The College Essay

001hi everyone um i'm miss crystal garrity i'm the secretary of the guidance office and this is the college roundtable panel for the college essay i will be helping to moderate comments as they roll in so feel free to ask any questions of our panelists oh like we have zero viewers i should wait it's my first time using this platform oh now folks are rolling in so we're just going to give it a minute or two until we've got a solid group and then we'll get started in the meantime i hope everyone panelists and students alike are having an okay start to the school year i know it's a little weirder than usual all right i'm just going to give it one minute more and then at 304 we're going to get started i'm going to

002repeat for folks who just logged in that you are welcome to post some comments in the uh youtube chat they will come over to us here um and folks are gonna be able to respond to those questions and i will be helping to moderate a lovely fall day outside i took a it took four minutes before this broadcast to go and take a quick little four minute meditation before we got started it's such a lovely day any any minute you can let off of zoom is precious right absolutely i got to meet with lots of amazing students today in their quest for their college process um so that was great so i'm going to get started so i can hand it all over to you all it looks like we have about 14 or 15

003participants so far so that's a good starting point for those just logging in i'm miss scarity miss crystal garrity i am the guidance office secretary um those of you who are familiar with the guidance office know that i'm in the office today um you can see by our windows behind me um i'm going to be here during the college essay panel to help moderate comments answer any questions that are maybe more arhs related versus essay related and you all can feel free to put things in the comments and we will do our best to answer things um if anyone has questions or comments like post along and i'm going to hand it over to our college admissions panelists who are going to be able to tell you a little bit more about the college essay

004and what schools they're looking for and then there were four should we should we just introduce ourselves before we dive in does that sound good uh so my name is liam daly associate director of admissions at beloit college in wisconsin uh small liberal arts college and i'll pass it over to vanessa who's above me on my screen at least i'm above you on my screen as well um hi my name is assistant director of admission at sarah lawrence college i actually attended smith college so i know and love the pioneer valley very well and i'm excited to talk to you today hi everyone my name is deandra berthum i am an assistant director at suffolk university in downtown boston really and really excited to talk to you about the essay today all right and i

005am nathan assistant director at the university of hartford so small to medium private institution uh in west hartford connecticut so not actually in the city for those of you who have that concern we'll talk a little bit more about us on a different level some other time does somebody want to jump in and just give kind of a basic overview of what it is we're talking about today what is the essay why do you write it why does it matter where does it go sure i can do that if you guys want perfect so um the college essay itself is you know depending on which application a student is using whether it's the common app or a school's individual app is really a good opportunity for the assistant director or admissions counselor to learn a

006little bit more about a student on an individual level as many of you know the college application process does come hand in hand with you know your grades and potentially standardized test scores this is really the first opportunity that we get to see a student beyond the numbers if you will um so it can be anything as small as your first hit you ever had in little league t-ball um to you know a huge piece of adversity that you fought through uh in high school um to just why it is that you want to pursue uh your major potential career that you're looking at so um you know it's kind of a broad topic here that we're chatting about um but we're going to give you kind of as much insight as we can from

007school to school about what it is little things that we like to look for and that's where you folks come in being able to post comments and questions and let us know throughout your process how this is going for you first of all with everything being virtual and how we can help you lift a little bit of that stress out of that process if you will yeah and just jumping off of that i think we're really happy to talk about the kind of the the big college essay which is usually the essay submit on your common app or on an individualized school's application but there's also supplement essays to consider and i'm happy to talk more about that um but those are usually additional or optional um essays that you can write with prompts specific

008to the college you have in mind um for example sarah lawrence has four different questions to pick from and you respond to one of the questions in 250 to 500 words and that's just another opportunity to share another part of your story with us um and usually in a more in a way that's more tailored to the college because we definitely understand that your common app essay or your your main college essay is going to every school that you're applying to so we don't expect it to be super tailored to our individual schools but the supplement essays are a bit of a different story and i'm happy to go into that a little bit more later too so uh how about the the writing process um i think i can just say very briefly i

009imagine a lot of the people that were uh that we're talking to today are seniors so hopefully you've at least started thinking about your essays if you're not in the middle of writing them and tweaking them and things like that i'll just put a quick plug out there for juniors that this is probably not something you want to leave until october of your senior year so something you could start thinking about in the spring certainly over the summer you could pull a number of the common app prompts and start thinking about them write a couple different drafts get some people's feedback and if you can have this you know almost done by september or early october your senior year it'll give you a lot more flexibility to think about all the other stuffs that are

