5 Ways to Crush Your College Essay

Summary: The key to a great college essay is to tell a compelling personal story that sets you apart, reveals insights about your intellectual or personal growth, and makes you someone to root for.

Why it matters.

In many respects, your college essay (or “Personal Statement”) is the single most important part of your entire application. Yes, you need a strong academic record too: good grades, in top-level courses, with strong teacher recommendations, and solid scores on your SAT or ACT (test optional). But leading universities get plenty of students like that; in fact, far too many than they can accomodate. So assuming your academics are up-to-par, they turn to your Personal Statement to decide who they want and who they don’t. It’s as simple as that. If your college essay is bold, compelling, endearing and impressive, you’re getting in. If it’s not, someone else is taking your spot. Read on.

5 Keys to a Great Essay.

Below I’ll summarize five ways you can dramatically improve your essay. The good news is that almost anyone can do this. You don’t have to become a professional writer overnight. In fact, it’s not about fancy prose or using big vocabulary words at all. It’s really about keeping things simple and personal and remembering who your reader is. If you want to read examples of winning essays that helped students get into their top schools, click here. These, of course, are just examples. Yours might look very different. But the same principles apply.

#1. Tell a Good Story

This is the most important tip of all. The fact is that everyone loves a good story. It doesn’t matter if you’re a little child being tucked into bed at night, a consumer who’s wondering why you should buy a particular brand, or a politician who’s trying to connect with an audience through the use of a personal anecdote, there’s nothing as riveting and powerful as a good story. This is why the cavemen and cavewomen drew on walls. We’re all suckers for a good story. And that includes college admissions officers too.

The way you use this to your advantage is to turn you college essay into a story about something you did and how it changed you. Even if you’ve led a relatively boring life, you’ve still had 16 or 17 years on this planet to experience things. Surely you observed or witnessed something that affected you and helped make you the person you are today. It doesn’t have to be a big thing. It could be a really small thing that had an outsize impact on you.

Watching a bug die might have spurred your passion for biology or climate change or earth sciences or physics. Accidentally spending a day without your cell phone might have introduced you to worldwide inequities in technology. Witnessing a small injustice might have propelled you to social advocacy. There are no wrong answers. What colleges want to see is that you’re not dead inside; you’re a bright, vivacious, motivated individual who uses personal experience as a catalyst for meaningful change and growth.

#2. Be Specific

The worst thing you can do in your essay is talk about yourself in broad generalities. (A lot of AI-generated essays look like this; the prose is nice, but the content itself is just generalized clichés.) The best thing you can do is tell a very specific story, and highlight the specific way it changed you and propelled you to take action. You have to give details. That’s what will make the story personal to you, and that’s what will make the story come alive to your reader.

Think about the movie Rocky. It’s widely regarded as one of the most universally beloved movies of all time. But why? Isn’t it really just the same sad-sack story of some down-and-out boxer who can’t get his act together? There are no exciting car chases, no big explosions, no sinking ships or alien invasions — all the stuff they usually jam into Hollywood movies. So how did a little story like this capture the heart of millions around the world?

Because it focused on the specific story of a few interesting people who were worth rooting for. You’ll notice that if you watch carefully, the movie actually looks more like a stage play than a big movie. Most scenes have only one or two people in it. There aren’t a lot of background distractions. As a result, you focus on what’s important: these people and their story. Your essay should do the same. It should zoom in on a very specific thing that happened to you, and show how it changed you, and portray you as someone worth rooting for. Then, at the end, it can open up into something bigger than yourself, such as the profound truth you discovered.

#3. Start and End with a Bang

The first line of your essay is the most important line in the whole thing. If you can’t manage to find a way to say something interesting or provocative or eye-catching in your first line, there’s a good chance there won’t be anything worth sticking around for in the entire essay. And despite what you think, not all admissions officers read the entire essay. They have to read thousands upon thousands of essays; if they get bored in the first paragraph, there’s a good chance they’re tuning out or tossing it aside. Don’t take that chance.

