· College Essays | PrepScholar helps you prep for the SAT / ACT by answering the most important questions online! Online SAT / ACT Prep Blog by PrepScholar | · Your dedicated PrepScholar Admissions counselor will craft your perfect college essay, from the ground up. We'll learn your background and interests, brainstorm essay topics, and walk you through the essay drafting process, step-by-step
How to Write a Perfect "Why This College" Essay
College Essays. Writing the college application essay is a tough gig. You've got to be charming, personal, memorable, and insightful--all in under two pages! But I'm going to tell you a secret: half of a great personal essay is a great topic idea.
If you're passionate about what you're writing, and if you're truly documenting something meaningful and serious about yourself and your life, then that passion and meaning will come alive on the page and in the mind of your reader.
So how do you come up with an essay idea? The best way is to brainstorm your way to an event from your life that reveals a core truth about you, prepscholar college essay. In this article, I will help you do just that. Keep reading to find 35 jumping off points that touch on every possible memory you could harness, as well as advice on how to use your brainstorming session to fully realize your idea for an essay topic. What does your application tell admissions officers about you?
Mostly it's just numbers and facts: your name, your high school, your grades and SAT scores. These stats would be enough if colleges were looking to build a robot army, but they aren't.
So how do they get to see a slice of the real you? How can they get a feel for the personality, character, and prepscholar college essay that make you the person that you are?
It's through your college essay. The essay is a way to introduce yourself to colleges in a way that displays your maturity. This is important because admissions officers prepscholar college essay to make sure that you will thrive in prepscholar college essay independence of college life and work.
This is why finding a great college essay topic is so hugely important: because it will allow you to demonstrate the maturity level admissions teams are looking for. This is best expressed through the ability to have insight about what has made you into you, through the ability to share some vulnerabilities or defining experiences, and through the ability to be a creative thinker and problem solver.
In other words, a great topic is an event from your past that you can narrate, draw conclusions from, explain the effect of. Most importantly, you should be able to describe how it has changed you prepscholar college essay the kind of person you were to the better person that you are now, prepscholar college essay.
If you can do all that, you are well ahead of the essay game. Eric Maloof, the Director of International Admission at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas has a great checklist for figuring out whether you're on the right track with your essay topic.
He says, if you can answer "yes" to these two questions, then you've got the makings of a great essay:. Make it personal. Write about something personal, deeply felt, and authentic to the real you but which is not an overshare. Take a narrow slice of your life: one event, one influential person, one meaningful experience—and then you expand out from that slice into a broader explanation of yourself. Always think about your reader. In this case, your reader is an admission officer who is slogging through hundreds of college essays.
You don't want to bore that person, and you don't want to offend that person. Instead, you want to come across as likable and memorable.
Put the reader in the experience with you by making your narrow slice of life prepscholar college essay alive. This means that your writing needs to be chock-full of specific details, sensory descriptions, words that describe emotions, and maybe even dialog. This is why it's very important to make the essay topic personal and deeply felt. Readers can tell when a writer isn't really connected to whatever he is writing about. And the reverse is true as well: deep emotion shows through your writing.
Writing with deep emotion: because you can't just stick smileys all over your college essay. Want to write the perfect college application essay? Get professional help from PrepScholar. Your dedicated PrepScholar Admissions counselor will craft your perfect college essay, from the ground up. We'll learn your background and interests, brainstorm essay topics, and walk you through the essay drafting process, step-by-step.
At the end, you'll have a unique essay that you'll proudly submit to your top choice colleges. Don't leave your college application to chance. Find out more about PrepScholar Admissions now :. Some people know right off the bat that they have to write about that one specific defining moment of their lives. But if you're reading this, chances are you aren't one of these people. Don't worry—I wasn't one of them either! What this means is that you—like me—will have to put in a little work to come up with the perfect idea by first doing some brainstorming.
I've come up with about 35 different brainstorming jumping off points that ask questions about your life and your experiences, prepscholar college essay. The idea here is to jog your memory about the key life events that have shaped you and affected you deeply.