010part of the college application process but for seniors for those of you who are wrestling with it right now do you guys have uh some tips or tricks that you want to share about what you think makes a really good essay or uh ways to write it ways to sort of you know keep your own voice shining through and do something unique yeah i can jump in on that um i think just the most important thing to know is we want students to write about something that they're passionate about so we really do get to know who you are as an individual because really that is our only opportunity to kind of get to learn more about you as a student outside of your academics and activities you're involved in um with um within your

011school um so really just you know making sure you're writing about what you want to write about and not necessarily what you think we want to read about so just really staying true to yourself and writing about something that you're you're passionate about definitely and i know we we chatted about maybe sharing one or two of our favorite essays um but i think the the essays that always stand out to me are the ones that um no one else could have written but you and that doesn't mean you have to like break ground on something completely new you don't have to do like fancy research or anything but just the ones where as the andrew is saying where your voice really comes through um an advice one of my former colleagues used to give was

012that um if you you know print out your essay and like cut out cut your name off it and left it on the floor of this of your school and somebody picked it up would they know that you wrote it um would it be something just really specific to your story story and your voice um and some of us are like introverts and go to really big schools so that advice doesn't apply but hopefully that the concept translates uh so um one one thing that i would add to that is that i think that the the essay gets a ton of stress and pressure around it right it's this huge thing where you have to sort of tell your whole story share every possible piece of information about you you know talk about the the

013most intense or terrible or crazy thing that ever happened to you and i think that it's really important to remember that the whole application tells your story and the essay is just one piece of that and so it doesn't necessarily have to be this big huge event or moment or realization but it does have to be well written and i think that we're all you know we're probably going to talk about writing in about 18 different ways today i think that writing in your own voice is probably one really good definition of good writing um but if you write a really good essay you're probably gonna be in pretty good shape um even if it is not about uh you know some sort of uh earth-shaking you know realization or something like that if you

014write a good essay that's in your voice about something you know has some sort of interesting point or story or a little tidbit about you that'll probably do the trick it doesn't have to be this huge sort of you know kind of all caps uh moment in your life um anything you want to add to that nathan um yeah just kind of reiterating everything that you've all said um you know it it doesn't necessarily have to be one specific experience or um you know breakthrough that you've gone through but it just it has to draw us in it has to be something that you know you're excited to write which makes us excited to read it um and you know i have you know read countless personal statements and college essays and um the ones

015that i remember are the ones that that stood out to me obviously um so yeah i mean that's the shortest way to say what i'm what i'm trying to to get out of my mouth and i think that there's so much pressure on the the big asset sometimes i i really like reading supplement essays and i have this suspicion that it's partly because there's just less people have a little less pressure on them and they just kind of can write about what's on their mind and what what inspires them whatever answer inspires them um so i wouldn't ignore those supplement questions but also oh i think maybe a roundabout way of saying like you can take a little bit of pressure off yourself as liam was saying like this isn't the end-all be-all i hate

016when people post videos of like the essay that got me into x school or like the essay that got me denied for mex school like especially with holistic admissions we're not just looking at the essay is not a make or break there's no make-up break point on any of the pieces of your application in a holistic process um so we are looking at your your test scores when relevant your transcripts those letters of recommendation um so know that that's not the only way that you're sharing your story with us so it's okay to just kind of take a deep breath and just share your story and not it doesn't have to be like the greatest essay even you've ever written it really doesn't right and and it probably won't be because it's actually a really

017really hard essay to write right i bet that there are a lot of you who are sort of tearing your hair out over this essay who you know write a ap you know literature paper every couple of weeks and do it could do it in your sleep and right but it's very different to sit down and analyze a book or do historical research or present scientific research or whatever it might be than to sit down and say okay me what do i say about that i think it's always really good for folks in our role every once in a while to sit down with the common app prompts and try to figure out what the heck we would write about because it's really hard so i think we we all understand that we you know

018we put you in a little bit of an awkward position you may be a really good writer you may be comfortable writing that this is probably something you you haven't done a lot of um do we want to share some of those favorite essays does anybody have one that that jumps to mind i can go first so we don't all right okay i have i have two that i always think of um and the caveat is that uh neither of these students were accepted but they were still some of my favorite essays um so i think that's just there are other parts of it even though they wrote really incredible essays the other like an amazing essay can't always save you if that makes sense but i still love these essays um the first one

