Want to find your best material to start your college essay?

x

Enter your email address, and the guide is yours, free!

  • Skip to content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Essay Intensive

  • About EI
  • Services
    • Admissions Essay Support
    • Tutoring Plus
    • Homeschool Reimagined 2020-2021!
  • Featured Essay
  • What They’re Saying!
  • Blog
  • Contact
  • Login

brainstorming

Before you write that essay about your hike…

May 17, 2019 by Sara Nolan Leave a Comment

Every year, I have students bring me that essay --the incredibly heartfelt one-- about their trip into the woods, or up a mountain. Some of these students are accomplished hikers, some total, struggling newbies. 97% of the time there are blisters in these essays. It's hard to explain to the writer that this rubs a blister in the admissions readers. But I have to try. Here's why: what you experience on the mountain top or in the mosquito-thick woods is likely very similar to what every other person who ever hiked experienced: irritation, discomfort, transcendence, appreciation, disappointment. Often, you leave with gratitude, renewed perspective. It's also very likely those two last mental states are quite short lived. That essay doesn't translate to real life! Say: until someone double-crosses you at school, or you drink soured milk your sibling put back in the fridge, or you can't get a new bus pass and you have to walk somewhere in the sheeting urban rain, or...the list of irritating things in everyday, non-hiking life that ask you to face your inner self goes on and on. Where are the woods then? Where are all those blisters and mosquitos and the high cloud vista of the craggy peaks? Admissions offers have heard that essay too many times The admissions readers have heard your story 10000000 times, maybe literally. They know you mean it-- but everyone does. They also know, because they have lived a little longer than you-- that those take-aways are often temporary. So they are looking for something more. Sorry to say: Not the cliched journey with its predictable life-lesson. So what are you to do, if that essay is burning a hole in your mind, feels like THE ONE? Find a unique angle on that essay You need to dig much, much deeper into your experience. Beyond even those aggravating, debilitating blisters that dominated your psyche at the time. Last year, I worked with a student whose essay took a long time to find itself, but when it  Continue Reading …

Filed Under: Solutions, Stories, Students, Uncategorized, Writing Tips Tagged With: admissions officers, brainstorming, cliches, college admissions essays, topic choice

Try to Understand

June 12, 2017 by Sara Nolan

If you don't try, you may never understand. My new student, J, was in his bright red basketball jersey and shorts, and he was doing his best not to shiver.  Starbucks was as cold as a meat freezer. But what he was saying warmed my mind.  In the course of a short conversation, he'd already told me that as a kid he'd been pegged as "troublemaker." Or, even worse, proving the little words matter: "THE Troublemaker." You wouldn't know it now, from his composure even under the offensively strong air conditioning.  But according to his teachers, he had "too much energy" and bounced around the room and, worst of all, Socrates be damned, he had too many questions.   I'm like: "Hold the sauce.  How is it possible to have too many questions IN A CLASSROOM?"  Continue Reading …

Filed Under: Integrity, Solutions, Stories, Teachers, Uncategorized Tagged With: brainstorming, college essay, college essay writing, questions, teenagers

Primary Sidebar

About Our Conversations

At Essay Intensive, we are listening for the Big Challenging Questions to arise–physically, mentally and emotionally. We jump, word-ninja style, at the chance to be stimulated and engage in a true conversation.

Our bodies are holistic, courageous homes with a singular mission (in a multi-faceted world): live! It’s up to us to realize and share the rich outcomes of that drive. “A conversation” is a place for members of our community to do just that.

Think, feel and write deeply. Question. Sweat. Speak.

Find a topic

Tags

admissions officers advice anecdote anxiety attitude authenticity college acceptance college admissions essays college application college essay college essay tips college essay writing Common Application Essay Writing exercise Free-writing freewriting ideas inspiration Letter from Birmingham Jail Listening love Martin Luther King Jr. meditation parents personal essay perspective poetry prompts revision sample essay self-awareness stress stress reduction student stories supplemental essays teachers topic choice topics voice writer's block Writing writing process writing prompts writing tips

Recent Posts

  • Writing About Your Weaknesses in Your College Essay
  • Frog and Toad Write Your College Essay
  • Strategies for College Supplements
  • Apologies Accepted
  • I promise you don’t have “Nothing To Write About”

Subscribe below to receive new posts in your email

  • Email
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn