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Some personal tips for College Essays

Joy Xie, [DATE]
College essays are a strange genre of writing, in my opinion. You have to tell a story, but you have to choose and subtly tune that story in some way that aligns with vague values that a college is looking for.

Some personal tips for College Essays

As a senior about to graduate, I know the writer’s block and confusion that comes during application season. In this blog post, I’m going to collect some of the tips that I personally found useful while writing college apps in the hopes that someone else will find them helpful. I don’t claim these to be the “ultimate college app hacks” or a definitive formula to write a good personal statement. In fact, most of these are based on my own experience and I’m not one of those professional college essay editors. Take this with a grain of salt!

(and in general, you should take most advice/feedback about college essays with a grain of salt—when I gave my drafts to my friends and family to read, I found that some of their feedback was valid and pushed my drafts in a good direction, but others were not very helpful)

Tip 1 - specific experiences
This was the one thing that really helped me overcome that college essay block—focusing an essay around a specific example. Before, when I didn’t focus on one specific experience and tried to squeeze a lot of small examples into my essay, I found writing to be very difficult. It didn’t feel like my essay was trying to go in any specific direction, but rather it felt too broad and shallow, making it hard to tie together.

Sometime in the middle of my application process, I started basing most of the longer (> 200 words) essays around specific experiences I had—for example, a specific tutoring experience, my school’s Linguistics Club (though this was less of a ‘specific experience’ but rather detailing the growth of my club and what I learned from it), among others.

I think going into specifics is helpful even for those broad essay prompts like “What do you want to study and why” and the personal statement type questions. It helped my essays get a clear organization structure—my organization usually looked like [essay hook], [specific experience], [what I learned from the specific experience], [explicit tie in to the prompt]—and helped me guide my essays better.

Tip 2 - conclusions!
I liked writing conclusions to my essays—they were a nice way to show the ‘impact’ of whatever I was writing about and to tie all the essays together. (by conclusion, I mean a one or two sentence “what you learned”/”how this will help you in your future college career”/“how this impacted me” sort of thing)

My conclusions usually fell into some categories:

“At [college name], I hope to continue to…” (a good way to namedrop some specific programs at your college and inject some “why college” into your essay)
“At UIUC, I hope to continue collaborating with others—and changing the world with physics.”
“As a Cornellian, I hope to continue spreading the joy of language by joining Cornell’s own linguistics club, the UnderLings (a brilliantly punny name, by the way), injecting my enthusiasm into Cornell’s learning community.”

“After all, [big idea]”
“After all, it’s at the intersections of these subjects that innovation and inspiration occurs—and I love that physics intersects with literally everything.”
“After all, laughter connects us. And at Brown, I’ll continue injecting my enthusiasm into not just my studies, but also others’ lives.”

[Thematic Metaphor]
“I’m excited to continue puzzling at MIT, whether by organizing a Mystery Hunt team or creating next year’s Aquarium Hunt. And as a Physics major, I can’t wait to tackle—alongside newfound friends—the puzzle of the Universe.” (this was the what do you do for fun prompt, where I wrote about writing crossword puzzles and puzzle hunts)
“With my juggling balls and perseverance in hand, I’m sure I can learn to juggle all the new opportunities Pomona offers.” (the what item are you excited to bring to college prompt; I wrote about my juggling balls and hobby)

Tip 3 - read successful essays
I was not good at writing personal statements before Junior year. Junior year was when I began reading a lot of college essays. In particular, one of my Senior friends (who is also a very good writer) sent me a lot of her essays to edit. So I got to read a lot of good examples of essays and absorbed a lot of good writing.

Specifically, I think reading essays from people you know is more helpful than reading those example essays you find on the internet—for me, it was helpful to be able to compare someone’s actual self with who they portrayed themselves to be in their essays.

Tip 4 - em-dashes help you save a couple words (if you need to cut down by one or two don’t want to delete anything)
I’ve found that most application portals count words in essays based on how many spaces you have, at least when I applied. A neat trick to cut down on your word count without actually losing any words is to add some em-dashes—like this. Since there’s no space between the word ‘em-dash’ and the word ‘like’, these two are actually counted as one word.

If you’re not sure how to use em-dashes, there are guides on the internet. Generally, they can replace commas, parentheses, and colons but also give more emphasis to the clause you have after them.

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