Bauld - On Writing the College Application Essay

For Lizzy, Molly,
Xabier, and my students

O n a fall day not long ago I returned to the high school where I once taught English, to address the senior class. (In the past I simply talked to students, but it seems any time you travel more than 150 miles to say something you are entitled to a lot more respect.)

The place was packed; even students who had cut my classes were there, looking angelic and attentive. There was a reason for that, I knew. My subject was College Admissions.

I hadnt even finished panting from the four-flight trudge up to the auditorium before a girl stood up in the middle of the crowd and asked The Question.

What are they looking for on those application essays, anyway?

Faced with that same query hundreds of times Ive always been tempted to mimic the Zen master who, when asked What is Zen? by his students, simply put his slippers on his head and left the room. But Western sympathy has prevailed and Ive stayed behind with my shoes on, trying to explain why What are they looking for?like Whats going to be on the test?is an Unquestion, or at least the wrong question.

This book will help you ask (and answer) the right questions. There are two reasons for you to concentrate on your essay. Number One you may already be intimately acquainted with: its not easy. In fact, its a pain in at least two anatomical areas. As an admissions officer, Ive seen the doom and dismay in the faces of thousands of applicants whove asked me about the essay, and as a teacher Ive watched my students agonize over them. (Once, in the dark backward and abysm of time, I even wrote a couple of college essays myself.) So I know its the hardest part of applying, even more grinding than the SAT, which at least ends after three hours. Finishing an essay seems to take forever, and there are always more interesting things to do, like putting sharp sticks in your eyes.

But the second reason to concentrate on it is a happy one. The essay can be your ticket out of the faceless applicant hordes and into First Choice University. And unlike everything else in your applicationthe grades, recommendations, and tests, which are by now out of your handsyou have real control over your writing, right up to the last frantic minute. Essays show the admissions committee who you are, and its your chance to let fly, uninterrupted.

You may be more frightened than excited by that opportunity. Many of my students, facing the task at first, have shrugged and said, I speak better than I write. Ill concentrate on the interview. But, as youll see in chapter one, pinning your hopes on the interview is not a good idea.

My students doubts about themselves were reflected in the advice of some adults I talked to when I began this book, who suggested Id have to write down toward some Common Denominator. The way they described it, this Common Denominator must have one set of knuckles wrapped around a blunt Crayola and the other dragging on the ground.

But I dont believe I have to write down. Even though were all swamped every day with sloppy and deceitful language and bad writing, you can learn to say something simple and meaningfuland thats all a college essay asks. Just as my students did, you can write a good one that distinguishes you from everybody else. What nobody can do is just dash it off. In fact, before you even put pen to application there are two things you must do to help yourself:

1. Read other essays. Familiarity breeds knowledge. Every writer working in a special formsonnet, mystery novel, diet book, college essayneeds to know how it has been handled in the past, the good and the bad. Being able to navigate the shoals of clich and convention is a necessity for the sailor in college-essay waters. Chapters three, nine, eleven, twelve, and thirteen, as well as the sample essays throughout, are maps of previous voyages along this course. Chapter eleven especially, with comments from admissions officers on student essays, will show you routes of clear sailing as well as the dangerous reefs.

2. Practice. On your maiden voyage, dont expect to win the Americas Cup. You need some practicethe more the better. I have made a few suggestions for ways to strengthen your writing muscles, and even given specific examples. To write well, you have to write. How good you want your college essay to be is up to you.

Throughout the book I concentrate on the writing of a general personal statement, to satisfy one of the Common Application topics. Chapter ten suggests ways to address and streamline the writing of the supplements.

A warning: Theres no magic formula for writing the college essay. Writing, said E. B. White, is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar. Its not any kind of trick at all, in fact. Your writing is your way of seeing and of thinking, and good college essays have as many guises as the Greek god Proteus, who was always changing shape to slip out of somebodys grasp. You, as a college essayist, must realize how protean you can be, too: one minute telling a story, the next confessing and explaining a bias, or reminiscing, or investigating your world like a reporter. All so that you can slip into somebodys grasp.

A word about the examples. Whether a particular essay worked, no one can say, if by worked we mean it was the crowbar that opened the gate. Some essays, no matter how good, wont get you into First Choice University; some, no matter how bad, wont keep you out (if your parents just paid for the complete renovation of the admissions building, lets say). The essays in this book are naturally taken out of their application contexts, so you dont know who had three As senior year and who was captain of cross-country. Its not always easy to tell precisely why someone got in. But a good essay, like a good painting, has an interior rightness that has nothing to do with the price it fetches in the college admissions auction. That rightness makes the difference for you when the decision could go either way. If you write as well as you can, the rest of the process will take care of itself, and you can glide into your senior spring knowing youll be more than just a list of numbers to the admissions committee.

Thats how an essay really works: it shows you at your alive and thinking best, a person worth listening tonot just for the ten minutes it takes to read your application, but for the next four years.

W hen I finished the first edition of this book in 1986, Columbia University, which had gone coed only three years before, boasted its lowest admission rate ever: 30 percent. That year Harvard University, then as now the most selective college in the country, accepted a scant 17 percent of all applicants. The competition to be admitted to these and other Ivy League schools was described in the press of the time as fierce, cutthroat, and brutal.

In 2011, Bowdoin College, which doesnt even require the SAT, admitted 15.6 percent of its applicants. Columbia accepted 6.9 percent; Harvard, 6.2 percent.

In 1986 the Common Application was itself a teenageronly 114 colleges accepted it, none of them Ivy League schools. In 201112, 456 colleges used it, including all of the Ivies.

In 1986, the Internet, which contained almost nothing, was known only to a handful of academics and computer geeks. Colleges urged applicants to type (remember paper?), though even handwriting was acceptable; at Brown University in the early 1980s we required the essay be handwritten, for that human touch. In 201112, almost everyone applies online.

The SAT since the mid-1980s has changed its name and addedof all thingsan essay!