It’s early January. College applications are due in 48 hours, and your applications are complete—except for the essay.
Why not? Perhaps you fear writing something that will not match the record displayed throughout the rest of the application. Perhaps because of the difficulty of capturing your personality on a single sheet of paper. Or maybe you still are waiting for an original idea—something that will prompt the admissions officers to place your application in their “great thinkers of the 21st century” folder.
You call a friend. “…Oh, you’ve already finished your essay,” you say. “Me? Oh, I’m almost there. Just have to finish thinking of a topic…What did you write about?…No kidding. The electoral college. Nice choice…”
You want to say something about yourself, but you don’t want to sound pretentious. You want to show them you’re different—better even—than the next applicant, and you want to show it on a single sheet of paper. You want to show them you’re funny, or creative, or bright, or athletic, or ambitious. You want to let them know that you deserve to go to their college.
The intent of this book is not to give advice. Nor is it a how-to guide. Instead, it is intended to inspire by way of example.
With that said, we will now offer three bits of somewhat ambiguous advice—which we hope the rest of this book serves to illustrate:
First, try not to accomplish too much in your essay. Less is more.
Second, poor essays make a big deal out of nothing (e.g., learn to respect mankind from serving as captain of JV basketball), and successful essays take respectable accomplishment and keep it in perspective.
Finally, be loose. This doesn’t mean writing a string of jokes. On the other hand, write for admissions officers, not for the law review. Keep it simple, easy to follow, and “be what thou art”—a high school student.
Throughout this book, we have attempted to illustrate that a successful college application essay need not be produced by a gifted writer—otherwise this would be a very short book. We could not, of course, resist including a number of essays written by talented writers; however, we also strove more to include essays that stood out for other reasons. And these, we believe, deserve greater attention simply because they illustrate what can be done with a little creativity and a little thought. And that, more than anything, may be what separates the average essay from the successful one.
After almost every essay, you’ll find a “Comment” written by one of the professional admissions officers or counselors who helped us with our selections. In the text, they are identified by their initials; their full names can be found on page viii–ix.
The essays in this book are those that college and high school officials as well as the editors of this book have selected as outstanding, successful, unusual, or exceptionally thoughtful. The purpose of the book is simply to expose students to various techniques in essay writing and to illustrate that there is no one type of essay that should or should not be written.
—THE EDITORS