality meshes with what the school wants outside the prompts, but faking that isn’t helpful. What good are admissions to schools where your personality isn’t a good fit?
I always wonder whether these “good” essays actually helped with admissions success or the kids were successful in spite of them?
I guess it’s impossible to know for sure how/if essays helped, but in my son’s case I believe they definitely helped.
(FWIW I’ve used this basic philosophy to help hundreds of students who wound up at top-20 schools. No way to know how much the essays contributed to their admissions success, of course, and no way for me to prove it even if I cared to do so, but my track record is pretty hard to beat, and I only got out of that biz because my SAT prep responsibilities grew too time-consuming to do both.)
You can count on top colleges wanting a lot of the same qualities: seeing and taking on a challenge, resilience, self awareness, the right sorts of drives, and (much) more. And understanding the basics is part of matching yourself, not just, “Here I am. I want you.” My nag is a warning against the typical focus on what the kid wants, missing that the college has goals for the class.
It’s not faking. If a college wants a level of, say, activation, you have it or you don’t. If you have it, show it. Choose to. Not writing about something off the top of your head, meaningful to you, maybe, but not going to advance your chances.
“Global” doesn’t only mean international. It can refer to one’s perspective (another magic word,) as opposed to just the “me” or “my high school success” most think (eg, misunderstandings about “passion.”)
Marvin, I don’t doubt your success. But you have a better idea what makes a match than most hs kids. I believe you know how to filter, to find what’s relevant, the story that shows that. Eg, no sense proclaiming one’s “intellectual curiosity” if nothing backs that up.
I run into a lot of people trying to target what a particular college is looking for (“I heard Dartmouth likes ambitious, outgoing leaders, so I want to write an essay that shows I’m an ambitious, outgoing leader,” for instance), but I’m very skeptical. Having known dozens of students who have gone to Dartmouth over the years (including my brother haha) and over two hundred who have been admitted, I can’t find any through-line like that. I’ve known shy, nerdy introverts at Dartmouth, brash, outgoing gadflies at Dartmouth, flaky creative types at Dartmouth, etc. Every college has a complex mix of students, and the notion that any school is looking for any particular qualities (other than the ones all schools are looking for) doesn’t ring true in my experience.
(One slight exception is Chicago, whose essays make pretty clear that it likes creative outside-the-box type thinkers. A soft heuristic for Chicago is if you read its supplement prompts and think, “this is going to be fun!”, Chicago might be a good fit for you, but if you read its prompts and think, “what is this nonsense?”, then it probably isn’t!)
(And of course Deep Springs is an even more special case!)
This is so true. D’s best essay was her UChicago Uncommon Essay, which she wrote in about 30 minutes. She said it just flowed for her.
While I certainly agree with the storytelling and “show don’t tell” advice, I do think it is more useful to start by identifying what it is you want to “show” about yourself, and brainstorm from there, rather than start writing anecdotes/stories without a sense of where it may be going because finding a way to connect those anecdotes can be a challenge afterwards.
I can see the difference between my kids’ process – first kid wrote a charming essay – self-deprecating, funny, sweet – but other than showing he was funny and quirky, it didn’t really “go” anywhere. Next kid reverse engineered the essay – we knew the LACs he was looking at valued diversity and he couldn’t change which boxes he checked there as an upper middle class white kid who hadn’t faced many challenges. But, he had engaged in a diverse community and school and his ECs were with diverse groups, so he connected his storytelling to showing, without explicitly saying, how he lived, and valued, a diverse community. Both kids wound up in the right spot for them, but older one – though a stronger intellect – underperformed in his LAC results, though by then, he knew he wanted big and wasn’t interested in LACs.
For the most part, I agree with Marvin in terms of the essay. Keep in mind, there needs to be “fit” between the college and the applicant. Sometimes a denial or deferral is in the kid’s best interest.
In terms of demonstrating the kid has what college wants, I think its important to look at the application as a whole. If the kid has been captain of their sport and president of their class, they don’t need to write about leadership in their essay. The essay needs to tell the broader story, fill in the gaps and show things about the kid that aren’t obvious from class choices, extracurriculars and other parts of the application (such as the short answers.)
I agree that you have to look at the application as a whole, but the essay needs to be part of a consistent narrative. I think if go about the application trying to check boxes off of qualities you think the school wants, you run a risk of submitting a seemingly contrived and disjointed application. I agree with @marvin100 in #26, top schools are full of students of various personality types. And certainly some schools are better fits for certain students based on academic resources and focus, size of institution, geographic location, social scene, etc… But I think it is a mistake to pretend to be someone you are not or even highlight something of marginal interest or accomplishment because you think that is what the school wants. Highlight your strengths, what makes you, you. If you are the captain of a sports team and/or the president of the student body/class, sure it is listed in the activities section of your application, but if that is an important part of who you are, you should highlight why it is important to you and what you have done to earn and further this responsibility (“show, not tell”). To this end, if you have a trusted friend, mentor, relative, it’s not a bad idea for them to review the entire app, and give you feedback on whether the app is a true representation of who you are (of course in a positive way).
It’s not about personality types but what one does/has done. That comes from the attributes. You have the vision and can climb out of the narrow hs box/hs thinking or not. You stretch or not. You impact others or not. You’re open to new experiences or not.
Many on CC claim it’s a crapshoot. Posters also say just to be who you are. But that’s not matching yourself to what they look for. It’s not pretending to be something you aren’t. It’s about being what they look for. Or your chances go down. Showing it. All along, not just in a essay where you proclaim or look for some fuzzy example.
I’m surprised we repeatedly call this bending oneself or faking. You either are or are not the sort they seek. Imo, it’s useless to advise kids to lean back, when top colleges want to see energy and willingness, among other things. You don’t need to cure cancer (not what they look for,) captain the team, collect titles, show great ambitions, etc. You do need to be activated in the right ways. Or revise your expectations.
Same as wanting some job. You match or you don’t. You get the experiences they want.
This is right, of course, but I struggle to see how it’s useful, since there’s no way to tell what adcoms are seeking and they’re seeking a diverse class made up of all types. Even Wharton and Stern, bastions of go-getter biz culture, take plenty of introverted quant types, as I see almost every year–I knew a kid who got into Wharton with a Personal Statement about being more comfortable running regressions than running a study group (it worked, imo, because he had interesting and engaging stories about both).
The one thing I’d like to emphasize that I didn’t put in my initial post is that finding your best stories is hard. When I was doing app consulting, it was a huge part of my work with my students–I’d give them dozens of writing assignments and have lots of 1:1 meetings to try to tease the most interesting stories out of them, and they often had a hard time evaluating their stories’ “interestingness” on their own. Students I know who do it successfully without much outside help are the ones who start early and start with lots of general introspection and free writing about their life experiences. You never know where the best stories are going to come from, and they can come from anywhere.
And of course, every now and then a kid would ask, “why can’t I just make up a story?” My first response is “don’t be dishonest,” of course, but for people who aren’t swayed by (what I consider) basic ethics, I add this: “Making up great stories is even harder than relating true ones, and very few people are genuinely good at it–they’re called fiction writers, and almost none of them are teenagers. You’re probably not one.”
Circling back to agree that it is not about “pretending” to be something other than what/who you are, but about finding a “narrative” that makes sense of who you actually are. My kid who “over achieved” in terms of merit, had a clear story about himself, as shown through his deep involvement in art and athletics both inside and outside school, and could mine his experiences to show how he would be a desirable classmate, roommate, student, peer.