xiggi said:
Sounds like fun. Great idea.
mathmom said:
I agree. I see it all the time. There are a few ways that adults can show students how to personalize it, make it more about self-discovery or about changing goals or values, or about enlarging one’s awareness of the world – and those are fine, and they have worked well.
I guess I can get pretty serious about all this- so, sorry. But it’s not the topic as much as the choice what to write. I never saw xiggi’s chair essay, but a kid has to ask himself it it sheds light on his app for that school. It’s not a clever hs writing assignment. The hs teacher may be thrilled you exercised your writing muscle, may laugh with you. An adcom is a stranger, wondering if you’re the right kid to admit. Give them something relevant.
“Self-discovery or about changing goals or values, or about enlarging one’s awareness of the world” are all great, when done well. Keep those in mind. They can show how you deal with a challenge can be resilient, evolve, play fair, etc. All things adcom want to know. But see, that’s about the message in the writing, not simply the topic.
A kid once shared an essay with me, something about how the old chair on the front porch was his best friend. (Must have been for the “content” topic.) That was it. How glad he was they didn’t throw it out. What does that tell an adcom? They don’t read between the lines and assume you meant this or that or have this quality or that one.
My 2 older kids’ essays were rather mundane, usual topics- one dealing with adversity and perseverance on a sports team, the other on how a summer camp focused his major interests. Neither were particularly great writers. Youngest wrote of her love of learning and how she made connections between all the classes in her daily schedule. It got her into several selective LACs and she received some personal comments from admission directors.
LF, it was in this lengthy thread: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/1672639-5-little-known-tips-for-getting-in-p84.html See post 1252 – just above yours:
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/17549915/#Comment_17549915
Fwiw, it was a quick dirty essay written without editing and was a reply to a post about writing about something that might appear trivial on the surface.
As far as directly answering a prompt suggested by the school, my take is that a student can use different essays to project the image that shows good fits to the school in general. IMHO, essays can be used to complement each other by presenting different angles but with one common theme. How does one make him or herself likeable or interesting in the eyes of the adcom. What could be presented that would force the adcom to conclude: Boy, I’d like to meet THAT kid, and so should most of the students I just moved to the top of the pile of A for Accepted.
For that reason, I believe that more essays is better than fewer. For instance, I like the QB type of application much better than the ones that simply require listing grades and ECs. I also loved the CMC expository essay that had … no limits! I think I submitted 8,000 words! But that is just me as I see essays as one of the best opportunities to be yourself.
Son wrote about why he likes to go running very early in the morning, the things he sees and experiences only at 5 a.m. He was 8 for 9 with acceptances, and is attending his first choice.
My older son hated the extra essays with a passion. His roommate essay for Stanford stank. But younger son really enjoyed the places with optional and weird essays and did well with them. For Tufts he wrote one essay about what he learned from origami, another about feeling like a real historian while indexing the local neighborhood association papers, and the third was an alternate history of US if we’d lost the Battle of Lexington. They were able to show different facets of himself - and all of them also showed his sense of humor.
Ha, xiggi, right before me. It conveys a lot.
I’d contrast it to the ones where the kid drops his backpack to go recount the dots on his bedroom ceiling.
Now that the admissions process is over for my child, I see how terrible important the essays were in defining the student for the admissions folks at the highly selective private schools. They are faced with thousands of other applicants with 3.7 to 3.9 GPAs (or better) and 2100 to 2300 SATs (or better). What will cause that student to rise to the top of the stack instead of stuck in the middle with all of the other good students? The essay is the only voice the student can give to the adcomm reader who is otherwise faced with a bunch of numbers and facts representing another generic excellent student.
Last year’s prompt: “Describe a place or environment where you are perfectly content. What do you do or experience there, and why is it meaningful to you?” was what my child chose. I look back on the essay that was written and it is as bland as a “perfectly content” environment would be. A peaceful place is a boring place that no one wants to read about. We needed to think about the audience for that essay and give him/her something interesting to read, and not a vision of Lake Wobegone. They probably removed that prompt for this year to spare the sanity of the essay readers!
