Word: essay
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...little warmth and humor never hurt either. Bowdoin requires a second, shorter essay on an influential teacher. Most students opt for a boiler-plate hymn to the hardest teacher in school. But a rare description of a teacher who "was big, but not overweight...like you could trust her to provide you with bread and beef through the winter" got the committee laughing. And the essay's touching conclusion--"she taught me how to improve from a mistake and still like myself"--sent them straight for the ADMIT stamp. Otherwise, the student's B record would not have...
Admissions officers say the most successful essays show curiosity and self-awareness. Says Cornell's Saleh: "It's the only thing that really lets us see inside your soul." While there's no one right formula for soul baring, there are many wrong ones. It's disastrous to write, as a Rice applicant did, of what he could "bring to the University of California." A self-absorbed or arrogant tone is also a guaranteed turnoff. Exhibit A: a Rice essay beginning, "I have accumulated a fair amount of wisdom in a relatively limited time of life." Exhibit B: a Cornell...
...officers accept that student essays are often heavily edited and adapted for multiple applications. But if an essay seems too polished, they'll often compare the writing with that in other parts of the application, and even to a student's verbal SAT score...
Admissions officers love a good against-all-odds story. "We like to see that kids have overcome adversity," says Cornell's Gabard. "Goodness knows, they'll face adversity in college." Provided the adversity is authentic--like a death in the family--it can make a much more gripping essay topic than a summer jaunt through Europe. And if applicants have suffered any dip in academic performance, they need to account for it, either in an essay or in a counselor's letter...
With scattered Cs in the ninth and 10th grades and football and guitar as his only extracurriculars, Comeback Kid would normally have missed Bowdoin's first cut of applications. But in his essay he wrote of how he'd spent those first two years of high school "slowly poisoning myself in a pool of malted hops." Then a close relative who was an alcoholic died of a stroke. After that, Comeback Kid cut out the beer, got A-pluses in his senior year and won a national writing award. He also won a unanimous thumbs-up for admission...