Seven Ways To Make Your College Essay Stand Out

Seven Ways To Make Your College Essay Stand Out Even if I happened to read another essay about being a drummer in the marching band, there’s no way I could confuse it with this one. These details belong only to this student, and they show us her leadership qualities rather than just telling us. With a January 1 application deadline racing toward us, now is a great time to be brainstorming, creating, polishing and revising those essays. In September we published a blog post that provided a basic framework for how to write a killer college essay â€" and offered tips on how to incorporate the Outward Bound experience into the application. This month, we’re giving you another nudge â€" and a slightly different perspective from yet another expert. But in this short time, AdmitSee has already gathered 15,000 college essays in their system. Many are from people who got into well-ranked colleges, since they targeted these students first. The vast majority of these essays come from current college students who were admitted within the last two or three years. Sharing that you participated in an Outward Bound program will help colleges understand how you’re spending your time outside the classroom. But you also have the opportunity to articulate to colleges why this experience is worth mentioning. Nothing has more impact than just being yourself. I worked with a student last year who had played in the marching band all of high school, which is something thousands of students can claim. I would encourage students to think about how participating in Outward Bound impacted them, specifically. Anyone who completes an Outward Bound expeditioncould say that they were challenged, that they weren’t sure they could do it, but on looking back, they feel proud of what they’ve accomplished. The real questions to ask are, why was it challenging for you, personally? Shyu says that this model has allowed AdmitSee to collect a lot of data very rapidly. The company is only a year old and just landed $1.5 million in seed funding from investors such asFounder.org and The Social + Capital Partnership. Talking about how helping people feel good isn’t original; everyone experiences that. It’s just that admissions officers learn nothing new about you when you write something that anyone could claim. Typically, assuming students are sticking with their proposed deadlines, they can comfortably reach a “final draft” form of a piece within about three weeks. For the smoothest application process, students should keep on top of all proposed internal deadlines. A lot of students feel anxious about this because they don’t feel like anything unique has happened to them. But everyone has a different perception of their experiences, and the more you can share that, the more you’ll stand out in that stack of applications. What about this makes you feel proud, and how will you carry this into the next part of your life? Whether you write about it in your essay, or just list it as one of your activities, sharing the influence it has had on you, personally, will be much more impactful. Talking about how being in marching band taught you the value of hard work isn’t your story; that could be anyone’s story.