I failed to get involved in the essay process and that was a mistake. Not that I can write it but I should have had my child get some advice about the essay as it really was the make-or-break part of the application for us. This forum would have been a good place for us to have started.
edited and moved.
There are more ways to look at the prompt. For instance, it does not have to be peaceful!
A student who professes a love for the medical field and shadowed a doctor or volunteered as an EMT might very well write about the chaos at a hospital. It could straight from a recent episode of the night shift!
Actually it can be … anything and, in fact, it is a great prompt for that simple reason. Fwiw, I still believe that a small number of essays can be tailored to answer … any prompt with a little tweaking.
I do not understand all the references on EMTs when you need to be 18 in order to start the process of volunteering. How may high school students to that?
? A number of my friends have done just that. Perhaps it is regional or an issue of semantics. It is, however, not an area I know very well as I never had any interest in the medical field. Shadowing doctors is one of those buzzwords among high school kids … from what I read on this site.
FYI http://www.ems1.com/ems-news/1388199-high-school-emts-saving-lives-in-boston/
PS It was just an example E pluribus Unum!
Xiggi makes the essential point that you make the essay say what you want/need it to say rather than an exact answer to the prompt.
I had no idea that the essay did NOT have to exactly answer the prompt! Just assumed that a rejection would be guaranteed if the student failed to answer the exact question asked!
But several years ago, my son applied for (and did not win) a scholarship based solely on an essay. The prompt asked for a 500 word essay describing what the applicant had done to be a good member of the community. The winner’s essay was published. It was well over 1000 words, and was clearly written for another purpose and submitted perhaps on a whim. It was a made up tale, written in first person present tense, about going to another country as a missionary and saving a life by doing emergency surgery. Seriously, it was like “As monkeys howl in the jungle, my years of medical school flood my memory. My Nobel Prize winning research has prepared me for this moment, and I swiftly make the incision……” What the……?
Wrote about how I found a stray dog in the woods and took it home. Worked out pretty well, on both accounts.
I wrote about my experience with our local DIY punk rock scene and how one concert, in particular, made a difference in the way I felt about this subculture. Much to my parents’ chagrin, I dedicated the last four or five years to this scene. It got to the point where I was going to a concert a day, but hey–I’m proud to say punk got me into college!
Screw you UC Berkeley EECS, I just wanted my trophy admit (as it’s the only other college I applied to other than the one I got into) and allow someone else to have my spot.
After my sophomore English class in college, I think I could top it and write about introversion and how I view myself in this world.
D2 described her routine of feeding a particular “street cat” each day when she gets home from school. (Common App prompt about a place where you are content.) She worked in thoughts about growing up overseas, the symbolism of the courtyard walls, etc.
D1 wrote about her cousin’s baptism ceremony (old Common App prompt). It was a diverse group of family that she didn’t know very well, and she worked in her reflections about her own cross-cultural heritage. Both of these were well-written and subtle, and received hand-written comments on acceptance letters.
Among all the short essays, my personal favorite was D2’s description of all the tabs/programs that she has open on her laptop at any given moment, and how she jumps between tasks. It was funny, well-written but very much in her “teenage” voice, and I found it to be a clever way to give strangers a window into her varied interests in a personal/human way. I mean, don’t we all do that - have dozens of various, random things open at any given time? 
My friend wrote about baking a pumpkin pie and got into UCLA, Cornell, NYU, and more haha
Here I am, back months after I started this thread. My son showed me his rough draft for his essay. In the essay, he discussed how listening to music affects his moods and how his interest in music has changed and how it was influenced by the key people in his life. It was pretty good! He’ll have the guidance counselor or English teacher review it. I’m just glad he got something on paper and he’s happy with the idea.