By: Jonah Blank

You've got strong grades and SATs, glowing recommendations, and an impressive list of extracurricular activities�or a background almost as stellar. So do many others. How can you impress an admissions staff with what sets you apart? "Write from your soul, write from your heart, and reflect upon your experiences," says Margit Dahl, director of undergraduate admissions at Yale, about the college essay. The audience you're trying to move is undoubtedly an overworked admissions officer who already may have read 20 essays the day she gets to yours and may have 40 more to read before the day is through. The wrong way to grab this burdened reader is to expound on a lofty topic without having anything personal to bring to it. "Don't tackle world peace unless you've thought a lot about world peace," warns Robert Kinnally, dean of undergraduate admissions and financial aid at Stanford.

The challenge is to select a subject familiar enough that you can write about it with feeling and authority�yet unusual enough to distinguish you from the mass of other applicants. Perhaps it's the story of your breakthrough as a high-altitude rock climber. Maybe it's a quiet recollection of learning to play the sitar on an exchange program to India, or of a summer spent volunteering at a soup kitchen, or of the personalities you encountered during a summer painting houses.

Whatever the topic, the strongest pieces are written in language that is vivid and precise. "I trained very hard for a very long time to beat the school record in sprinting," might better be written, "For two years, I stumbled out of bed at 5:00 every morning to shave hundredths of a second off a long-standing school record in the 100-yard dash."

A college essay is no place for purple prose or the fancy words you memorized for the SATs. If your expostulation is transmogrified to mephitic pedantry, throw out the thesaurus and try again. How does the piece sound when read out loud? If it doesn't seem written in your voice, chances are the admissions officer will find the essay stilted and pretentious. It doesn't work to try to become "the person you think the university would like you to be," says Kinnally.

It's also best to resist the temptation to dazzle with a gimmick. If you're planning on submitting a series of haiku on running, printed in the shape of your Adidas shoes, remember that the presentation isn't likely to get you further than the starting gate. Anyone clever enough to come up with an approach the admissions staff has never seen is probably smart enough not to need it.

[TOP OF PAGE]