019was about this this was from the student who he was like considering himself like very he took himself very seriously and like he loved classical music he had like really just like high brow things and then kesha's new album came out and he just was like torn over it because he loved it so much and didn't consider it high brow and he just it just sounded like him and i was and it to my point earlier no one else could have written this essay it was but it's not about some like earth-shattering thing to happen it was just over about his conflict for loving the kesha album and i just i love that because it just it felt very much in his voice no one could have written this for him and then the other

020essay um it was a topic that i don't i don't think is necessarily like particularly unique it was a student who wrote about being the only girl on her high school's golf team and she just wrote about it with a lot of empathy and compassion both like for herself and for her community and i hate that we talk about like grit in the college admission process but she did show grit and she stuck it out for four years even though the boys on the team were not super nice to her always um but i just i appreciated that vulnerability that she showed and sharing that experience so two very different essays that stuck out for for very different reasons and were very memorable to me i do think that that that point that um you

021know that young woman is not the only young woman who's written an essay about that and that didn't keep it from being a really memorable essay is a really important point i think it's really easy to get hung up on you know if you can come up with if you can write you know about this topic that no one else has ever written before it's going to be really memorable and that's true um but we can also read you know 20 essays in a row about you know folks love for you know playing baseball or whatever it might be and 19 of those might sound like a lot of other essays we've written or excuse me we've read and the 20th one we might go wow that was really unique and insightful and i have

022a really good sense for who this person is and why they'd be a great fit at this college even though the topic was exactly the same so i think that's just an important thing to keep in mind my mom always knows moses told the last original joke um i agree with and i think it's just about finding your own voice to put into the topic even if it to liam's point is a topic we see a lot i can jump in and talk about one of my favorite essays um so one of my favorite essays that i read was a student who talked about always wanting to be spider-man when they were little and then wrote about how the things they did like in modern like in their day that made them despite like a

023modern day spider-man so that one was really um unique and stood out to me it was just really real well written um and i really enjoyed reading it and literally i always think like every reading season i think of that essay yeah i'll hop in one one that that said or stands out to me um you know like you're saying gender every every time i sit down to read an app is one a student was writing about all these hardships that they had gone through all these battles that they fought and then the last paragraph was uh essentially them saying that none of what they had written about happened to them it happened to one of their classmates and it was just something that they had learned a lot about the people around them um

024and they were going into kind of those human services style majors so they were showing through the essay how much they cared about the people around them that they knew enough to write you know this piece about them so it kind of spoke to you know their interest in those human services but it also spoke to their attention to detail about the people around them and again it drew me in because i was just feeling for this kid non-stop and then it was i'd like to help that kid not i am that kid so it's just a different different perspective to to take for sure yeah i think probably probably any time you can sort of get us heading in one direction and then change your expectation expectations a little bit or something like that

025is always good um an essay that i really like guys helping a student with last year a young woman who grew up with dual citizenship in ireland in the u.s and had sort of moved back and forth and um was writing about sort of not quite owning an identity in either place and not really knowing what her home was and all these kinds of things and um what was really really great about the essay was that it was just absolutely hilarious um and so there were all of these great jokes about cows and accents and uh and i i laughed out loud a couple of times while i was reading it and then there was this really great sort of moment at the end same thing you were just talking about nathan where you know

026after all of these what just kind of felt like jokes there was some really great insight into who she is and what she would bring to a college campus but i also really like the essay as an example because she's a young woman who uh as far as i can tell has had a really great life right and i think that if she had tried to say you know oh i've been you know i've lived here and i've lived here and i don't feel at home anywhere and it's been really really hard uh i would have been like i don't know about that right i think you know um but because she was able to sort of um be a little bit self-deprecating kind of acknowledge that you know all this is really good and

027it's sort of a minor problem and she's loved being in both places she's learned a lot and use sort of humor and lighten it a little bit it then actually lent a lot more credence and weight to the to the takeaways that she was sharing um so i think that it's really uh it's important to be honest about your experience and whatever that is and you don't need to make it something that is more or less or different right we're really just trying to get a feel for you and and what your story is how about maybe um some uh some sort of uh things to avoid or things that um you know don't necessarily always work anything like that i think speaking to your your last point with the that you made previously was

028that um you know don't don't try to spin things to make it sound worse than it is you know tell us a story tell us you know kind of what what you're going through and and be matter-of-fact about it don't try to exaggerate bad things or minimize some of the good just be upfront about it i think going off that point too if a student you know definitely if you want to talk about some kind of you know hard thing that you went through that's great but you know maybe just share you know how you are now how you've overcome that i think sometimes i read essays and i read about those hardships but i don't i just read about the hardships i don't i don't read about you know like how the student's doing

