“Hello, Lauren!

I am about to finish junior year, and I’m ready to get a head start on my college applications. Do you have any advice on starting my college admissions essay?”

As a graduating senior, I know how difficult it was to perfect my admissions essay. On top of that, I had to write countless supplementals and scholarship essays in order to make college affordable. 

So here are my top four tips for starting your college essay:

#1: Stay organized!

I would highly recommend keeping all of your supplemental prompts and responses on one long Google Doc. I applied to fourteen schools, so I had a fourteen page document with all of the prompts for each school. This made it easy to copy and paste from school to school if there were similar prompts. You can do the same thing with scholarship essays, although those will usually be longer. Additionally, scholarships do not stop being important when you begin college. Some scholarships are not renewable, and tuition rates are increasing more and more every year. If you save your essays to your high school Google Drive, you will not have access to them after you graduate. Be sure to write these essays on a personal Google account for future scholarship applications and opportunities after senior year.

#2: Start as early as possible!

One of the most helpful English assignments I had in high school was to write a rough draft of my college admissions essay. It was by no means perfect, but it gave me a place to start and an excuse not to procrastinate the summer before my senior year. Although I ended up rewriting that version a few times, it was nice to have already thought it through. Once I came closer to submitting my applications, I used Grammarly and ChatGPT (*responsibly*) to make sure my essay matched the Common Application prompt I was answering to the best of my ability. Side note: AI programs can be very helpful, but plagiarizing any material from them is highly frowned upon. I NEVER copy and pasted, so it often took me a while to revise my work based on their suggestions. Also, the earlier you start working on your primary Common App essay, the more time you will have later to write supplementals, Honors College applications and so many other hidden essays that no one warns you about!

#3: Write theme essays!

I consulted with many current college freshmen, their parents and college coaches before beginning my college process. Now, I am going to give you the greatest piece of advice they gave me that I chose to ignore: Write theme essays. These essays are short responses that focus on one aspect of your life or academic career that you wish to share with the admissions committee. I knew I would be writing more than one essay to apply to school, but I never thought that would mean more than 25 different written responses. All of these wordy prompts may seem daunting, but what if I told you that you only needed five? A parent that we spoke with recommended writing ‘theme’ essays focusing on the main things that colleges want to know about you. These typically include:

• Leadership skills
• Career or major specific goals
• Community service
• Diversity and inclusion 
• Overcoming challenges

I know that I was asked for at least three responses about each of these main ideas. After choosing a prompt from the Common Application list, I would recommend looking at your top school’s supplemental prompts on their websites. If they sound like they match any of the topics above, start writing a response around 250 words based on their prompt. You can then adapt those responses for other schools to match their word counts and fulfill their prompts more thoroughly.

#4: Balance your essay’s content!

You have reached the bottom of this column, and you are probably thinking, “Wow, Lauren really isn’t going to discuss what to actually write about?” Give me a minute, I’m getting there. My English teacher once told me that colleges ask for essays because they want to get to know you, but mostly because they want to know that you won’t drop out. Her advice made so much sense to me, and helped me reframe my writing process. A successful college essay ends with a message relating to resilience, grit and perseverance. You must show the admissions counselor that you may have fallen down but you were able to pick yourself back up again. Although this sounds like one of the exercises my therapist would give me, I would like to add that your college admissions essay is not a diary entry either. It treads the line between being personal and conversational as well as professional and academic. Most people already know the tragic story that they want to write about for their essay the moment that it happens, but being overly personal is often frowned upon. The early drafts of my essay were very dark, but I was able to focus on what I learned from the experience rather than the ways that the experience hurt me. Any impactful essay will tell a complete story without delving too deep into the details. I apologize if this is not the advice you were hoping for, but as I see it, writing your admissions essay is quite therapeutic. I found that mining the positive morals out of my memories made me feel more well rounded as an applicant and fulfilled as a person.

As always, I hope that I can offer helpful advice on this subject from experience. Of course, these are all my opinions so take them with a grain of salt, and I encourage you to live moment by moment in your own experience.

That’s all for now!

Lauren Bazan