College Admission Essays: Tips for Telling a Compelling Story

You have probably heard the standard advice before:

"Show, don't tell."

"Choose a story only you can tell."

As a former English teacher and magazine editor, I love to work with students on their writing. College essays are "personal narrative", which is way different from the expository essays or research papers most students are used to creating for high school assignments.

I know people love lists, so for my GoLocalPDX column this week I created a bullet list of tips that will help any student improve his or her application essay.

Writing skills stick with you. Any techniques you learn now and use regularly will help you be a better writer throughout college and into your career.

6 Tips for Writing Compelling College Application Essays

This article first appeared in GoLocalPDX.com on September 17, 2014.

The college admissions essay (also known as your personal statement) is your chance to show who you are beyond your grades and test scores.

Embrace the opportunity to give the reader a sense of your personality.

Decide what characteristics you want an admissions officer to remember before you brainstorm and choose your essay topics.

Remember, this is a personal narrative—not the sort of expository essay you write for a class assignment, and definitely not a restatement of your activities and accomplishments in paragraph format.

Tip #1: Learn by Example

Read a lot of examples of well-done college essays. You will get that chance to do so if you follow this column for the next five weeks.

Tip #2: Avoid These Overused Topics

• The Trip and/or Outward Bound (how I broadened my horizons)
• My Favorite Things (a list of fluffy things that tell you I’m nice)
• Miss America (how I will work for world peace)
• The Jock (how I learned the noble value, the great lesson)
• The Three D’s (discipline, determination, diversity)
• Tales of My Success (how I overcame adversity to win the day)
• Pet or Relative Death (how I learned to value life)
• The Autobiography (I was born at a young age).

Tip #3: Drafting Do’s

• Tell a story only you can tell
• Write in first person, present tense
• Make it a slice of life – a moment in time
• Show, rather than tell
• Provide rich sensory detail
• Use metaphors
• Be very selective with adjectives
• Get the story on paper without editing (that comes later).

Tip #4: Hook the Reader with a Good Lead

Here are a few options:

• The Anecdote (dive into the story, almost mid-stream)
• The Why? (make the reader ask the question)
• The Shocker (takes the reader off balance)
• The Curmudgeon (refutes conventional wisdom)
• The Split (there are two types of people…)
• The Confession (become the reader’s confidant)
• Stating the Obvious (that was hidden).

Tip #5: A Good Ending

• Ties to the lead – but adds a deeper insight
• Is not “moral of the story-ish”

Tip #6: Revising

• Make sure the tone sounds like you (read aloud)
• Cut weak and waffle words (clearly, somewhat, rather, kind of)
• Cut (who, what, which, that, thing)
• Cut needless restatements
• Swap lazy uses of “to be”
• Swap vague verbs - become, get, do, have
• Swap passive verbs – use active voice
• Prefer punch over perfect grammar.

What Do You Want Colleges to Know About You?

The college exploration and application process requires you to learn about yourself—who you are, what you want out of your college experience, and how you can contribute to the college community. To do a great job throughout the application process, you need to share what you have discovered and be clear what you want colleges to know about you. This column explains a technique for describing those characteristics that make you special.

Off to College: Student-Parent Agreements

I am now a weekly columnist for www.GoLocalPDX.com. In my first column I talk about Student-Parent Agreements. It covers the topics of communication, money, grades, health and coming home for the holidays and summer. Most importantly, it explains why parents with college students need a signed FERPA Release, HIPPA Authorization Form, and Advance Care Directive for Health Care. Read the full story here.

How to Request and Get Fabulous Recommendation Letters

This article first appeared in GoLocalPDX.com on September 10, 2014.

Yikes! Colleges will see a letter about you that you didn’t get to see. You won’t know what it says and you have to trust the writer to help you put your best self forward. How can you increase the odds that your recommender will write a detail-rich letter that reinforces the characteristics you want colleges to know about you. 

Follow this step-by-step process

Many colleges and scholarships require or allow letters of recommendation. They help the application reader paint a mental picture of you beyond your grades and test scores. Since they are an important component of the college application process, help your recommenders write the best possible letter by making it easy for them.

You may request up to five letters. One will definitely be from your high school counselor. Two will be from academic subject teachers. Ideally one academic letter will come from a humanities teacher (English or social studies) and one from a math or science teacher.

These need to be teachers from high school, and preferably they will have had you in multiple classes. You may additionally request letters from two outside recommenders such as your art, drama, or Spanish teacher, a sports coach, your boss at work, a mentor under whom you did research, your Scoutmaster, your church/synagogue youth group leader or a college professor from whom you took a class.

Each person should know you well and have specific examples/stories they can tell about you.

Only school counselors are required as part of their job description to write you a letter. Everyone else is doing you a favor.

Step 1:

Decide whom to ask. A class in which you got an A but did not have much teacher interaction might not be as strong a choice as a class in which you struggled, went for before or after-school tutoring, and really got to know the teacher.

Remember, you are looking for someone who can tell detailed stories about you. Verbally ask the person if he/she feels comfortable writing a letter for you. If the answer is no, do not press. This is an indication that the person doesn't feel they have enough to say and you will be better off with an alternate choice. If the person does say yes, you will give him/her your prepared letter.