029now or like what you did to like overcome it so definitely if that's something that you want to write about that's okay but just make sure to maybe include that part as well yeah i'd say um i like something one of my colleagues used to say was that the essay is the trailer for your life it's not the whole movie um so you don't need to feel the pressure to tell us in your entire life story i think it's a lot more impactful to hear about one really important experience that you've had versus i was born in wherever and then i moved and then this was hard and this was hard like that that's interesting but it's not really um i don't think it's as impactful as hearing it one really compelling story yeah that's

030a um another way of saying that is that the the essay is not a resume right so it's not your life story it is also not just a list of you know 20 different things i mean there's an activity activities list in the common app right there's space for that and a lot of schools are happy to have you share a resume the essay really should be you know kind of one or two things fleshed out and and um dive deep into i think another you know we've all touched a little bit on uh sort of you know people dealing with you know sort of intense experiences or you know hardships they've had to deal with in their life and i just want to put out there that you do not owe it to us

031to share those stories right um and i hope that you do not feel like if that's something you don't want to share you should anyway because it's gonna you know it's gonna be sort of your ticket into college right i think that um if there are things that have happened to you in your life that you feel like we're not going to be able to understand you without knowing about them and you feel empowered to share those things by all means you should and i think we're going to do you know everything we can to try to understand where you're coming from and certainly to try not to sort of hold anything against you or judge what you've been through but on the other hand i wouldn't i wouldn't want anybody to feel like there

032was something that they you know weren't really comfortable sharing with us that you know a parent or a guidance counselor someone was like oh you should write about that you know that's going to really tug on somebody's heart strings or something like that there are other ways to do that but you know your counselor can talk about your background you can use the additional information session section or a possibly an interview or a call with one of us if you want to share some something you don't necessarily need to make the essay the the place where you sort of um uh you know share that that's that story if it's not the right space for it yeah i'd emphasize that using the additional information section if there's something you just want to tell us very

033matter-of-factly like you were out of school for a certain number of weeks because of a you know family hardship or a medical thing um you don't have to you don't have like i would rather read about something you're really excited and passionate about um in the essay because that gives us more of an idea of what you're going to be like as part of an intellectual and social community um but i'm not telling you not to write about that but don't feel the pressure of saying oh i have to write about something difficult that happened to me that's a great use of the additional information section there's also the coven section this year if it's coven related so if you just want to tell something very matter-of-factly you don't have to write another essay i

034wouldn't encourage you to write another essay for that um but that is a place that i think not everybody knows about until they actually open the common app and start it so know that that is there and that is a great way for you to just very transactionally communicate things with us as well yeah i've also had students that at schools where we didn't sort of accept supplemental uh you know essays or uh art portfolios or things like that who use that space you know it doesn't necessarily have to be something that sort of happened to you it doesn't have to be that you had a health struggle or you know something else go on in your life you can just say hey you know i wrote a really good essay my essay's about this

035if you have two extra minutes you know i'd love you to go to this website i built or i just want you to understand this uh you know other thing that's really important to me in my life so you can certainly you can be really creative with how you use that section overall um it's uh it's there for you it's additional information it's for you to share whatever you want so certainly take advantage of that you're gonna talk about supplements vanessa yeah i'm happy too um so i've worked at schools both where we had required supplements and then sarah lawrence has optional ones because we're very big on trusting you to know how you want to share your story the thing i would emphasize most about supplements is thinking about a lot about fit um

036so thinking both how you fit the college and how the college fits you i think it's really important to think about it going both ways um and so i think supplements really require you to do your research i know that it's very tempting to just copy and paste and change out the name of the college um for like why i want to go to x um but that's honestly often very transparent when you're doing that and sometimes you forget to do that and that's not a good look always um so i think just be be mindful of that um and and if there's a very common supplement question is why do you want to go back school which i think is a valid question and i think something you you also owe it to yourself

037to know the answer to um i always think that there should be not one reason that you want to go to a college so i think really understanding that and looking for as you're looking at colleges i think it's a really good sign when the question that a college is asking excites you um personally i i rewrote our supplement questions because i thought they weren't exciting enough um and i wanted them to reflect on sarah lawrence's personality um so we have four new supplement questions and if you hate them then that's fine um i won't take it that personally only a little bit um but one of ours is about being a hyphen like sarah lawrence students are direct they're not just directors they're directors sound designer linguists like they're economists but they also study

