<p>I’m going to give an unpopular opinion: these essays are ridiculous and that is probably the reason your son understandably has no interest in completing them.</p>
<p>My oldest spent months writing those essays and she was accepted to several tippy top schools, but the process was like pulling teeth. It was painful, boring, and she ended up hating some of the schools because of the sheer number and stupidity of their application essays. In the end, she wouldn’t even consider some of the acceptances she received, because she just didn’t want to attend a school that would ask her those silly questions.</p>
<p>Interestingly, she actually had fun writing the essays for one of the top tech schools to which she was accepted. I asked her why that one had gone so smoothly and she said “they asked me the right questions.” So, the essay requirements told her something about the school culture and if she might like it there. Those “overcoming obstacles” and “greatest influence” standard type essays simply drove her nuts.</p>
<p>My son, who hates to write, learned from his sister’s experience and only applied to two schools. He wrote a crappy essay to his top choice school and was accepted with merit money.</p>
<p>I agree with you, anneroku.
I just have to wonder how much weight the AdComs really give to essays. After reading hundreds or thousands of them, don’t they just sort of blend into each other, with only the really good or really bad standing out?</p>
<p>Shouldn’t the kid’s four year record of grades and accomplishments count for a whole lot more than an essay? And for kids like my little computer geek child, creative writing isn’t his forte. (He wrote an essay about mathematics, which my get varying marks depending on who reads it. If the reader is a techie, great. If not, not so good…)</p>
<p>Don’t nag, it will only make him more reluctant or make things tense around the house. You don’t have him home for much longer if he’s going away to school and you want to enjoy that time with him. I say this from experience. I’d make sure he’s aware of the deadlines and that’s it. Let it go and let him own it.</p>
<p>He’s a good student and he’ll get the essays done if he wants to get the essays done. My experience with DD has been that if she really wants something, she gets the application in ahead of time. Those she’s maybe not as keen on, she procrastinates.</p>
<p>I also agree with others who said that he may still be mulling the essays over in his head. That’s what I do. I can’t sit down and write if I don’t. DD writes when the spirit hits her, when she’s “on” as starbright said, and if she’s not in the zone, she’s blocked in a sense.</p>
<p>You’ve got a great kid who has accomplished alot already. Have a little faith in him and enjoy the rest of the time you have with him at home. Happy holidays to you and your family!</p>
<p>Look at it this way, if he never gets them done he’s going to UVM honors and he probably knows that. That alone can take some pressure off of you. My son never finished the flagship U application. He ended up going where he wanted to go, but three years later now that his younger brother is going through applications he mused about whether he should have finished it just to say he’d been accepted there. Remind your son of the deadlines, remind him if he doesn’t get a few more apps done then he won’t have a choice in the spring and that is about all you can do.</p>
<p>Quite often, I mull whole themes, paragraphs, sentences, words, for days before putting pen to paper. the fact that your son has not yet written out a word does not necessarily mean that he is not thinking about the essay.
You might help out by brainstorming, asking him about what he thinks of writing about, as opposed to asking why he has not written anything yet.</p>
<p>By the way, the essay which I liked best was the one S took the least amount of time writing, and the last he wrote. Perhaps it had been percolating, or perhaps it was not overcooked.</p>
<p>Is it a boy thing? I wondered. I agree these essays are dreadfully hard to write: writing a creative, funny, reflective, and oh-so confidant essay when you’re a 17 year old dealing with tons of other distractions (academic, social, ECs, etc.) puts a lot of pressure on kids. I’m certain I never had to write those apps when I applied in the late sixties, and I wasn’t nearly as involved or as academically aware as my son.</p>
<p>As for my own son: those apps didn’t get written until recently. I didn’t nag him, he knows the deadlines. He just had to get geared up to go again after learning he was deferred. So consider yourself lucky because at least your son is in *one *school. We have to wait until April to find out.</p>
<p>I can sympathize with your son right now
I was accepted into my early action school, and while it isnt a top choice of mine, I wouldnt mind going there. But once I get the acceptance letter, I’ve kind of lost all the motivation I had to work on for my top-choice schools - the schools I was so anxious to get into a few months ago!</p>
<p>But I also think its part of my own nature. Even for school essays, I usually dont start until the night before, and the method usually works out for me because I’ve found that I do my best work under pressure. Sometimes I cant motivate myself unless I know there is a deadline coming up. </p>
<p>So maybe its not such a bad thing that I have eight days left and seven more essays to write…haha</p>
<p>Concerto3: Stop kidding yourself. Some people may do better than others under pressure, but nobody does their “best work under pressure”. I think it’s safe to say that for most of us, we do our best work after careful planning and preparation.</p>
<p>*The best advice I feel I can give is: He got into his safety, so leave the rest up to him. *</p>
<p>Excellent point. If he want to apply to those other schools, he’ll do the essays. If he’s satisfied with his safety, then he’s not motivated to do his essays.</p>
<p>I defend concerto3 on this one. My daughter by far does her best writing under pressure…she has learned that over the years and it works very well for her (though no doubt she’s processing what she’ll write before writing it, sometimes subconsciously). Some of my own professional writing (ie. research journal articles) comes best very very close to a deadline. Not at all the case that everything requires careful planning and preparation. It very much depends on the task at hand and the person doing it.</p>
