Chapter 6: The Anatomy of a Great College Essay
Written by Kaashvi, Dartmouth College
Welcome back to The College Countdown! If this is your first time stopping by our blog, I am Kaashvi, your friendly neighborhood college admissions enthusiast and your guide through this series. Whether you’re a returning reader or a newcomer, I’m pumped to have you join us for this wild ride. After last week’s article on perfecting your activities section, we are in a great place to kick things off with our most awaited piece. In today’s episode, we are dissecting the qualities of a great personal essay.
Over the past two years, I have read a ton of essays of all different kinds—from friends who got into their dream schools, to students I’ve helped with editing and examples shared by admissions officers. Through this process, I have picked up on some patterns that pop up in many of the essays that stood out to me. But before I disclose these secrets, we need to talk about why we want our essay to speak to the reader.
It’s simple; you want the reader to really root for you. Sure, you could have a 4.0 GPA with a schedule full of AP classes and 99th percentile test scores, but to an admissions officer, that’s only part of the picture. For them to really want you to get an acceptance, you’ve got to show them that you’re more than just numbers on a piece of paper. Your essay makes you human and gives the reader your personal qualities and struggles. With six hundred and fifty words, you’re suddenly not just the star athlete with a perfect record on the field, but also a teenager who struggles with dyslexia and volunteers at a tutoring program for students with learning differences. See how it works? Your goal is to win the admissions officer over and make them feel invested in your journey so much so that they gladly want to be your personal advocate.
Alright, time for those essay secrets.
“It shows and tells.”
I can guarantee if you’ve looked for essay advice on the internet, you’ve definitely been told to “show, don’t tell” when writing about yourself. While I do think that is good advice, I also think sometimes it might be more helpful to go beyond description and draw a soft conclusion. Showing is great for putting the reader in your shoes but telling helps them understand why what you’re showing matters. Or in other words, showing gives details, and telling gives meaning.
But how do you do this well? It all starts with brainstorming. Most students don’t immediately know what they want to write about and so, starting with some soul-searching can give you several starting points. Think of stories or anecdotes that give the reader a clue about what is important to you. When I was going through this process, I found that I had way too much that I wanted to share. So to narrow my list down, I wrote down arcs for each one of my stories and thought about what each of them said about me. This left me with a handful of topics that felt representative of my values.
There is no reason why this approach can’t work for you, too. Once you’ve decided on your value, start showing it subtly through your story rather than writing it directly. Then, go one step ahead and unpack what it means to you by telling the reader why it matters and how it has shaped you to be the person you are today. Here’s an excerpt from my personal essay that does this:
“Buried under several crossed-off to-do lists; a tattered, yellow Post-it note has the gesture used to say ‘a fridge’ in sign language drawn on it. I had stuck similar neon-coloured squares all over the house while I was relearning sign language a couple years after my grandma’s death. Because of her deafness, I learned to communicate effectively at a young age— being precise with my own gestures while carefully interpreting what she was saying. While I don’t need those Post-its anymore, that yellow one has managed to stick around through the years.”
Here, I’ve tried to showcase a couple traits of mine: being good at communication (sign language), valuing family (grandma) and dedication (relearning) while only outwardly telling the reader about the first one.
“It nudges the reader.”
I recently came across a story about an Apple employee who would intentionally tilt the screens of all the Macbooks in the store until they went black. Whenever a customer would walk in to check out the devices, more than half of them would physically lift the screen back to its place. That one interaction not only engages customers but also creates a small connection, making the buyers feel more invested in the product—absolutely brilliant.
We are looking to recreate this same kind of effect with your personal essays. But when your essays are being written and read through a computer screen, how do you psychologically get your reader to become more attached to your writing? Nudge them. Check this:
“Running my hands over the laptop’s keyboard, my fingers moved over two subtle bumps. At two in the night, the last thing I wanted to do was continue typing so I placed my head sideways on the desk. Right on the keys ‘F and J’, were two lifted lines, deformities hiding in plain sight.”
Chances are, the existence of these bumps isn’t known to the reader. If the essay can get the reader to look down and find the bumps for themself, it goes a long way in cementing your words in their memory. Here’s another example:
“When I first learned to fold a simple origami boat, I was amazed at how a few simple folds could turn a piece of paper into a beautiful crane. Start with a square paper, fold it in half diagonally, then fold the corners to the center line, flip and repeat.”
Again, the idea is to get the reader to physically react to what they’re reading and try it out for themselves. If they can invest even the slightest bit of cognitive effort into your work, it’s more likely to stay with them.
“It makes you the protagonist.”
The trick I used to make myself the protagonist of my essay made the process a lot more fun. I would pretend to be the narrator in a Martin Scorsese movie, like DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street or De Niro in The Irishman, and try writing in that voice. The narration of those movies is a perfect yin and yang between conversational and formal which makes the writing feel more personal. But being the main character isn’t our end goal here. For your essay to tell a compelling story, you need to present yourself as a compelling character first.
You want to portray yourself as someone the reader can’t help but be drawn to. For starters, mystery can create some of this allure. I’ve seen students use cold-opens to get the reader’s attention right from the get-go and then reveal more details about themselves throughout the essay. By leaving the readers with some questions unanswered at the start, you make them eager to read on and learn more things about you, hopefully clearing all of their questions. For example, Jay Gatsby is introduced as a wealthy socialite but the true extent of his fortune and the secrets of his past are only revealed as the story progresses.
