Admissions

Admissions If you need some help, check out this guide from Purdue. Sadly, one of the easiest ways to stand out is to have correct spelling and grammar. Don’t let stupid mistakes pull down the quality of your essay. Proofread this thing more than any essay you’ve ever written. If you buy through our links, we may earn an affiliate commission. icons new College Packing List Show up to your next semester ready for anything. Listen icons new The College Info Geek Podcast Learn how to be a more effective student, even while you're doing your laundry. For lots more information on applying to college, see the links on the next page. Here's a list of 42 awesome college tips to make the most of freshman year and beyond. After you’ve checked for mechanical errors, you need to go back through your essay and edit it. Look for things like consistency of tone, style, and form. Does the way the essay is organized make sense? Students use their grades and test scores to select where they apply. That means every college has a pool of applicants with similar grades and test scores. Risa C. Doherty is a copy editor and education and parenting writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Working Mother and Boston Parents Paper, among others. In a 2007 Boston magazine article, Harry Lewis, former dean of Harvard College, drew a parallel between professional essay editing and hiring an imposter to sit for the SAT. Even if they do, they certainly don’t have the same knowledge and perspective that you have. To close this gap, you need to be as specific as possible. I believe the main cause of the problem is that there’s a disconnect between what we know in our heads and what we put down on paper. As I mentioned before, it’s best to start with brainstorming. You’re trying to show who you are and what you’re about. Furthermore, they likely know nothing about the subject of your essay. You need to talk about what you learned, about how this experience changed you, and how it helped form who you are today. To do this, you need to get away from simply summarizing events. For instance, let’s say you spent a summer during your high school years doing a homestay in another country while learning a new language. Remember, you’re not Sergeant Joe Friday writing up a police report. And you’re certainly not telling your story just for the heck of it. I’m not sure how else to put this, but there are some things best left unshared in your college app. From there, get out a piece of paper and start brainstorming ideas for each. Put down anything you can think of that might work as an essay. The more ideas, the better, as you often find your best ideas only after getting the obvious ones out of the way. These are just filler words that we lean on for convenience. To craft an outstanding essay you have to get past these overused descriptions. When writing about an experience like this, it can be really easy to get wrapped up in all the cool things that happened. But you can’t forget to talk about what matters. Whether it’s one lesson or seven, you decide what to spend. We’ll make sure you get the right guidance at the right time. Once you’ve followed the process I described and have a list of, say, topics, I recommend doing a bit of free writing for each. Now, it’s certainlypossiblethat you happen to be that guy, and I definitely encourage you to highlight any uncommon experience you’ve had on your essay. For instance, if you’ve climbed Mt. Everest or visited space or helped cure a rare disease, then yeah, you should probably mention that at some point.