038mandarin like they're really cool multi-faceted people and if you you're like that's cool i want to be that then that also tells you something about um your fit with the college so i think that's kind of like the high level what i would say um schools will treat their word counts very differently i'm a very big proponent of brevity being the soul of lit um so i will never be mad about a short ter essay if it's 250 instead of 500 words for example um but what we're really looking for is to understanding that the common app is say the big essay that's what you're sending to everybody as as we mentioned earlier and supplements are what you're specifically sending to the college that is asking for them so i think putting in as much

039specificity as you can and showing that you've done your research and showing that you've put a lot of thought into this and that you're not just like applying for the sake of applying um because nobody feels special about that nathan or geondra have you guys worked at places that have uh supplements anything you want to weigh in there um not not that i've been a part of the process for so i don't i don't have anything constructive that i can add here so i apologize yeah i would say the only supplement question we usually ask is why you want to attend our university so just you know really emphasizing and making sure you're sharing that with whatever college you're going to um i think is important yeah and i think i think to vanessa's point

040uh hopefully that's a question you've answered long before you have to write it down right if um if your list is made up of schools where you know you said you you googled schools that have psychology and then you haven't taken it to that next step where you've tried to figure out what kind of community you want to be a part of or you know that faculty guidance is really important to you or internships are really important to you or locations important to you or whatever it is that really matters to you you probably want to start answering that question for yourself before you start you know hitting submit on college applications because it's going to come up one way or another it's going to maybe you get in and then you start talking to

041somebody like me and i say oh man are you so excited to come here you know what can we do can i introduce you to a faculty or you know student or you know get you out here for a visit or something like that and you go uh you know can you can you tell me about what what you offer on your campus right so you wanna you wanna try and figure that out a little bit earlier in the process and and um you know maybe you only apply to eight schools instead of fifteen schools because you've answered that question for yourself that's okay too just want to remind everybody that uh we would love if if there are questions that you have that you want us to answer you can submit them in the

042q a we'll we'll keep rambling until the session's over but if there are things that would be really helpful to you um by all means share those with us uh other things we haven't touched on guys anything you wanna you think we should cover what about um advice for just the the writing side of it i think we've talked a lot about kind of the storytelling part of it um do you all have advice for um i always like i always talk about like the editing process um do you have a kind of in the writing and editing process that you like to give students i can start if you want a moment to think um i like to encourage students to be mindful and selective of who they asked to read it um please

043ask somebody else to read it um i've read some some essays that i was like girl you really could have had somebody read this that they would have helped helped you out um but um i think an english teacher is a great person to read it you do not need to please don't pay somebody to read your essay an english teacher is great a counselor is great that your per um your friend who always copy edits your english papers is great um but i think be mindful about how many people you have because it gets to be a lot of cooks in the kitchen so i think if you ask one or two people whose opinion and feedback you really um trust that's that's a great route to go um and and be clear if

044you're like i only want you to edit for grammar and spelling or like i really want some help with the the way it's constructed in themes um because i think that way you're getting the advice that you're looking for not just somebody who's kind of like dumping on you or projecting um i think in my experience an english teacher is a great one and they'll also be um helpful in thinking about how your kind of entire story is constructed because they might be like why did you not mention this big thing and you're like of course um so that's that's i think something that a lot of people struggle with kind of figuring out how to identify so something to think about yeah i would i would mostly agree with that and just um you

045know not only having somebody else read it but read through it yourself a lot of times you can find a lot of those simple things um you know i know myself as a as a high school student i had a real bad reputation for just writing something and handing it in um so it never hurts to to go back through and read it through yourself um separate yourself from it for a little while too to to kind of clear your head and come back to it and read again um and then bring it to somebody else for grammar and punctuation and things like that um spelling is another one um there's nothing that that uh frustrates me more sometimes when i'm going through uh a really well done essay in terms of the storytelling piece

046and then there's just one one word that's pretty common that's spelled just a little bit wrong um so just little things like that um are are part of it for sure and just kind of pay attention to those as you're going through yeah i definitely agree with what vanessa and nathan both have talked about um i think my other piece of advice would be to read your essay out loud to yourself um it really can help you with the editing process if you're listening to yourself read it and if like you stumble on a sentence out loud then maybe there's some editing to be done but definitely look over it and have an english teacher look over it um and please capitalize eyes when you write your essays i've read a few essays when the

