After you’ve read through the instructions a few times and gathered your notes, you can start creating an outline to organize your essay and decide what message you want to send. Now you're ready to write your first draft.
Remember that there are thousands of others students applying to your desired university, and you need to distinguish yourself. Re-read your essay, delete all the sentences that sound like a cliché, and try to find a more original angle.
However, if you are the type of person who likes to start with the don’ts, check out our blog post on How Not to Write a University Application Essay.
Universities are looking for authenticity and quality of thinking, so don’t try to shape your essay around phrases or ideas that people have used many times before, but base it on your genuine beliefs.
2. Start with a compelling introduction
If you don’t follow the application essay guidelines, the admissions officer may assume that you won’t be able to follow the directions of the university’s program. Page and word limits are mentioned for a reason and you must be able to organize your submission by following the rules.
They say starting the essay is the hardest part. You may think it’s redundant to mention that you need to read the instructions carefully, but with all the excitement and stress that characterizes this period of your life, it needs to be highlighted.
While you research your application essay, you will be encouraged to check out some examples of great essays and get inspired. While this is a great exercise, many students allow themselves to be influenced too much by the examples, and use lots of clichés in their desire to impress the admission officers.
Usually, your intended major won’t affect your chances of admission too much, unless you apply to a specific school or program within a university that’s particularly competitive, such as the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. In 2020, the Penn acceptance rate for undergraduates was around 9%, while Wharton’s was a full two percentage points lower.
What do your transcript and extracurricular activities support? If you’ve taken plenty of science and math AP courses and participated in, say, Science Olympiad, you’re probably looking at a STEM major. Meanwhile, if you’re a writer who is excellent in humanities courses and served as editor of your school newspaper, English or creative writing is probably more up your alley.
It’s not a good idea to apply with an “easier” major (not the one you really want) and attempt to transfer internally later on. Often transferring within the school is extremely selective, and you may actually be lowering your chances of initial acceptance if your profile isn’t consistent with the supposed easier major. While most colleges don’t publish statistics about internal transfer acceptance rates, generally speaking, it’s quite difficult to transfer to more challenging schools with lower acceptance rates, such as Cornell’s College of Engineering.
Of course, you don’t need to know what you’re going to do with the rest of your life right now, but you may have some idea. While many people don’t necessarily end up going into the field in which they majored, your ambitions can help you decide what to study in college and provide some direction. Keep in mind, too, that many majors can apply to numerous career paths, such as most humanities majors, while others have a more direct route, like engineering majors.
Your career goals
What do you actually like to do? Read? Conduct experiments? Play sports? Given the abundance of majors available, you’ll more than likely find something that correlates to your passions.
At the heart of your studies is your major. When you apply to college, you don’t have to have it all figured out — few 17 or 18 year olds do — but you may have an idea of what you’d like to study. This is where your intended major enters the picture.
Like it sounds, your intended major is the discipline you plan to study in college. When you apply, most colleges will ask you to put down one or several intended majors, the majors you think you’ll choose when it comes time to declare.
But in most cases, your intended major is simply that: an intention to study a discipline, not set in stone.
- Maybe your stress reliever is playing the cello, but you have a particularly complicated relationship with that because playing the cello also brings you stress. You want to both excel in the instrument, winning competitions and helping your school orchestra, but also want to keep it as a hobby that brings you joy. You can talk about the times it’s been a relief, maybe when you play a certain song you love, but also dive into the times when it’s caused stress and pain in your life.
There’s many different ways in which you can approach this essay, and it’s certainly a bit more left field than prompts one and three, but if done right, this essay can shine an equal amount of light on your character, personality, and passions. However, this essay is a bit tricky, because you want to answer the prompt and talk about the ways in which you relieve stress, but you also want to show the admissions committee a deeper picture of yourself as a person. Therefore, you should try to avoid a simplistic response, like “I binge Netflix,” without a bit more depth into your own struggles and passions as a person.
- Maybe your destresser is watching food channels on YouTube, which not only makes you more hungry, but has also instilled within you a curiosity about the different food cultures across the world. Maybe there’s a few particular YouTubers you follow closely, which has inspired you to create your own YouTube channel, and spread joy through cooking videos of your own. Making the videos turned out to be hard work, but you found joy through seeing other people respond positively to your content.
You can be as open as you want to be, talking about stress relief side by side with your daily stresses, flipping back and forth between the difficulties and the pleasures of your daily life. Ideally, your stressbuster could also be a hobby or activity you love to do, but just don’t have enough time to pursue. Or maybe your stressbuster is an extracurricular activity, and you’ve been struggling over the difficulty in enjoying it, while being pushed to excel in it. It’s critical that you drive the essay towards not what you do, but who you are.
