Constructing The World's Best College Application Essay - How To Avoid Common Errors When Writing Your College Application Essay
Applying to college is one of the most nerve wrecking times in the life of any student. The creation of a well constructed application essay is one of the most frustrating components of the application process. The application essay will be read by the people directly responsible for your entry into college and can either send you to the forefront of their minds or the bottom. Simply put, the application essay is one of the best ways to boost your chances of acceptance, especially to schools that are very competitive in terms of grades and volunteering. By following the tips in this article, you can impress the admission committee and gain entry to the college of your choice.
Dive Right In
The first step in writing the world’s best college application essay (or one close to it) is to get started immediately. The greatest enemy of excellent work is procrastination and haste. The moment that you get your essay topic, sit down and brainstorm ideas that you think will highlight why you should be selected over the thousands of other potential applicants desiring to gain accepted to the college that you are applying to. Colleges ask you to write an application essay to ensure that you are mature enough to handle the particular program for which you are applying. They also want to make sure that you can follow instructions and create something impressive by applying your own creativity. Rushing your essay will cause you to make mistakes and limits the amount of time you have to properly make a positive impression on the reader, so get cracking early.
Common Applications and School Specific Application Essays
Many students who set out to write the world’s best application essay falter here and don’t end up getting accepted to their first choice college. The common application can be filled out and sent to the 346 different school that participate in that particular program. What some students do is to submit the same application essay to other schools without realizing that the topics may have nothing to do with the essay that they wrote. Some colleges have specific essay topics that they need you to develop and show how that particular topic relates to your life and experiences, while others are much more vague and ask you to write about a topic of your choice. You should always read the instructions carefully and construct your essays to properly answer the questions asked of you
Don’t Follow Application Trends And Templates
Following a template or a trend will not get you noticed, it will only cause you to sound boring, clichéd or repetitive. The admissions committees deal with thousands of applications every year and most books on the subject of writing application essays are widely available to thousands of other potential applicants. This will cause your application essay to fade into obscurity. Instead choose to move away from the crowd and writing about a topic that you are sure that most people will not write about. Instead of writing why you love medicine or why you have a wonderful caring heart, chose a topic where you compare yourself to a bat or a lizard, why you find dreams interesting and not how you want to change the world. Most admissions officers read the title of your essay and the introductory paragraph and if it is something they have seen twenty times already, more often than not, they don’t finish reading the rest. Not following well established trends and templates is a major part of writing the world’s best application essay.
Write The Application Yourself
You would be surprised how many students outsource their application writing to a family member or friend and end up with a topic that they have no personal experience with. The essay might be wonderfully constructed but in the even that you are interviewed and asked to expound on topics stated in your essay. You will only end up looking stupid. Admissions officers also look at topics and wonder how the applicant could have written a topic on “How volunteering at the hospital changed my life” when the student has no record of such activity on his or her transcript. Outsourcing the writing of your application essay yourself will only end up costing you money and time and should be avoided at all costs.
Touch it up
You should try to write at least three drafts of your college admissions essay to make sure that it is exactly how you want it to be. Reread your essay at least five times, check to see that it is answering the question that the topic poses and make sure that it has a powerful opening and conclusion. Writing an amazing college application essay is easier than it sounds, and with a little imagination and dedication, yours might just be the world’s best college application essay.