I think they are pretty boring to read too. The GW admissions officer practically begged us to use the “write your own prompt” option. I think part of the reason my younger son has been enjoying the essays is that he’s had some less common questions. For Georgetown SFS he had to write about a world problem he thought needed fixing and for Chicago the prompt he chose was “How did you get caught? (Or not as the case may be.)” For Tufts he gets to contimplate US history if we had lost the battle of Yorktown.</p>
<p>He has already written an essay that he can use (but still has some other supplementary ones to write, but, still, the main one is done).</p>
<p>If you talk to him at all about the essays, I would emphasize that getting the mediocre one in by the deadline is better than not sending one at all, if it comes to that. Your son has a lot of things going for him and I doubt the essay quality matters all that much.</p>
<p>I have two who have gone to or are going to top colleges. They both got their essays done and applications in after Christmas.</p>
<p>My third, like Northstarmom’s child, is not applying at all. I did see her at the computer today looking at a school, so maybe very late in the game she will apply to it. But if she doesn’t, that’s fine with me. Better to wait a year and go when she is more enthusiastic, enthusiastic enough to do the work of applying.</p>
<p>starbright: As I said, some people may do better than others under pressure. Unfortunately, most people that wait until the last minute end up with a something that looks like they wrote it at the last minute. Still, I’ve heard that many schools only look at essays if someone is borderline. I don’t know, but I certainly appreciate the schools that don’t require essays.</p>
<p>I’m the OP and I just wanted to thank everyone for their thoughts and encouragement. Reading your comments made me feel a lot less anxious. I do have a lot of confidence in my son and I know he will pull something out at the last minute that will be good, if not great. One of the suggestions, to encourage him to write something personal and assure him I wouldn’t read it, really struck a chord with me. There is one particular topic related to his father that I know would be good material for him. His sister used it for her essay and had no problem showing it to me for comments, but he’s a different kid and I think he might hold back if he thought I’d be reading it. I’m going to discuss it with him today (luckily we don’t celebrate Xmas!) and see if that helps motivate him. He’s a good writer and it would be a leap of faith on my part not to edit it before he sends it, but at this point I think it may be what’s needed.</p>
<p>MichaelsMother: Kudos to you! After all, it’s only a few more months until our kids will NOT have us looking over their shoulder and kicking their butts to get things done. It’s soooooo hard to let go!</p>
<p>OP- I am in a very similar situation. My D is also in at UVM Honors but it is not her top choice. She has her main essay done but is dragging on the supplements. I think it is better for her to see if she wants to go somewhere different than UVM that the rest needs to get done. </p>
<p>Wishing you and us both luck before New Year’s Eve!</p>
<p>Update: Common App essay still not written but some progress on the supplements. I’m trying to maintain a sense of humor about the whole thing. I hope this will make a great story one day (with a happy ending)!</p>
<p>Chill, MichaelsMother. I didn’t write my college essays until the day they had to be postmarked. I still got into all of the colleges that I applied to, and that included 3 Ivies.</p>
<p>^ Can you please tell my dad that? He’s yelling at me that I’m the most useless, irresponsible daughter in the world and that I’m a disappointment who will never go to college because I have two ‘Why Us?’ essays of a paragraph each left. With everything else done, dusted, mailed, edited (multiple times) and set.</p>
<p>Yowser, a kid has done 8 applications and has 7 more to do. Ouch! No wonder these kids are stressed. </p>
<p>There are two things that have helped us navigate some of these steps: Me confessing my issues by saying “I know you are feeling fine about where you are but this being unfinished is causing me tremendous anxiety. I’m getting all psychotic and frazzled – so, do me a favor. In the next two hours either finish an essay or clean your bathroom so that I feel like some kind of progress is being made on some front.” Then I LEAVE (if you stay, they follow you around to open negotiations). </p>
<p>I don’t know why teens (or just my teens perhaps) don’t want to mess with the bathroom cleaning – but I have gotten a ton more compliance when we have Option A being a task and Option B being clean the bathroom. They almost always go for Option A. Cleaning the bathroom is such a small, reasonable thing to request (Twenty minutes, tops) – particularly if requested in a really pleasant, “lets be reasonable and fair” tone of voice. I’ll come home or in from the garden and the kid will be typing away while the damp towels are untouched. </p>
<p>My second management option is straight from dog training: small but immediate rewards with lots of praise. So I might say “I know that essay is an enormous pain. Just as soon as you get that essay done, I’ll be glad to fund tickets to Avatar for you and a buddy. Why don’t you call XX and see if he’s free tonight to go to the movies? That would be a great celebration for conquering those paragraphs.” So, if teen calls friend and sets evening time for celebration, we now have motivation this afternoon to get the essay done. </p>
<p>My kid knows me well enough that I’ll have him reschedule the movie if the essay isn’t done. No performance, no punishment (also from quality dog training) but there will be a discussion/analysis of why what should have been a win-win deal didn’t work for the both of us. </p>
<p>This is done with a light hand – it is his life and part of the process is him sorting out if he really wants this particular school. Sometimes a school falls off the list at this point because teen can’t get motivated to finish the application.</p>
