Admission

Admission First off, make sure to get your early admissions applications submitted. A majority of deadlines are Nov. 1st, but some are Oct 15th, so make sure to not miss those. To be safe, try to submit your applications a week or two ahead of the deadline. Although you don’t have to make final decisions for your college list yet, you want to have a number of schools that you’re stoked to apply to and will stay on your college list. The earlier you can accomplish this, the earlier you can start on the rest of the application work. Do online research, visit campuses if possible, check out schools on CampusReel, attend college fairs, talk to alumni, etc. Like I mentioned before, continue to look for opportunities to reuse drafts for other schools. You should be reaching critical mass around this time of having an essay draft for just about any prompt that a school will give you. You’ll just have to adjust word counts or the focus of the learning point a little bit. This is about you figuring out where it is you can academically flourish. What will admissions officers know about me prior to my essay from my teachers, counselors, activities and grades,What is it about me that they would need to know to be more apt to want me there. Write a story with a setting, a beginning, a middle and an end. In drafting your essay, focus on the content of the narrative. Do not “write” seven paragraphs of conclusion and your thoughts; content is writer’s craft. When I am helping a student with an essay, there is little purpose in developing witty turns-of-phrase or glassy segues if you cannot tell what the student is trying to communicate in the essay through its content. By the time someone is considering your essay, they have reviewed your grades, your scores, two teacher recommendations and a guidance report, and your activity list. They know you in most ways that are relevant to admit you to a school. Just like it says, some students are still not satisfied by what they’ve come up with, but think they’re really close to finding the right topic. Remember, your main essay is the only essay that you put THIS much work into because of how important it is. In order to give an essay a proper chance in the editing process, it needs to be crafted to the vision that you have for it. Great essays ideas are oftentimes thrown away because the first version of an essay was executed poorly and readers are unable to even comprehend the message behind it. Before asking others to give feedback, really try to finalize the essay to the best of your ability. What will get you into college is writing an essay that will be distinguished from the rest. The college essay is a page-long assignment given to you by a school, to be completed by a certain date. When your first draft is complete, don’t rely on a spellchecker to correct spelling and grammar mistakes; ask tutors, family and friends to look at it and give you their feedback. Like the Ucas personal statement, an attention-grabbing opening sentence is crucial if you’re going to highlight yourself as an interesting person who the admissions faculty would want on their course. Remember that these prompts are just that, and not questions that must be “answered”. Trust me, a little work now will go a long way towards boosting your confidence and overall preparedness throughout this process. If you’re getting any help from counselors or teachers for editing your essays, keep in mind that many of them will stop checking their emails once Christmas break starts. Make sure to get things into them ahead of time and be respectful of their time. If you didn’t get your drafts to them in due time to give feedback, don’t get upset if they tell you that they won’t sacrifice their vacation to help you. Get feedback on your two Common App personal statement essays, decide one which one to use, and make final edits. If you’re really hesitant to work on essays because official updated prompts for your schools haven’t come out yet, then working on the UC essays can be a safe alternative. The UCs rarely change the prompts and even if they did change them, the changes would probably be announced by now. Make sure you go through at least several rounds of this, and you’ll achieve a polished essay that will give you the best chance of success with your US college applications. The conclusion must round off your essay in a way that leaves a lasting good impression upon the admissions tutor. It should be a summary of what you have learned from your experiences and how they have shaped you into the person you are today. Make sure you launch straight into telling the reader why you’re unique, without wasting time restating the prompt or describing what you’re going to write about.