Conquer The College Essay

Conquer The College Essay If you chose your essay prompts correctly, hopefully you can use an essay or two from here for some of your remaining school essays. Map out all essay prompts for UC applications and all regular decisions schools. Decide on schools to apply to for early admissions. Although you don’t have to make final decisions for your college list yet, you want to have a number of schools that you’re stoked to apply to and will stay on your college list. The earlier you can accomplish this, the earlier you can start on the rest of the application work. Acceptance into college is dependent on your strengths and academic abilities. To help youth applying to college navigate the college essay in order to submit their best work with their college application. Your goal should not be to include all of your accomplishments and activities . The most engaging essays tell a story and have a clear focus. A thoughtful and detailed narration of a difficult time in your life tells far more about you than a list of competitions won and honors achieved. Read the top 147 college essays that worked at Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, and more. The overall workload here is really dependent on your college list, so if your list isn’t as ambitious, some of the timelines above might not apply to you. Do online research, visit campuses if possible, check out schools on CampusReel, attend college fairs, talk to alumni, etc. This is about you figuring out where it is you can academically flourish. Remember, in the grand scheme of the college admissions process, the application essay is a unique opportunity â€" and an opportunity to be unique. Don’t rely on spell check alone to catch all of your mistakes, either. If you choose not to disclose your disability in your essay or college application, remember, you may still disclose at any point after you are accepted into the school. You will need to do this to receive any of the accommodations and support services that you might need to be successful. Discuss how your disability has made you the person you are today. Emphasize how it has made you stronger, think outside the box, or overcome adversity. Do not focus on the things you cannot do or highlight your weaknesses. The main point here is that getting a head start and planning your essay workload is essential to limiting how stressful the college application process needs to be. Make sure to get these done early so that you give yourself a lot of time to work on the remaining regular decision supplemental essays. Be sure you are using the correct form of words too (they’re, their, there, your, you’re, etc.). Few things will throw off an application evaluator more than misspellings and typos in the college essay â€" except when you mention the wrong college! Don’t tell us how much you want to attend XYZ University when you are submitting the essay to The College of ABC. While it is important to talk yourself up as the awesome student you truly are, you still have to remember that the application essay is not a résumé. You can certainly submit a résumé with your application, but your essay is not the place to do it. We want you to expand upon a few characteristics that make you great, not just give us a list with the thousand and one things that contribute to your greatness. This way, we are able to fully grasp why these particular characteristics, out of the many you could have selected, are so important to you and who you are as an individual. Besides, that other essay would go on forever, and, as I mentioned, we read thousands of these things each year. Any uncovered dishonesty would have serious consequences on your future. Anyway, writing about something due to of personal experience will be much easier than writing about something you have had to make-up. Craig is a college admissions coach and founder of CollegeMeister. He previously held university admissions and high school college and career counseling positions in Baltimore, West Palm Beach, and Rio de Janeiro. A thoughtfully crafted essay and a clean, clear application can make a tremendous difference in the college admissions process.