Soon-to-be college applicants, here’s a great way to start your college essays—and to improve your college essay writing—before most applications are available. Write 1-2 paragraph responses to the following ten questions using these criteria:
- Be completely honest. Nobody will see, grade, or evaluate your responses, so you have nothing at all to lose.
- Use specific stories to illustrate what you’re describing.
- Write as if you were talking to your favorite teacher, someone you respect but also feel comfortable talking with.
- Which activity has meant the most to you and why?
- Which activity will miss you the most next year and why?
- What’s your favorite subject/class/teacher and why?
- What’s something you’d like to learn more about when you get to college?
- When have you failed or made a mistake during your high school years, and what did you learn from it?
- What have you made a conscious effort to learn about outside of your high school classes? These could be academic topics, skills, hobbies, interests, etc.
- Name three things that you’re just naturally good at (subjects, skills, jobs, etc.).
- What is something that you’re just not good at, no matter how hard you try?
- What has been your proudest moment of high school? (It doesn’t matter whether it’s impressive or important to other people; it just has to matter to you.)
- When you imagine the things you hope or expect to gain from college, which 2-3 would be at the top of your list and why?
Now, when the applications become available, you’ll have ten stories from which to pluck everything from ideas, to inspiration, to actual sentences or even paragraphs.
Honest writing that sounds like you, that’s not contrived to impress, and that reveals actual events from your life is exactly what admissions officers hope to read from applicants’ college essays. I simply cannot imagine a scenario where a student faced with multiple college essay prompts would not be able to draw heavily from honest, detailed, revealing responses to these questions.