These are very good advices. However, they also tell you how broken our system of college admissions is. “Success” essentially requires a student to be a good “salesperson” (in selling him-/herself), or to be able to hire someone who can sell his/her story.
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That’s how it works for finding a job though too. IMO, a student does need to be able to sell themselves, both for college admission and beyond.
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Yes, but the student isn’t even an adult. Besides, salesmanship isn’t necessarily a quality that’s essential for all professions.
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Yes, no way you can cram in every criteria you think matters (or in this case that Yale has called out) in an essay or interview. But I do think it is relevant to understand what the colleges are telling you is important and start from there vs starting from a point of what is important to me or I am most proud of. Ideally there is overlap, but sometimes there is self-indulgence which is not to the applicant’s benefit.
With my kids and friends who I informally help, my advice has been, “what are you trying to get across to school X to make you desirable in their eyes” then what are the anecdotes and factual achievements to substantiate this vs throwing some type of story on the wall and trying to fit criteria to the story. Essays, for better or worse, are not an exercise in creative writing. It is a sales pitch so work on what you are pitching first and then substantiate it.
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Yes, not every job is a “sales job” per se, but there are very few vocations where clear concise communications of points you want to make are not beneficial. You are “selling” or trying to persuade people of your ideas/opinions/conclusions.
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Agree that college application essays should not be “an exercise in creative writing”.
Nevertheless, a college application can be carefully or skillfully composed revealing writer traits in a subtle manner.
I agree that ability to communicate well is highly desirable. It’s certainly essential in some professions such as in politics, lawyering, or investment banking. But it isn’t essential in all professions. When college admissions are based on such a criterion, it distorts, for at least some students, what is necessary to succeed in college and beyond. Maybe it isn’t a coincidence that some of these colleges produce a disproportionate number of politicians and investment bankers.
Ok, so my daughter is a STEM person. She worked at a well known research institute in Boston right after graduation. She is now a PhD candidate in a top program on the West Coast. She has always been grateful for the emphasis on writing at her LAC. She has consistently gotten high marks/feedback for her presentations (written and oral) for her projects. Sometimes the presentation was to colleagues/academics and sometimes it was to companies that had commissioned the studies. Was she selling a product or a service, no, but she was putting together a case for her findings and what they could subsequently lead to. I think that many people would be more successful at their jobs if they were more effective communicators and I am not talking about traditional sales, marketing, legal, consulting, political or banking jobs. This is why I am a huge fan of liberal arts education and why I believe engineer/STEM types would serve themselves well to take courses in critical thinking and persuasive writing. Conversely, I always felt humanities types should have some training in quantitative analysis.
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Go to a career center at any school and one of the first things they will work with a student on is their “elevator pitch.” Students need to be able to communicate their strengths at a job fair very quickly, for any career. College applicants need to be able to do the same with their application.
There are plenty of less selective schools that admit by stats alone but for the most competitive schools in the country, that are usually discussed on CC, essays matter. For better or worse, students need to figure out what their schools are looking for and what they need to communicate in their essays.
I always encourage students to look up the mission and vision statement for the schools on their list. There are lots of clues about what schools want in their student bodies in those statements.
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I don’t disagree with anything you said. My son is also in STEM and is a good writer. I often tell him that he needs to communicate and convince others of his ideas even if they are the best ideas. On the other hand, I know too many really brilliant people who aren’t great (or even good) communicators. They rather spend all their time on what really interest them. We all have only finite amount of time and energy. At least for some people, some really brilliant people, the best use of their time and energy is to focus on what they’re really good at, for themselves, and for the society. That’s what they think. And maybe they’re right.
Mike Tyson was an effective communicator.
But in an academic setting, effective communications means effective writing.
Academic writing is very different from what’s required for college admissions.
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It is all about communicating effectively in writing.
Writing in a clear & concise manner works for both college essays and research papers.
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Academic writing (research papers, proofs, etc.) has its own unique style. Some colleges require students to take courses on academic writing and presentation for their disciplines, regardless of how good writers they are.
Agree and I understand.
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I am not sure if you want us to take what you wrote, literally, but here is my take -
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Definitely be yourself in your essay. If you can’t be recognized in your essay and applications, it can be especially hard to cut through the many applications.
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Although you are correct that “many” schools have specific guidelines on how a student should be rated, if a student is memorable, interesting and likable - those ratings creep up a bit in each category. Humans are doing the work.
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Intellectual Vitality - Not from my experience, although it would be in the top 5 at top schools, probably.
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…or even hire someone who can create his/her story. Many of my daughter’s peers had college consultants that planned out their whole high school lives, including summer research, camps etc (Bay Area super competitive public). These are lovely, smart, personable teenagers. We didn’t believe in this type of “grooming” (this is not the right word but it’s also not really consulting so I don’t know what to call it) and it created alot of stress for my daughter primarily due to peer interactions.
As for college essay writing vs research paper writing. @1NJParent and @Publisher are both right in that clear and concise writing is imperative but there is a also a little bit of a sales pitch involved. As an experimentalist, our data is our data but how we interpret it and the significance we choose to afford it is where the sales pitch comes in. I don’t see how a clear and concise essay about what an unpleasant human being one is would be a successful tool in college applications.
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I think one criteria is that an AO would rather admit someone who is interesting and engaging, all else being equal. (Of course, all else is never equal, I do realize). But once you have the impressive academics and ECs – and tens of thousands of kids have them – I do think AOs want to have interesting, engaging, and interested people making up their classes. I do believe in “thinking outside the box” and writing an essay that the AO hasn’t already read a million times before yours. I remember one CC poster a few years ago wanted to write about their hobby of riding a unicycle, including that they loved teaching others to ride. This sort of thing is the icing on the cake – if this kid had the academics etc, then wouldn’t you want someone who was riding around campus on a unicycle and teaching other kids to do so too? And that probably was the only unicyclist the AO came across that year.
My oldest son wrote one of his supplemental essays on how he was a news junkie, and how he read the BBC, Al Jazeera, the NY Times, etc every day. There was more to the essay than that, but it wasn’t the kind of EC that was organized or others did, but in fact it was something that was very important to my son, took a fair amount of time, and also told you something about him. All else being equal, wouldn’t you want someone who was very engaged with world events and who wanted to talk about them on your campus? Again, this wasn’t his main essay, and is “icing” not the cake, but when you get into fine gradations I think you want to be perceived as someone who adds more than just academics to a campus.
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100%. You need to engage the AO reader and in a direction that makes you desirable as part of the school community. The canned essay about a curated EC is not going to be as effective as the piece about your son being a news junkie. To me that tells a lot about his curiosity, openness to different viewpoints and healthy fundamentals in critical thinking, qualities that are attractive to almost all schools.
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I agree with @BKSquared in that it is how one communicates rather than what one communicates. Embedded in the essay as described by @BKSquared are important qualities which are attractive to competitive admissions schools.
I do not think that the activities–unicycle riding & news addiction–were as important as the personal qualities revealed through the essays.
I do agree that the activities present the applicants as interesting persons to read about and that unusual activities help to capture the reader’s interest.
Nevertheless, an applicant could write a compelling college application essay about a broken shoelace if it revealed attractive personal qualities such as intellectual curiosity and openness, etc.
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