The role of your first line is to hook your audience. It’s to grab them out of their slumber and convince them to sit up and pay attention, because something rare and wonderful is about to happen. For inspiration, check out some TikTok videos. Since it’s so easy to swipe past a video on your phone, the most successful creators find creative ways to grab your attention right away, in the first second. They might do this with a striking visual or a provocative statement. Your job in your personal essay is to grab the reader’s interest by saying something interesting or unexpected. Sometimes your hook won’t come until the end of your first paragraph, but in general, the sooner the better.

You also want to end your essay with a bang. I’d venture to say that ending your essay with a bang is a lot less important that grabbing the reader’s attention with a great opening line. But the point is that you don’t want your well-written essay to drift off into mediocrity, or (a mistake a lot of students make) to just rehash what you said earlier. That’s an anti-climactic letdown. Ideally, you should tie the whole thing together at the end with a nice satisfying bow, perhaps referring back to your initial line. It’s easier said than done. But you should remind yourself that the first and last lines are bookends that hold your essay together; if your first and last lines are great, you can often get away with a lot of unimpressive stuff in the middle. Just like the secret to a great sandwich is the bread.

#4. Make it Personal

Too many Personal Statements read like dry academic papers. They’re overly-formal, boring and impersonal, like something anyone could write, or even an AI program. Your Personal Essay is something quite different. Imagine yourself sitting on a plane next to an admissions officer from Yale. How would you talk to this person: would your try to use big words and stilted language? If you do that, they’d likely look for another seat. Or would you try to engage with them on a human level, to have a conversation with them, which showcases your enthusiasm and dreams? 99% of admissions officers would rather sit next to that person.

Remember that admissions officers are people too. Yes, they have a job. But more than that they’re a father, or a mother. Maybe they just went out on a bad date last night, or had someone break up with them last year. Maybe they have a sick kid at home, or an aging parent somewhere. Maybe they’re dealing with health issues, or money issues, or who knows what. The point is to remember that the reader is an actual human being. If what you’re writing would bore you, it will probably bore them too. If you don’t really care about your essay, they probably won’t either.

When I work with students, I sometimes ask them to think about how one of their favorite writers would write their essay. What kind of language would they use? What would be the tone of the essay: serious, provocative, jovial, mysterious, quizzical? Personally, I like the way that Anthony Bourdain used to write copy for his food travel shows, No Reservations and Parts Unknown. I found his writing to be refreshingly candid and informative, with just enough dark humor to give it a kick. Think about books or articles or TED talks that resonate with you, and try to draft your essay in that style. Maybe it’ll just be a useful exercise, or maybe it’ll help you find your true voice.

#5. Swing For the Fences

The biggest risk you face with your college essay is not that you accidentally say the wrong thing, or choose the wrong topic, or use syntax or grammar that’s too casual. The biggest risk — by far — is that you blend in with everyone else. In college admissions, that’s the kiss of death. There’s tremendous leeway with your Personal Statement. You can write just about anything. But if it’s not bold and memorable, it will be quickly forgotten, and potentially lost in a pile of other rejections.

The primary goal of your essay is to help you stand out from the other tens of thousands of applicants who are all vying for your spot. That’s why I tell students to “swing for the fences,” which is a baseball term that means to go for a home run. Small, safe “base hits” are not going to cut it. The game is down to the wire. You’re facing seemingly insurmountable odds. Nothing short of a grand slam essay will put you over the top and catapult you to victory.

That’s how you need to think about your essay: as your first and maybe final chance to wow the admissions committee and differentiate yourself from all the other applicants. Playing it safe is not an option, not in the highly competitive world of college admissions.

#6. Write Multiple Drafts (Bonus!)

If you think you’re going to write a great essay with your first draft, you’re wrong. Even the best writers on the planet, seasoned professionals, write multiple drafts until they get it just right. It’s just the way it is. Here’s what you should do: Start early. Write a draft. Come back to it a day or two later and make some changes. Do that again and again, until you’re ready to show it to someone you trust (like an English teacher) and then make changes based on their feedback. Writing is not like making a sandwich, where you do it once and then you’re done. It’s more like sculpting: you come back to your masterpiece every day and work it some more, adding some clay here, removing some clay there, constantly reshaping and reevaluating it until you can’t make it any better. Then click submit. Congratulations! You’ve just become a better writer.