Simply being a likable and wholesome person will take you a long way as well. Forrest Gump and Charlotte’s Web are whole stories of just this. Both characters are unwaveringly good and sincere and that helps readers connect with them easily. This is the beginning of an essay that does this really well:
“The clock was remarkably slow as I sat, legs tightly crossed, squirming at my desk. “Just raise your hand,” my mind pleaded, “ask.” But despite my urgent need to visit the restroom, I remained seated, begging time to move faster. You see, I was that type of kid who ate French Fries dry because I couldn’t confront the McDonalds cashier for some Heinz packets. I was also the type to sit crying in front of school instead of asking the office if it could check on my late ride. Essentially, I chose to struggle through a problem if the solution involved speaking out against it.”
This opening scene grabs your attention right away, doesn’t it? It creates suspense, introduces the writer to us in a warm way and more importantly, focuses only on the writer.
“It feels vulnerable.”
This one’s quick—your essay is the component that humanizes your application. It brings flavor and color to an otherwise relatively monochrome packet of paper. You have to write in a way that hearing about slices of your life makes the reader empathize with you. It’s so much harder to reject a person who has opened up to you than an inanimate file you feel nothing for.
For the reader to feel like they know you, each line of your essay has to be such that it could not have possibly come from anyone else but you. Write with a unique angle about who you are. Or, share the things you’ve picked up on going through rotations of life. At the end of this, you’re guaranteed to have an essay that could’ve only come from you.
It’s no good to say, “Make the reader care.” How could anyone predict that? The real advice is easier: “Make sure you care.” If you care, the reader cares.
“It doesn’t feel predictable.”
You don’t want the readers to tune off from your essay after reading the first couple paragraphs because they think they already know where it’s going. You run this risk when you write about overdone topics like a sports injury, death of a grandparent, parents’ separation or a mission trip. I’m not saying it’s impossible to write a good essay on a common topic, but it does make it easier for your essay to fall into those done-to-death tropes.
You play the piano? Write the story from the perspective of the keys or the pedals. Do you love tennis? Tell a story about how you went from a nervous little boy or girl to now helping nervous little boys and girls learn about the sport you love. I wrote one of my essays about volunteering at a food bank. It would be a safe guess to expect the essay to talk about feelings of gratitude, right? But my experience was actually more about feeling like an imposition. That is an unexpected emotion that turned what could’ve been a pretty generic essay to something unpredictable.
The secret isn’t to find a totally unique story but to tell a normal story in a special way. You can
try to pick a quirky essay topic but unless you’re actually passionate about it, it won’t make for a good essay. Why? Because your voice isn’t in the essay. The anxiety about being one-of-a-kind prevents you from being yourself. Don’t make the mistake of confusing original with personal.
“It doesn’t try too hard to be deep.”
It can be a little difficult to figure out where to draw the line between being introspective and trying too hard. In my opinion, this includes overstated attempts to impress, to be unique, to write well, to sound smart, to be funny, to make light of something serious or to be creative.
You never want to be writing something you think someone wants to hear. When you do that, there’s a good chance that you don’t actually believe what you’re saying. Readers can spot this a mile away and it takes away from your credibility. Don’t take the bait of wanting to sound ‘smart’ and write without feeling obligated to impress the reader. It won’t work. And, it’s not what they’re looking for either. For something to be meaningful, it only has to be meaningful to you. Break free from the mold you think you’re supposed to fit in and showcase how you actually are.
“It ties everything together.”
This one is a purely personal take; I have a bias for essays that have the loop effect. It’s where the writer makes a callback to the beginning of the essay, making everything feel connected and cohesive.
And that’s it—those are my major takeaways to write a successful personal essay. I do have a lot more smaller observations I’ve made along the way but you can expect another episode on that in the coming months. After you have a first (or second or third) draft of your essay, read it from the perspective of an admissions officer, as someone who knows nothing about you and is reading through the essay in a rush. Making your essay as easy to follow as you can will make for an effective essay. You need to go through the process of writing and scrapping your work a couple times to get to a point where you feel satisfied with what you have on the paper.
A massive thank you to all of you for joining me today and sticking around till the end, this one was indeed a long one. Stay tuned for next week’s topic where I’m breaking down ins and outs of letters of recommendations. Until next time, keep dreaming big!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hey there, college-bound crew! I’m Kaashvi, an undergraduate student at Dartmouth College from India. I’m the brains (and heart) behind the College Countdown series here at The Ivy Institute and I am stoked to be your guide through this process.
So, a little bit about me: I was a STEM kid through and through in high school and all my classes were the highest level ones offered at my school and graduated at the top of my class for three consecutive years. Outside of class, I was involved in activities that let me nurture my love for inventiveness, responsibility and storytelling. From designing a vehicle to aid oil spill cleanup to working as an elected representative for the youth advisory council to volunteering at the local deaf school—I devoted a lot of my time to projects that were true to my values.
When I’m not typing away at my keyboard, dishing out college advice to people in my inbox and on this blog, you can catch me exploring new hiking trails, whipping up some questionable (but oddly delicious) desserts at my bakery or getting lost in a gripping mystery novel.
As an international student, the application process wasn’t just about finding a spot at a prestigious university but also about finding a place that felt like a second home. Now that I’ve made it out alive to the other end (with a boatload of stories to tell), I'm here to spill all the tea on how you can do the same. With some guidance and a whole lot of oversharing, together we’ll crush this admissions game like absolute pros.
Catch you on the flip side,
Kaashvi