047eyes aren't capital capitalized and it really um really bothers me so make sure you're capitalizing all those eyes in your essays yeah i would definitely echo the the reading out loud is such a good tip i do that with almost every you know emails i write like almost anything i do um and not only will that help you catch errors but i think it's also a really good way to flag if you're not writing in your own voice and if it feels weird for you to read it out loud that's probably not a good sign particularly you know maybe there are you know cover letters you would write or certain papers that you would write that need to be in a particular format that don't quite feel the way you would speak this essay i

048would say as much as possible without like you know absolutely throwing the laws of grammar out the window should read to some extent the way that you speak i think you know um maybe i'd be interested to hear what all of you say i've certainly i've worked mostly at schools that are um you know excited when people uh are a little edgy with their essays a little creative and things like that so certainly you know if you want to start a sentence with but uh i i can't speak for anyone else but that's not going to bother me right i don't want to see an essay that has however 15 times through it right that's not who you are i don't think could be but probably not right i shouldn't need a thesaurus to read

049your essay right unless you're you know those are words you really use um so i think you can you can take some liberties i've read some really great essays that read a little bit more stream of consciousness or a little bit more poetry than prose or things like that and you know you don't want to do that for the sake of doing it but if that's really who you are and how you write um you can give that a shot and i think we'll give you some leeway there's a big difference between not sticking to you know traditional mla format or something like that and having a ton of spelling errors in your essay right one is a bold intentional interesting choice the other one is you know not proofreading enough um so i would

050i i personally really like like essays that sort of uh flirt with the edge of what's um what's sort of traditional would you guys agree with that or do you at your institutions as do people sometimes cross the line i would agree that um i like seeing creative takes i will make the bold claim that emojis have no place in the college essay um that's my take i will say that i i think i've seen really well done stream of consciousness essays but i think they're very very difficult to do well um largely because um i know every institution reads a little bit differently um but in my i usually i'm writing a couple bullet points about what your essay is and i think if you can't say in like two or three bullet points

051what your essay is about and what you want the admission counselor to take away you may need to go back and look at the structure a little bit um just because we want to be able to tell our colleagues this is what the the applicant was communicating to us not just in your essay but in every part of your application um not that we think you should be boiled down to bullet points but we do have a lot of applications to communicate about in a very short amount of time in committee so i think making sure that um you almost have like a tweet length version of your essay that we could write is is very helpful and i know we have some questions but i want to see if anybody else has anything to

052say at that point um so i see we have a question um eve asks is if there are multiple supplement essays do you want to see a consistent theme or is it okay to talk about a bunch of different unrelated topics activities that interest the student this is a really good question so at the last institution they worked with we had two required supplements one was essentially y ex school and then there were six to pick from to answer for your second question um i did not like seeing the same things talked about in all of the essays from um the big essay to supplements because i'm like well i already know that you're the captain of the tennis team like i would have rather learned something different about you um but um i think

053it's mostly most schools will have i mean there's definitely some outliers but most schools will have one or two supplement questions not not more um like i said there are summations um but i would i would rather i mean the theme and topic i guess can be disparate but i would rather learn something new about you in every essay even if it's the same theme from different angles than reading about your like love for plato in the same like three times like you're you're more than just one thing um essentially so that hopefully that makes sense i think that that extends beyond just the supplements right i think that um we're gonna see things that are sort of uh resident throughout your application right you know if your uh college essay is about your favorite

054thing to do probably that's gonna be mentioned in your activities list your recommender right mention it might mention it so it's not that things can't come up more than once um but i think you can end up in a situation where your common fsa is about plato and then the you know one of the supplemental essays is like who's an author you love and you write almost the same exact essay about plato but shorter and that's clearly a missed opportunity on your part um i i had a old colleague who said if you if you want to put all your eggs in one basket it better be a really nice basket so you know i've had i've had applicants where like they are a poet in all caps right and five different things on their

055activities list are like different you know editorial opportunities they've had in places they've been published and classes they've taken and you know lessons they've taken right and so there's a real diversity of things that they're doing under that heading and then their essays about their love for poetry and then maybe a supplemental essay is about you know one of their favorite poets right so it's all poetry but there are a lot of different things that you're learning about them along the way it still might be a narrower focus than some schools are looking for and that's something you might want to think about on a school-to-school basis if you're you know applying to a particular program if you're applying to a you know particular major or school within a school or if you're you know

