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To Write a College Admissions Essay

  1. Question the situation.
    • Subject: What specific topic will you write about? What prompt has the college provided for you to respond to?
    • Purpose: What are you trying to accomplish? How can you create a narrative that will reflect positively on your achievements and character?
    • Audience: How will you attract the attention of the admissions officer? What details about your life show you as a valuable addition to the college?
  2. Plan your admissions essay.
    • Reflect on your life, your academic achievements, and your goals.
    • Analyze the prompt that you have been provided, making sure you understand what admissions officers seek in your response.
    • Schedule your submission, making sure to achieve the due date.
  3. Research your topic.
    • Search: Collect details for your story, listing key events and people.
    • Focusing: Identify elements from your story that put you in the best light—likable, honest, hardworking, and so on.
    • Shaping: Plan to lead the reader to an important realization about you.
  4. Create the first draft of the essay.
    • Begin your essay in a surprising or interesting way.
    • Follow with important details of your narrative.
    • Build the narrative toward the important realization about you.
    • End with the last detail or a closing statement about yourself.
  5. Improve your first draft.
    • Evaluate your first draft.

      Purpose: Does the essay achieve its purpose?

      Audience: Will the essay hold an admissions officer’s attention?

    • Revise your writing.

      Rewrite sentences that are confusing, unclear, or too long.

      Add details that will help you make your point.

      Cut unnecessary words or parts. Strive to be concise.

    • Edit your revised writing.

      Replace general nouns and verbs with specific and active ones.

      Check your writing for accuracy using pages 190–195 as a guide.

  6. Present the final copy by submitting it with your application.
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College Admissions Essay

Below is a sample college admissions essay. Most colleges ask for admissions essays of 500 words or less, so it is important to choose your words carefully.

Lessons from Bully High

The beginning relates the writer’s experience to a pressing current issue.

All those nightly news specials about bullying could have been filmed at my high school. You saw it in the hallways and in the locker rooms and on the gym floor and behind computer screens. Girls bullied girls, boys bullied boys, and vice versa. How do you change a school culture where bullying is the norm?

I didn’t always stand up for those who were bullied. However, one incident during my junior year changed things. In the locker room after health and fitness class, a friend of mine was taunting another classmate for no reason in particular. When the classmate fought back, my friend, a big and muscular guy, slammed him against a locker repeatedly. Everybody just stood around watching. After a while, I couldn’t take it anymore and stepped in between them.

Later that day I confronted my friend. I told him he took it too far. “I thought you had my back. I guess you punked out,” he responded. In the weeks following the altercation, I lost favor with that group of friends. It was a bit of a lonely time, but I also grew more confident in myself and met people who are some of my best friends today.

The middle shares lessons learned and exemplifies the writer’s good character.

During this period, I became more aware of the bullying going on around me. I stopped being a silent bystander and started acting as a mediator. My actions garnered ridicule from my old friends but also respect from other students. One lesson I took from the experience is that bullies are actually a minority at my school, but other students are reluctant to speak out against them.

This silent majority offered an opportunity for change. I joined a group of students and teachers in a “Not in Our School” campaign aimed at curbing bullying and hateful speech. For the first month of the new school year, we implemented activities and classroom discussions to engage students in conversation and action against intolerance and bullying. The campaign was successful, and the prevalence of bullying dropped (though not completely). My hope is that the lessons from the campaign will carry over in years to come and that the culture of bullying will eventually cease to exist.

The ending ties the story to the writer’s future goals and aspirations.

My high school experience is one of the main reasons for my interest in the field of social work. I’ve gone from being an observer of social problems to being an advocate for solving them. Working with others to solve conflicts has helped me grow as a person, and I hope to continue to learn and grow in college.

 
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