Here's what NOT to do if you want your college essay to be more meaningful False stabs at a meaningful essay go like this: Try to make your writing sound like someone else's, preferably that person you know who got into Harvard early. Write it with one hand the night before it's due while picking your toes and scrolling google for quotes by famous people that feel even marginally applicable. Flip out about it and decide that you have to write with overwhelmingly convoluted lyric sentences and complete absence of ego. OK, now we got that out of the way, go for a walk. Then-- Here's what to do if you want your essay to be more meaningful Remember that you matter. Period. Decide that being stressed out about one more thing purely because everyone else is or tells you to be is boring. Decide you will not treat your college essay merely as something to have completed. Do not aim to use fancypants vocabulary words you would not use if talking to a good friend about a complex movie you loved. Slow down the writing process a little. Ask yourself what you would write about if you knew you would be listened to and understood. Write in order to be listened to and understood. Ask yourself how many things that you do in life are meaningful to you personally. If the list is short, why? Ask yourself what the most true thing is at this moment for you. What makes you sit up, stand up, rev up, tear up? Challenge yourself to describe a scene from your life with skin-tingling presence. Don't check social media accounts while writing your essay. This correlates with spikes in incomplete thoughts, and dips in contentment levels. Share your work with people who don't HAVE to read it, and ask them if they are moved. Then, talk about what you wrote. Drink a hot beverage you love, and go find some grass to look at. Some insects are living out their whole lives in that grass, at this very moment, not giving a damn. Give less of a Continue Reading …
deeper meaning
Have Essay, Will Travel
It is exciting when I get to travel with my students for the long haul. Francesca, an irreverent and deeply talented student I first taught when she was in 8th grade, is now a writing colleague and itinerant scholar. She's left school, again (yes, you can leave school for good reasons)...to travel and write and to write about travel as a state of mind. Here's just a fraction of her story, and how her college essay became an important touch-stone on a journey of inner and outer travel that is not yet done. Francesca obligingly wrote this for you, as a case in point that your college essay can be so much more than a thing you write to get into college. (It also makes me pleasantly squirmy to be a protagonist/antagonist in such a fine story). Francesca's College Essay Story Travel Back When I walked into Sara’s house in the summer before my senior year of high school, late for our meeting and out of breath, I had no idea what I wanted to write my college essay about. Sara offered me a plate of avocado toast, and as I ate, she had me free write on a couple on prompts. I had seen Sara infrequently over the past few years, but in 2009, when I was in eighth grade, Sara and I had travelled around Europe and Northern Africa together. For a school year, she had homeschooled my sister and me, teaching me English, writing, history, Latin, and anatomy. We had spent many hours together most days of the week. Our year of traveling felt simultaneously central to my identity and far removed from my real life. It was like a dream that I couldn’t fully remember, but that continued to affect me in my waking hours. That is, it was like a dream I couldn’t fully remember until I sat down at Sara’s kitchen table with a slice of avocado toast and realized that, of course, my personal statement would have to be about our trip. Revision and Remembering I was very proud of the essay I wrote with Sara. I had never worked on a piece of writing so intensely, though I loved to Continue Reading …
“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 …