As summer draws near, the school year comes to a close, and decisions start getting sent out, it’s easy to start daydreaming about your future college. You have images of walking from your dorm to class, crossing campus, sitting in a lecture hall, cramming for midterms in a giant library. You dream of going to school in a college town, or in a city, maybe it’s a big school – or small. You think about all the different things you could study, friends you will make, and clubs you’ll join.
You’ve spent all of high school studying hard, getting good grades, taking the right classes, involved in the right extracurriculars. You have all the building blocks to create your best application ever but you feel stuck on one thing: the essays. Thankfully, that’s one of our specialties. When you work with us, not only do we help you brainstorm a creative and unique Common App essay – we help with the execution, the editing, and the eventual submission. And all those pesky supplemental essays? We help with those too.
So what does our process look like? Well, we’ll tell you!
Brainstorming the Common App Essay
There are seven prompts to choose from for the Common App essay. They range from questions about achievements, to obstacles, to self-reflection. Prompts #1-#6 are pretty standard college essay fodder – and we get why they seem appealing. However, these prompts put you in a box, and they’re pretty similar to some of the questions being asked by each individual school. Schools are already aware of your achievements if they’re on your resume, and we don’t love that students often feel they have to flesh out their traumas on their applications to get into college. If you had something greatly impact your high school experience, the additional info section is a great place to put that. But we want your Common App essay to show off who you are and your values and personality. To do that, we always advise choosing prompt #7 - Share an essay on any topic of your choice. It can be one you've already written, one that responds to a different prompt, or one of your own design.
The best way to show off your personality is by writing a totally unique college essay. It helps provide a bigger picture of who you are beyond the confines of prompts. But where to get started? We walk our students through a comprehensive brainstorming process that involves learning everything we can and identifying stories that help show off your core values. After we identify a story we’re excited to write about, we often encourage students to play with form, tone, and voice to help them make their essay even more unique. We’ve had students write about everything from their morning commute to getting a pet, because we know that these small moments help connect our students to admissions counselors, help show off their personalities, and help them stand out from the crowd.
After brainstorming comes the super fun part: editing.
Editing the Common App Essay
Ok, we’re kind of being sarcastic. Editing is not super fun. Maybe, juuust maybe, it’s type II fun (fun after the fact), but it’s one of the most important parts of the process. When you work with us, you work one-on-one with a counselor who is an expert in writing and editing college essays. They helped you brainstorm the essays, and now they’re going to go through, word by word and line by line, and make sure everything is perfect. Not only will the essay go through countless rounds of revisions, but we make sure to have several pairs of eyes on them too to ensure they’re up to par.
Now you have a final Common App essay ready to submit, and it wasn’t too bad of a process! By helping our students write fun, creative, and unique essays, they often leave feeling less stressed and more engaged in the process overall.
If you’re interested in working with a counselor and getting a jump on your college essays, reach out to us today.