College Application Essay Examples

College Application Essay Examples If your situation is one where parents can offer opinions that are helpful and if you are the kind of student who is open to listening to suggestions, then surely parents can be good editors. Further, if you have parents who know grammar and writing conventions and can recognize flaws, go ahead and ask parents to help. In other instances, each essay is distributed to several readers, who will then compare their impressions when the admissions committee meets to decide upon student admissions. In this instance, the essay would be read by several people. Again, the number of readers for each essay would depend upon individual institutional practices. For many students, finding an objective evaluator who is not a relative to help edit the essay is the best bet. Having a degree in English and being a published writer of college planning articles, and having edited hundreds of essays for students, I would be happy to help you too. Now parents â€" you all know the difference between fixing typographical errors and making massive substantive changes to your child’s essay, right? Remember â€" the admissions officers read thousands of essays every admissions season, and they can spot an overly polished essay a mile away. So â€" yes â€" it’s fine to take a quick read to look for spelling errors, but it’s not fine to write your child’s essay for him or her. That said, if they don’t think they have enough to go on after 2 essays, you’ve got a bigger problem. It is my understanding that if essays are required by an institution, they are actually read. Essays give admission officers real insight into the applicant. You might wonder how a huge school would manage reading thousands of essays, but you can trust that they hire extra staff, if necessary, to make sure the entire application gets a close look. The number of readers depends on how “borderline” the applicant is, and the number of applicants being processed. Even colleges who say their essay is “optional,” you shoulod definitely write one. It can make all the difference in your admission decision. There are many different kinds of schools, however, so it would be impossible to know how each of them handles the essays which are submitted. I do know that some schools have a group of readers, each receiving one set of essays, with each individual essay being read by just one person. So yes, they are read by all the admissions officers, particularly the ones who oversee your county and region. If you send more than the one supplemental essay suggested, there’s no guarantee they’ll read themâ€"unless they don’t think they have enough to go on. The tone could be funny or sad, reflective or poignant, but you NEED that reader to like you, so that they would support your application in admissions. If your essay does not reveal some sense of your best personal qualities are i.e. maturity, leadership or compassion then it has failed. Few things are as eternal as the search for the great college essay. But given the range of factors that go into the decision making process, it is hard to know if the “successful” essays ones really tipped the balance. There is a funny article in “The Daily Beast” by Kristina Dell that shares the anecdotes of college admissions counselors from this year’s record batch of applications. Many of the anecdotes revolve around silly or even comical things students do during the course of the college admissions process. The majority of these anecdotes are drawn from ridiculous mistakes college applicants make in their college essays. The ultimate point of a college essay is to engage and hopefully convince the reader that you would be an asset on that campus. You need the essay to wow them with your personal qualities while sharing an engaging story, perhaps- a snapshot of your life. That being said, the essay is something you can control so you want to make it good. Quite simply, a great college essay helps illuminate who you are. The worst things you can do is write an essay that is generic, one where if your name was replaced by another, the reader could not tell the difference. The people in the admissions office are trying to learn about you and the essay is often the last chance you have to shape their impression and understanding of you.