056doing a more broad application a school might get a little nervous by that uh but yeah probably different school to school on that looks like somebody could use just a general sort of a backup for a junior on what is the common app essay what are the sort of other essays when do you write them what do you write for all schools what do you write for uh independent schools somebody want to just do kind of a recap and a little more detail on that are you talking about the i'm a junior question yeah yeah so so you write a main essay for everywhere and then individual ones based on requirements for each call you apply to essentially yes um so many many schools are on the common application um so you write one essay

057and we like if you're applying to our four institutions i believe we're all on the common app i know some of you have your own applications as well we'd all read their same essay um but you are school some schools will invite you to write supplement essays um or they might have other requirements some schools might have required interviews um or a create a performing arts portfolio or something else entirely um so yes you write one main essay that you're it's usually like 600-ish words um that's kind of you your story and we are again aware that everybody is receiving the same one and then some schools will have um requirements or optional opportunities to write a supplement with their own and their school will have their own specific prompt um we didn't really touch

058on the common app essay prompts i believe there's like six i never look at which prompt a student responds to because it doesn't usually influence my idea of the essay in one way or another i don't know if others feel differently um but to me that you're basically writing a personal statement and i'm not looking at how closely you're answering the particular question because i think we all understand what the goal is yeah i think the the prompts are there to help you figure out you know what some good essay possibilities are right so you know you can sort of take that and go in any direction and there is a uh literally right whatever you want prompt is like the seventh or eighth prompt so if you look at those prompts and are really

059feeling stuck uh you also you don't have to feel attached to any of them that's one other piece of writing advice and i might have touched on this right at the beginning but if you have the time i think it's really helpful to at least sit down and think of how you would answer each one of those prompts you don't necessarily have to do a full draft but you know write a paragraph or write some ideas down or bullet points or something like that because if you just sit down and say oh no what am i going to write my college essay about right it's like going to be the worst writer's block you've ever experienced so that way you can come up with seven different possibilities and you might discover that three of them

060after you've written them down seem a lot more exciting than the other four and then you might kind of run with those but it's a really good way to get started to just start jotting ideas down in response to those prompts instead of you know starting okay what am i going to write the essay about because that's that's the process really terrifying other tips or tricks anything else we think we ought to cover i just doubled down on what you you all said earlier and that it's it's not as stressful as it needs to be just take some pressure off yourself enjoy the process of writing enjoy the process of talking about yourself because we don't we don't talk about ourselves a lot in this world so um just kind of take the moment and

061do some reflection and and just put yourself on that paper you know we we talked um a little bit um about like the hardship essay i remember my senior my ap lit teacher my senior high school um would talk about like the three or four d's like the big scary topics like i was divorced to press drugs do we want to talk about um any advice about how kind of handling those bigger harder topics in an essay um i mean i know leah mentioned it earlier it's talk to what you're comfortable with sharing um you know those are very difficult topics to talk about um they're sometimes difficult topics to read about so just make sure that what you're putting on the paper is something you'd be comfortable saying to us really in person if

062you really feel that strongly about it um and just yeah i mean that would be my biggest piece of advice in that topic anybody else have anything they want to add i would say um there's no need to go for shock value for the sake of it i know when you're in like writing class you learn about a hook which a hook is a great thing to have but i think going for shock value really just communicates that something shocking happened to you um i think also just remembering that there's a real person um who's reading a lot of these essays every day um and i think usually that advice is given in like you have to stand out um i don't like reading about gross things i don't like about reading about bodily fluids

063like all day long particularly um and like i want you to share your story and be be vulnerable and be who you are and share your voice but i think just being mindful like is this something that is going to like not influence the person who's reading it today but is this going like is it actively contri i think just asking the question of like is this actively contributing to sharing your story about who you will be on a college campus academically and socially um i don't i just don't want to read gross things anymore maybe that's my my big takeaway here yeah i think the the the point of like is this uh is this actively contributing positively to my application is a really good one again i think as nathan said i think

064we've all said you know at the at the root you know core end of the day if it's something you feel like we need to know about you then go for it right and then we'll sort of all live with you know whatever sort of you know comes out of that because i do think that it's that it's really important that you you know own this essay and that it's something that matters to you and that you're sharing who you are um but i do think that there's a difference between um students who've had something really difficult that they've gone through that has really significantly impacted their that sort of the the ripple effects from can be seen throughout their whole application and so i know that we talked earlier about whether or not the

