My parents are convinced that my college admissions counselor is basically the best thing to ever happen to me, and they want me to use her edits for pretty much every essay. The only issue is that her edits are absolutely awful–remove my original voice, contain numerous grammatical mistakes, etc (PM me and I can send comparisons; it’s VERY clear to anyone with a grasp of the English language). My college admissions counselor has decades of previous experience, but she’s not competent at all as a writer. Nothing I say can seem to sway them (they think my schoolmates are too dumb to know how to distinguish between quality essays, they think that the errors are just “minor issues” without realizing that they change the fundamental flow and structure, etc). Now that I’ve been deferred from Yale using essays that I wrote, they’re convinced that I’m fundamentally unable to write anything of sufficient quality to get admitted to any college. How do I convince my parents to use my own essays for the rest of my schools?
If all else fails: create your own essays, let her edit, and submit.
Follow up with your admissions counselor at each school, and explain your situation. They will understand, or at least should–something similar happened with me and WUSTL, and they gladly let me turn in my actual essay because they wanted me to present myself as I wanted.
No one else should be writing your essays. And how do your parents even know what edits the GC has suggested? Meet with the GC without your parents to get the suggestions on your essays. Decide which advice to take. Submit the essay as you want to after that. (You might tell your GC that your parents are interfering with your essay process, and that you feel it is unethical given that they are supposed to be your essays – the GC may be able to get them to back off).
Show your essays to a trusted English teacher and see what he/she says. Certainly all of the essays should all be in your voice expressing what you want to say.
Please do read the thread above. @pocrocodro has had a ton of great advice, and his thread immediately came to mind when I saw this one. You can pm me if you like, I have helped many students with essays.
We hired a private advisor for my daughter. Though she knew what she was doing with everything else, my daughter thought the advisor’s suggested edits for the essay were not good. I agreed. A private advisor might be very knowledgable, but that doesn’t make them a great writer. Your voice is the one that matters. Stick to your guns, and try some of the ideas suggested in the thread in post 1.
You have to check a box on the common app that asserts that all work in your application is your own before you submit. Your college consultant must know this. Using her work in place of your own would be unethical. Can you show this to your parents?
Our GC told us one cautionary tale of a charming, sincere essay edited into oblivion by third parties. The result for the applicant was not good.
I tend to be stubborn about my essays when I first finish writing them. I didn’t agree with most of the comments my teacher made. But after taking a break from my essays and reading them again, I saw what my teachers meant.