I recommend you spend at least two minutes on each question, coming up with and writing down at least one answer—or as many answers as you can think of. Seriously—time yourself, prepscholar college essay. Prepscholar college essay minutes is longer than you think! I would also recommend doing this over several sittings to get your maximum memory retrieval going—even if it takes a couple of days, prepscholar college essay, it'll be worth it.
Then, we will use this list of experiences and thoughts to narrow your choices down to the one topic idea that you will use for your college essay. Kevin was inordinately proud of his full and luxuriant head of feathers. He hated being called a bald eagle, always posting on his Facebook that the "bald" is short for "piebald," or multicolored. Svetlana was always jealous of climbers whose mountaineering careers weren't limited to flowers and small shrubbery.
For Matilda, the main challenge of time travel was packing. Just how do you fit one of those giant Elizabethan ruffle collars into a carry-on? Finnigan couldn't wait to introduce his future children to his family's birthday tradition—lemons. Thinking about her punk crewcut always made Esme smile. That hair was made to rock. We can help. PrepScholar Admissions is the world's best admissions consulting service. We combine world-class admissions counselors with our data-driven, proprietary admissions prepscholar college essay. We've overseen thousands prepscholar college essay students get into their top choice schoolsfrom state colleges to the Ivy League.
We know what kinds of students colleges want to admit. We want to get you admitted to your dream schools. Learn more about PrepScholar Admissions to maximize your chance of getting in.
Now that you have a cornucopia of daydreams, memories, prepscholar college essay, thoughts, and ambitions, it's time to thin the herd, prune the dead branches, and whatever other mixed metaphors about separating the wheat from the chaff you can think of.
Use the magic power of time. One of the best things you can do with your stack of college essay topics is to forget about them. Put them away for a couple of days so that you create a little mental space. When you come back to everything you wrote after a day or two, prepscholar college essay, you will get the chance to read it with fresh eyes. Let the cream rise to the top.
When you reread your topics after having let them sit, do two things:. Rinse and repeat. Go through the process of letting a few days pass and then rereading your ideas at least one more time, prepscholar college essay. This time, don't bother looking at the topics you've already prepscholar college essay. Instead, concentrate prepscholar college essay those you highlighted earlier and maybe some of the ones that were neither circled nor thrown away.
Trust your gut instinct but verify. Now that you've gone through and culled your ideas several times based on whether or not they really truly appeal to you, you should have a list of your top choices—all the ones you've circled or highlighted along the way.
Now is the moment of truth. Imagine yourself telling the story of each of these experiences to someone who wants to get to know you, prepscholar college essay. Rank your possible topics in order of how excited you are to share this story. Really listen to your intuition here.
If you're squeamish, shy, unexcited, or otherwise not happy at the thought of having to tell someone about the experience, it will make a terrible essay topic. Develop your top two to four choices to see which is best. Unless you feel very strongly about one of your top choices, the only way to really know which of your best ideas is the perfect one is to try actually making them into essays, prepscholar college essay.
For each one, go through the steps listed in the next section of the article under "Find Your Idea's Narrative. Handing out trophies to your top three ideas is entirely optional.
Now, prepscholar college essay, let's talk prepscholar college essay what to do in order to flesh out your topic concept into a great college essay. First, I'll give you some pointers on expanding your idea into an essay-worthy story, and then talk a bit about how to draft and polish your personal statement. All great college essays have the same foundation as good short stories or enjoyable movies—an involving story.
Let's go through what features make for a story that you don't want to put down:. A compelling character with an arc. Think about the experience that you want to write about. What were you like before it happened?
College Essay workshop with York College Pennsylvania
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· College Essays | PrepScholar helps you prep for the SAT / ACT by answering the most important questions online! Online SAT / ACT Prep Blog by PrepScholar | · Your dedicated PrepScholar Admissions counselor will craft your perfect college essay, from the ground up. We'll learn your background and interests, brainstorm essay topics, and walk you through the essay drafting process, step-by-step
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