065essay is the right place to sort of explain those things but i've seen students do a really good job of using the essay as a way to put the rest of their application in context and help us understand why maybe their transcript looks the way it does or why they haven't been as involved in activities outside of their family or things like that and what i think can be really tough is when um an application outside of your essay looks um really really sort of strong essentially right it looks like you've been really involved and done really well in school and you know had a really positive impact in your community and all those kinds of things and then the essay gives us a window into another part of your life that's not really having

066a positive impact on on how we're going to evaluate you and again if you feel like you have to tell that story and you want us to know that then you know so be it it's your choice to make but i think that if you know if you have an application that's knocking it out of the park and then you decide that you want to tackle this really difficult topic in your essay that's um you know gonna make us sort of you know take a minute uh that's a that's a choice you're making and there's you know i think there's a little bit of risk there so you definitely want to think about that and own it i also just want to reiterate too that you definitely don't have to write your essay about that

067and you can again use that additional information section to kind of tell us like if there's something weird on your transcript there's a reason for it like definitely use that information there use that section to share that information so if you want to write your essay about it you can but don't feel like you have to and just really use that additional information section on the comments you can also communicate with your counselors if there's something you'd rather that they share um that they might have better insight into or you want them to you know have discretion around or anything like that that's that's a very trustworthy source for us as well or if you want them to send us an email um it doesn't have to be a part of your application especially if

068there's something you'd rather um you know if your parents are in the application and there's something you don't really want them to know about um that's okay to give us a call give us an email and we'll we'll keep things things discreet um but i think that's also something to be aware of that you know sometimes something that's really important to your story is not like i i as that's the ceremony i read a lot of students who are um not out um and in their communities or they're out to the family but not school vice versa so i if this isn't something you want us to know we would love to know it but there are other ways of communicating those things beyond the application as well so just something to be aware of

069i think that's just about all the time we have right i think there's a there's another set of workshops coming up oh there's crystal hey so i just wanted to give folks a reminder we've got just a couple minutes left so if you do have a pressing question throw it in the chat now um and then i wanted to ask the panelists about something that came up during a professional development time yesterday our school is working actively toward an anti-racist education right now and one of the things that the english department brought up is that they are trying to teach students to write with their own voice and sometimes that includes their own cultural voice which may include different types of language and so i'm wondering when those kinds of essays cross your desk what

070are your reactions i'm gonna pop back out well i'll start initially it's it's um there's some of that shock factor that we mentioned like you just see it and you can tell that um you know it's it's just different from every other essay we've read um but you know as as long as speaking to the greater picture of things you know we're still trying to take something from it so if it's taking away the importance to you of the the culture in the background um then that's that's certainly you know a great piece to to add and a great um i guess literary device to use in in the essay portion yeah i think it goes back to um you know that that there's a difference between kind of you know pushing the boundaries or

071breaking the rules or being a little bit more experimental in a way that i think is it's usually pretty easy to tell that someone's doing it on purpose it doesn't mean that it always works or that it's always the best essay you've ever read but it's usually pretty easy to say oh this person is clearly writing in this voice right they're making an active choice to use this language or you know punctuate in this way to you know um whatever that might look like um and we might not you know like it it might cause you know different reactions and different folks reading the essay but it's usually pretty easy to say okay this person has made sort of you know an artistic choice to own this to write in this style well i think

072we evaluate that very differently from an essay that just looks sloppy right and i hope that we're all pretty good at identifying the difference between choices we might not make in terms of how to write uh versus um you know something where you just sort of didn't proofread and uh i would i would go out on a limb in regards to this and this is again something that you know every individual needs to make a choice about but i think there's an argument to be made for you know if you're um you know writing in your voice um and there is a school out there that reads that and says you know this isn't the kind of voice that we want on our campus you probably don't want to go to that school right so

073that's a you know that's that's something you need to think about and and recognize that there is the possibility that some admissions counselor somewhere might read what you've written and say that's not what we're looking for here but i think if it's really a you know i hope that if it's really an important part of your identity you want to own it and then you want to apply to schools so you're going to see that and say yeah that's you know that's who we're looking for absolutely that was a great essay so i think that you know any choice you make there's a risk that it's gonna you know sort of uh impact someone in the wrong way but if it's if it's you know true to who you are hopefully it's you know it's

074gonna resonate in the right way with the right school well thank you all so much for hosting this panel for our students i'm going to encourage students and parents if you have further questions feel free to shoot me an email if you have further questions for any of our panelists and you would like their contact info please let me know and i can help connect you all right thank you all so much and have a great rest of your day enjoy the group of panels good luck to all the students out there