Step 2:

Compose a letter to each teacher and outside recommender that contains the following components:

• A request for a college admission letter of recommendation
• Three extremely specific examples that you remember from your time in that teacher's classes, or your time with that adult. For example, you might describe the carton you built for your physics egg drop, the Lincoln/Douglas debate in which you came in costume and argued against slavery, or the class talk you gave explaining that some infinities were larger than others. If you are sports team captain you could remind the coach about the creative team warm-ups you led or the time you had a heart-to-heart with a team member who was rude to a competitor in the locker room.
• Tell the recommender what characteristics you are hoping to highlight in your essays. These are the three words or phrases you landed on such as "creative problem-solver, analytical and reliable."
• Find out if your recommendations are sent electronically by your school counselor or if they have to be snail-mailed. If they are going via the US Postal Service provide a list of schools, due dates, address labels and stamps.
• Ask the person to save the completed letter electronically in case you have additional places (such as scholarship opportunities) that come up later.
• Thank the person for his/her time and effort.

Step 3:

Without being obnoxious or pushy, check in with your recommenders at least two weeks before the earliest due date to be sure your letters will be sent on time.

University of Cambridge--colleges versus departments

I’m currently a graduate student at the University of Cambridge. Recently, my mother Jodi came to visit me, and she wanted to tour the school and take pictures. She asked me the classic question: ‘Where is the University?’ It’s not that simple. Buildings belonging to the University of Cambridge are scattered throughout the town of Cambridge, and while some belong to a University-wide network of infrastructure, many are the property of individual colleges. This all can be rather confusing, so my mom asked me to explain the university/colleges/departments system.

Pembroke, one of the 'old colleges'

Every student at the University of Cambridge belongs to a residential college. The University includes 31 colleges. 16 are the so-called ‘old colleges’ (founded before 1596), and the remaining 15 are ‘new colleges’ (founded after 1800). (My college is Corpus Christi; the most famous are King’s, Trinity, and St. John’s. These are all ‘old colleges.’) Your college provides housing, a dining hall, and lots of social events. They can also offer funding for travel or lessons, and many colleges have their own scholarships to help fund students’ studies. However, your college does not determine your subject. Because in some subjects, the college provides tutors for first- and second-year undergrads, a very few subjects are not offered by some colleges. However, you can study most any subject at most any college. What matters more than subject in choosing a college are history, culture, reputation, and funding. Some colleges are richer and more prestigious than others, and therefore have more money to finance student endeavors. These colleges tend to be more competitive than the less wealthy colleges. Students applying to the University indicate first- and second-choice colleges, but it is possible to get into the University but not one of the colleges you chose. In that case, you are ‘pooled’ and assigned to a college that needs more incoming students that year. A few colleges have special restrictions: three are all-female, and six are restricted to post-graduates or mature (i.e., older) students.

Corpus Christi, my college

Students tend to have a lot of pride in their college, and colleges compete against each other in all the usual sports (above all, rowing). Some colleges also have counterparts at Oxford (for instance, there’s a Corpus Christi Oxford as well as a Corpus Christi Cambridge), and annual ‘swaps’ including friendly competitions in many events are common. At the University level, the Cambridge colleges are united by a sense of superiority to Oxford, with one exception: a popular saying goes, ‘I’d rather be at Oxford than St. John’s.’ (St. John’s College has a reputation for snobbish elitism and has thereby earned the dubious honor of being Cambridge’s most-hated college.)

A sign in front of the Sidgwick site, which houses my academic department

Almost entirely separate from your college is your academic department. This is where you attend lectures and other events related to the subject you study. The departments are dispersed around Cambridge in ‘sites’—the Sidgwick site, for instance, includes English, languages, history, theology, philosophy, law and criminology. Some sites are quite far from the center of town, so colleges near those sites often contain a high proportion of people studying those subjects. Physicists, for instance, are unusually common at Churchill College, which is relatively close to the West Cambridge site (the far-from-everything-else home of the physics department).

I think that pretty much explains the university/college/department system. It’s far from the most confusing thing about Cambridge (that would probably be the slang), but it’s definitely an important structural aspect of the University to understand if you’re considering applying.

Academic Rigor and Choosing Classes

March and April are the months when high school students are most commonly asked to select their courses for the next year.

When a college evaluates your application the admissions officers read your school profile first. This document (which is provided by your school counselor) gives them context so they understand the educational philosophy of your school and what options are available to you. Admissions officers want to know the rigor of your coursework—did you take the most challenging courses available at your school in your areas of interest? You are never judged poorly for not taking something that wasn’t offered; for example, if your school does not offer AP or IB classes, the college won’t hold it against you for not taking them outside of high school. A selective college does expect you take advantage of what is offered at your high school and wants you to push your intellectual boundaries all the way through the end of your senior year.

My advice continues to be that you should not make choices just to “impress” a college. Instead, you should take the most advanced courses possible in the subjects you love. Are you crazy about languages? If you have mastered both the Spanish and French offered at your high school then sign up for Arabic or Russian at the local community or state college. Have you finished the highest level of math your school offers? Then challenge yourself with a college math class at a local school or online. Pursue your passions, and don’t get caught in the trap of taking advanced classes you don’t care about.