Hey there.
It’s Dr. Bernstein, the president and founder of Get Yourself Into College, and today’s
video focuses on the #1 thing you need to consider in relation to your main college
application essay, which for many of you is the Common App essay, so stay tuned.
Okay, the most important question you need to ask yourself about your main application
essay is “why do admissions officers need to know this about me?”
You have to remember that you’re not just writing an essay about yourself.
You’re writing an essay for a very specific audience—admissions officers who are trying
to decide whether or not to admit you to their intellectual and social community.
You must create a vivid, compelling, and authentic personal narrative that also manages to shed
light on your character, personality, background, and experiences. . .and your perspectives
on all these things.
And at the same time, you need to think about why it would be useful for admissions officers
to know these things about you.
For instance, if you’re applying to engineering programs and will have to write a supplemental
essay about your specific intellectual and professional interests in engineering, you
might want to write your main application essay—which tends to be more general and
more obviously personal than a supplemental essay of this sort—you might want to write
about a meaningful experience that demonstrates your problem-solving skills.
After all, engineering programs are looking for students who have this underlying skill.
This experience doesn’t have to be about engineering.
It could be about a time you got lost while hiking
and how you worked through this problem and how it influenced the way you think and act
in other situations.
So this essay would be helping admissions officers learn more about something you love
to do—hiking—while also shedding light on an underlying skill you have—namely problem
solving—how you deal with setbacks and challenges, and how you apply what you experience in one
part of your life to other situations.
Or let’s say that you’re positioning yourself for the sciences and most of the rest of your
application—your additional info section and supplemental essays—focus on these interests
and your work in the field—but that you’re also really passionate about literature or
music or philosophy— something totally different..
.then you might want to write about this other side of yourself so that admissions officers
can see that you’re multi-faceted person.
Colleges are looking to create an interesting, dynamic community on
campus.
One of my students who just graduated from Stanford wrote his Common App essay about
this one moment where he discovered the connection between his interest in poetry and his interest
in chemistry.
Another student whose at Yale now wrote about her experience performing in plays…and the
narrative centered around what was going on in her mind as she waited to get on stage.
. .and it was about her mother’s questioning of why she wanted to dedicate so much time
to performing when her main intellectual interest was in engineering.
Had these students just been writing narratives about themselves for themselves…they might
not have written about these particular topics. . .but they took into consideration their
audience. . .and the bigger picture of their applications to tell stories that were really
important to them. . .but that also connected with the needs of their audience.
So the bottom line is that you’ve got to tell a story that really does matter to you.
. .but you also have to tell a story that sheds light on things that admissions officers
really do need to know about you.
That’s it for now.
I have a more detailed blog post about this topic—a post that includes a more in-depth
case study of a particular student—and I’m including a link to my application essay tip
blog page in the description box below…You should definitely check that post and the
other ones out.
I try to share as many valuable tips as I can and I hope you found this video useful.
Take care.
Bye!