Your authentic voice? answer with an anecdote! The student in my college essay revising workshop tipped dangerously far back in his chair. Even the chair was nervous. "Can you look at my essay?" He called. No matter that I was in the middle of a sent-- He handed me an essay draft with tight lips. It was all about how he went from careless to caring about his school work over a few challenging years. "I don't like it." He said. "It's boring." He wasn't fishing for praise. He didn't like it. "Well, if you are bored by it, it's probably boring," I agreed. I skimmed it. Yup. Continue Reading …
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“Grandma Essay” or College Essay As Eulogy?
The "Grandma Essay" Everyone Warns You About...Is Not what you think! I'm writing to tell you a story. This story ends with a college essay that became a eulogy. It was a topic no-no turned yes-yes: the "grandma essay" your counselor warned you about. But this story started as a young, earnest kid, J, clutched a pencil, and tried to tell me, like every other gritty kid I coach has told me, that he is determined. Show me, I said. Tell me a story that shows me. Or maybe it started differently. Maybe we were eating sandwiches while we worked together, sifting through his life, looking for particulars, and he mentioned how his grandma only liked her chicken sandwich this one particular way. Uh-oh, he said "grandma." Cue the sentimental violin chorus. Now, how a person likes a sandwiches can reveal a lot about personality-- it's true. But an applicant is supposed to be careful not to focus too much on other family members in the personal essay-- right? Right, guys? And we ALL KNOW "the grandma essay" is soggy toilet paper of a topic, right? (Even if I'm personally a sucker for the elderly). But my interest came from somewhere else. My interest was peaked because of the look in his eye, the flicker that showed me that one comment about grandma had sent him to some gold-nugget inner place. Continue Reading …
How to take care of yourself right now
25 ways to take care of yourself this fall It's fall. It's frenetic. It's college application season for you or your kids or your students. It's hard to do it all. To take care of yourself feels like a luxury item that gets tossed with last year's papers. But still, you've got to take care of yourself or game over. Any of the suggestions on our list will be a perk, a plus. Pick and choose: aim to keep your body, mind and heart healthier-- and hopefully less bat-shit crazy-- as you move through coming months. Continue Reading …
Ditch cliches for a strong college essay
The worst thing you can do for your personal story is deaden it with cliches. Cliches make your reader's mind go numb. Use them too much (playing it safe?) and Admissions officers have forgotten you before they are even done reading your college essay. Even the most intense, riveting tale can lose all of its power if you tell it just like everyone has told it before you. "I couldn't believe my eyes. As she took her last breath I begged her not to go." This sort of thing. How tragic would that be? You have a powerful story to tell-- but it's so predictable that no one cares. Now, look: in human life, death is predictable. Suffering is predictable. Some mishap, some humor, transitions-- all are predictable. But that doesn't have anything to do with cliche, or how you choose to tell your reader about what happened. It's all about what details you include, where you put the focus, and what fresh images or stark descriptions you weave in. Continue Reading …
Use the Present for your essay conclusion
Where does the present fit in to your college essay? During the application process, you need to think and talk about your past-- where you came from, how you got this way-- and the future-- where you're headed, what you hope for. It's never bad to take stock like this, even if, in four years, your thinking is completely different. But the present has a very important role to play in your essay content, so read on. Good storytelling (which you should definitely practice in your essay) allows for flexible or fluid interpretation. No one will chase you down with your college essay when you are 25 and doing something completely different from what you predicted and say, "BUT YOU SAID IT WAS LIKE THIS?! YOU SAID YOU WANTED/CARED ABOUT THIS!" Don't worry about reducing your future to one personal quality or goal. Instead, stay present. What does that mean? It's kinda simple. You can't just write about that important thing that happened to you and call the essay done. Tune into yourself, and use the last third of your essay to show your reader what you're like, now. How that important event or story relates to your current self--your actions, engagements, and mindset. Make Your Past Relevant to the Present Your entire past led up to this moment, this person, this character-- you. You picked just a slice of it to share with your readers, and in a well-told story you highlighted something about yourself, some personal characteristic you made real for us, worthy of our attention. But how is that trait an important part of your life, right this very minute? For example: were you a picky kid, who didn't like to wear socks in the winter, or who wanted notebooks of only a certain color? Well, maybe the present you has a high tolerance for adverse weather, or loves things other people find challenging, or has a fine sense of design, or maybe you advise those other kids who never seem to know what to buy (that was me, thank you!), and that's your Continue Reading …
Stay Present
"Stay present!" And other grating advice... "Stay Present!" has become an instruction as common as "drink your water." Such common things are sooooo easy to ignore. It's valuable to take another real look. The most common things of all (like the Common App? like Air? Like, dare I say it, subtle kindness and subtle cruelties) are often incredibly important, but they don't catch your attention automatically. Unlike, say, that absolutely aware Meerkat, pictured above. (The Meerkat is eye-candy for your odd-animal spot. If you have one.) Reader, you may not even be 17 years-old yet, hoping your college essay will magically start (or finish) itself. Or maybe you're a parent of a kid applying to college. You've surely heard people say "stay present" or its cousin instruction, "be in the moment." Maybe you don't want to hear any more generic advice. To stay present is a virtue (in some circles), and it's not easy. But it will enrich everything. No, really. My Present is Your Present (and I'm bad at writing subheadings, so bear with me!) While I write (and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite) this one blog post, and attempt to do what I am writing about, I can hear my husband, stepsons, and 15 month-old in the boys' bedroom, jamming out to Otis Redding's "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay."-- "wastin' time" (Listen to Otis, he's so smooth. In a moment of total affection for his songs, I once told a student he was my dad. The student replied, "That's so cool!" Hmmmm.). When your aim is to "stay present", Otis croons, sometimes you have to just sit there. In our case: Sit with your self. Sit with your essay. Dig into the wildly mundane, wildly telling moment of... right now. Even if your "right now" feels pretty lame, pretty empty, pretty challenged. You get to cut right through that stuff. To the essence. The essence is NOT lame, is NOT challenged. The essence is something about yourself-- about all of us-- my present, your present, The Present-- Continue Reading …