What Makes A Great College Essay?

What Makes A Great College Essay? Writing a good essay can take a long time and require several drafts. No one ever gets a piece of writing perfect on his or her first draft. You will need to be patient with yourself and give yourself plenty of time to take breaks, ask advice, and edit your essay. If you choose not to disclose your disability in your essay or college application, remember, you may still disclose at any point after you are accepted into the school. But please, please, please do not not procrastinate on your admissions essay. Everything I’ve covered in this article matters only if you give yourself enough time. If you start the day before the application is due, all I can say is good luck. You will need to do this to receive any of the accommodations and support services that you might need to be successful. To help youth applying to college navigate the college essay in order to submit their best work with their college application. After showing their essay to everyone, students edit it again and again to make each reader happy--and before you know it, their story has been ground down and their voice has vanished. It would be tragic to turn in an essay that includes all of the above but is littered with misspellings and grammatical errors. Use the proofreading skills that you have developed to carefully read your drafts. Try reading it out loud to yourself or have someone else read it. Make sure you are reading it carefully and specifically for grammar and spelling. Watch that you are using the same tense and point of view throughout your essay. A thoughtful and detailed narration of a difficult time in your life tells far more about you than a list of competitions won and honors achieved. Alex Tiso, 18, wrote his college application essay on burrito bowls and got into his dream school. New York teen Alex Tiso wrote his college essay on burrito bowls and got into his dream school. We have found that the #1 reason for essay procrastination is that students don’t feel confident in getting started â€" i.e. they aren’t sure what to write about and how to structure it. Here are 5 essential traits of a compelling college essay. Standing out from everyone else could put you in the running for additional scholarships and will also simply make a good impression, which never hurts. So treat a college application essay as a tool for standing out in ways the robots can’t. It’s a lot like the cover letter you write when applying for a job â€" it’s your chance to reveal the person behind the accomplishments and statistics. Your goal should not be to include all of your accomplishments and activities . The most engaging essays tell a story and have a clear focus. The college application process is stressful, and the essay can seem like an insurmountable hurdle. DO NOT PROCRASTINATE. Look, we all procrastinate. For the most part, it’s unlikely that you’ve experienced anything extremely uncommon in the relatively short amount of time you’ve been a human. Most high school students lead lives that don’t deviate too far from the norm â€" except that one quiet guy in your class who sits next to the window near the back. He’s almost certainly either a genius mech pilot or the subject of some prophecy in an alternate dimension that he’ll be transported to. Even if you’re only applying to a couple schools that you know you can get into, it will still serve you well to write a compelling admissions essay. Your essay doesn’t need to have all 5, but college admissions officers look for at least one of these traits or possibly two. Once a student picks one or two of these to focus on in their essay, they are on the writing path to a stellar essay that describes exactly who they are and why they would be an asset to a college. When I was in second grade, I read the essay for the first time and learned the donor was a professional musician and an accomplished guitar player. Always read your essay over for grammatical and spelling errors one last time before you submit your application. Whether writing is a strength of yours or a struggle, it is imperative that you start early on the process of writing your essay. This knowledge was the catalyst for me to begin exploring my own musical abilities. I quickly learned to play the clarinet and joined the elementary school band.