What top colleges want you to reveal about yourself in the essay
Every one of the 7 prompts for the 650 word Personal Statement is designed to draw out information from you about your character, your values and your qualities. The prompts are simply different ways to provide you with a context within which you can reveal yourself to the colleges.
While your choice of extracurricular activity speaks volumes about your passion, initiative, resilience and leadership qualities, the essay provides a new perspective about you not found elsewhere in the application. A good essay provides insight into how you think, what you value, what kind of person you are and what qualities you embody.
A good essay cannot follow the conventions that you were taught in your English writing classes. Instead, a good essay better resembles a free form personal journal entry that flows with little restraint except that it will be read by college admissions. A good essay reflects your own voice in a powerful way, it tells a story about your journey.
While there is no one formula for writing a successful admissions essay, there are some important things to keep in mind that can help you create a strong and compelling piece.
First and foremost, it's important to remember that the colleges are looking for much more than just a student's academic record or extracurricular involvement; they want to get to know the person behind the statistics. They want to know if you have had an impact in your community.
As such, your essay should be an opportunity to share your unique perspective and experiences with the admissions committee. It's also important to be honest and sincere in your writing; admission essays are not the time to try to impress with grandiose language or inflated claims. Instead, focus on communicating your story in your own voice.
The essay must get very personal and it must show you to be vulnerable. A good essay requires that you are self-aware and if you are not yet there, you will develop self-awareness as you engage in the process of creating the essay.
College admissions officers are looking for applicants who are authentic and genuine, so it's important to be yourself in your essay. Don't try to fit yourself into a mold or tell a story that you think the admissions committee wants to hear. Instead, focus on sharing an honest account of who you are and what you have experienced.
By doing so, you'll give the admissions committee a better sense of who you are as a person and what kind of student you would be on their campus.
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Why was this essay successful?
This is an essay by an admitted student at Johns Hopkins University and published on the JHU website. We share an in-depth analysis of why this essay stood out and succeeded.
This essay would have been a response to either one of the following prompts:
The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?
Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others.
She describes her challenge, setback and failure
The writer draws an analogy between her challenges and frustrations in trying to master amigurumi with her challenges in trying to find her passion. She experiences setbacks and failures in both pursuits.
Mastering amigurumi is complicated, and trying to find her passion is also complicated. And what makes it even harder for her to find her passion is the intrusion of constant discussions going on around her about what had worked or not for others and the pressure she felt to be successful like so many other members of her family. She experienced self-doubt and felt lost.
Her use of the analogy with amigurumi triggers the readers imagination when visualizing the the physical messiness of trying to master amigurumi, with the struggle to find her passion. Juxtaposing the physical and spiritual lends power to her story.
Her realization
She then sums up her problem with great clarity:
“The only problem was that I did not have a direction”
She goes on to describe of how she changed the way she viewed her problem
“….I realized I could view this mission to find passion from another perspective.”
The change in perspective helped her recognize the value of each of her attempts at finding passion.
“The mini adventures I went on were all crucial to me in the greater journey of life.”
And that there are many ways to solve a problem.
“I have learnt that no one path is static, and I can be on more than one path at a time.”
What she did do to overcome her challenge
“Through trial and error, the current adventure I am on resonates the most with me….”
What does this essay reveal about the writer?
This writer’s boldness shines through with her willingness to share her vulnerability and she is unafraid to give the reader a close-up look at her struggles with finding passion. She acknowledges the obstacles she faced and the influences that shaped her pursuits, but she finds a way to breakthrough. She acknowledges that her current path to finding passion was through experimentation. She is authentic and honest. And she realizes that no path is static and there can be multiple paths at the same time.
The writer demonstrates qualities of maturity, determination, self-leadership, resilience and flexibility while she worked to find her passion. She deliberately stepped out of her comfort zone in her quest to find her passion even as she made good use of the opportunities available to her to find her passion . She maintains a strong positivity throughout her essay, describing her challenges as “adventures.” She demonstrates her values of accountability, authenticity, adventure, boldness and honesty in how she goes about solving her challenge to find her passion. She develops a remarkable level of self-awareness as she acknowledges at the end of her essay that she has “ so much to learn, and so much that I want to learn, and so my journey to grow continues.”
The writer never explicitly refers to her qualities, they are implicit in her choice of actions.
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