Option 2
- Maybe you’re not American, and grew up in Brazil. You could talk about your own local customs and culture, how it differs from the stereotypes of Americans you have grown up hearing. Maybe your interest is primarily in politics, and so you envision having long conversations that compare the Brazilian government to the American government, and how race relations operate in both countries.
Want to learn what Williams College will actually cost you based on your income? And how long your application to the school should take? Here’s what every student considering Williams College needs to know.
A key aspect of the Williams application lies in the strength of your supplemental essay, which gives the admissions committee a more personal look at your profile, and we’ve broken down each essay prompt below! Want to know your chances at Williams? Calculate your chances for free right now.
Option 3: At Williams, we believe that bringing together students and professors in small groups produces extraordinary academic outcomes. Our distinctive Oxford-style tutorial classes—in which two students are guided by a professor in deep exploration of a single topic—are a prime example. Each week the students take turns developing independent work—an essay, a problem set, a piece of art—and critiquing their partner’s work. Focused on close reading, writing and oral defense of ideas, more than 60 pre-determined tutorials a year are offered across the curriculum. Imagine yourself in a tutorial at Williams. What topic would you be most excited to study in that setting and why?
This college essay tip is by Mira “Coach Mira” Simon, Independent Educational Consultant and professionally trained coach from the Institute of Professional Excellence in Coaching (iPEC), who combines her expertise to help high school students find their pathway to college.
This college essay tip is by Rick Clark, director of undergraduate admissions at Georgia Tech. The tip below is paraphrased from a post on the Georgia Tech Admission blog.
Most people prefer reading a good story over anything else. So. tell a great story in your essay. Worry less about providing as many details about you as possible and more about captivating the reader's attention inside of a great narrative. I read a great essay this year where an applicant walked me through the steps of meditation and how your body responds to it. Loved it. (Yes, I'll admit I'm a predisposed meditation fan.)
For an inquisitive student like me, Brown’s liberal program provides a diverse and intellectually stimulating environment, giving me great freedom to tailor my education by pursuing a double concentration in both public health and business, while also being able to tap into other, more unconventional, academic interests, such as ancient history and etymology through the first year seminars.
College Essay Tips from College Admissions Experts
Listening to rain: Why not watching TV? What does it tell you about this family that they sit and listen to rain together?
Verbs jump, dance, fall, fail us. Nouns ground us, name me, define you. “We are the limits of our language.” Love your words, feed them, let them grow. Teach them well and they will teach you too. Let them play, sing, or sob outside of yourself. Give them as a gift to others. Try the imperative, think about your future tense, when you would have looked back to the imperfect that defines us and awaits us. Define, Describe, Dare. Have fun.
9. Keep the story focused on a discrete moment in time.
The requirements for declaring a major vary from school to school. Most schools ask you to declare your major by the end of sophomore year, while still allowing you to do so earlier, such as at the end of freshman year. Some majors like neuroscience at Amherst College require you to write up a plan of all the courses you plan to take and when in order to fulfill the requirements. The plan of action to declare your major will vary of course from school to school so be sure to speak with your advisor to stay on top of deadlines.
As a high school student, you’ve probably felt constrained by the prescribed curriculum at times and wondered why you really need to learn, say, calculus if you’re planning on pursuing a career in history. The good news is that once you get to college, you’ll have a lot more freedom to choose your curriculum.
At the heart of your studies is your major. When you apply to college, you don’t have to have it all figured out — few 17 or 18 year olds do — but you may have an idea of what you’d like to study. This is where your intended major enters the picture.
It’s not a good idea to apply with an “easier” major (not the one you really want) and attempt to transfer internally later on. Often transferring within the school is extremely selective, and you may actually be lowering your chances of initial acceptance if your profile isn’t consistent with the supposed easier major. While most colleges don’t publish statistics about internal transfer acceptance rates, generally speaking, it’s quite difficult to transfer to more challenging schools with lower acceptance rates, such as Cornell’s College of Engineering.
When Do You Declare Your Major?
What do your transcript and extracurricular activities support? If you’ve taken plenty of science and math AP courses and participated in, say, Science Olympiad, you’re probably looking at a STEM major. Meanwhile, if you’re a writer who is excellent in humanities courses and served as editor of your school newspaper, English or creative writing is probably more up your alley.
Like it sounds, your intended major is the discipline you plan to study in college. When you apply, most colleges will ask you to put down one or several intended majors, the majors you think you’ll choose when it comes time to declare.
Some particularly selective majors at certain colleges require separate or additional applications, such as Johns Hopkins University’s prestigious Biomedical Engineering (BME) program. In cases like this, you must declare your intention to study the subject when you apply. You may also be admitted to the school but not the program itself.