How to Write A Personal Essay for College Application
Let’s get straight to business, as a personal essay for college application is not a joke. In this essay, you need to show professors who you are, what your background is and why you, and you especially, deserve to be admitted to this particular college. Considering how many students want the same, it is not a very simple task.
Many students say that they would prefer to pass only a standardized test and not to write about themselves under any conditions. It is hard to write about yourself because you know everything about yourself, and it is very hard to choose what is really important. However, colleges want to assess your personality, and it is the only way they have.
College is a community, and every community has its rules, its profile. Reading your essay admission committee assesses your ability to contribute to this community. That is why you should not get discouraged too much when you receive several rejections. They don’t mean you are a bad person. They only mean that the community looks for different skill sets, different characters in new members.
Another reason why the essay is necessary is that most of the colleges receive applications with similar scores for standardized tests like SAT, GMAT, etc. How should the schools choose?
They choose based on your essay, as they know whom they want more for now — competitive sportsmen or working bees, creative artists, or the ones who will contribute to a school’s paper. That is why it is very important to make your essay stand out among others and truly tell your story and show your personality because you will be picked or not based on it.
Contents
Major Principles of Writing a Personal Essay
While the colleges’ approach differs in many aspects, these principles will still work for any application.
Pay attention to the required topic
Yes, it is a personal essay, but it always has a direction. For example, you can be asked to tell how you’ve dealt with a complex problem, or you can be asked to write about your future goals.
There are 5-6 topics that every college uses one way or another, and you can find them online rather easily. Read the prompts, but don’t save them, as they will limit your creativity. Returning back to the topic — it is very important not to deviate from it too much. If you are asked about your future goals, then more than 70% of your paper should be written about your future goals, not about your long road to this particular moment, not about your hobbies or your achievements. You can use the remaining 30% to explain those goals using some personal anecdotes or other references, but not more than this.
Delegate if you are not sure you can do it
The unfair thing about application essays is that they are discriminating against people who have no talent in writing. You can be very good in economics or law, you can be more than literate, but you still can find writing creative and, at the same time, well-structured essays too challenging. With the competition that is mandatory when it comes to college applications, it can become a real problem. That is why so many students choose an expert essay service like WriteMyPaperHub which could write papers for them and where they have a great opportunity to order application essays online. It is such a massive practice that often it comes to the point when you compete not with other student’s writing, but with essays crafted by expert authors working for professional writing agencies. It cannot be called fair play, we agree, but first of all, you should remember about your final goal, and your ultimate goal is to enter a particular
school.
Make “What for?” question your guide
Ask yourself “what for?” about every word, every sentence, every abstract in your essay. Don’t even think that you will be able to deal with application essays from the first try. You will definitely need several drafts. Some students say that they had written more than 30 drafts before they finally were satisfied with the result. When you start questioning the purpose of every part of your essay, you make it lighter, more clear and concise and help admission committee members to understand you faster and better.
Make sure your grammar is impeccable
There are a dozen quality proofreading services you can use when working on your college application essay. We recommend using one paid one and several free ones. They have different algorithms and find different mistakes. Also, it is a good idea to edit a paper the next day you write it, or at least with a several hours break. This way, your brain will perform better. If you can, print your essay and read it aloud. We find more mistakes when we use a printed version, and reading aloud will help you to allocate too long sentences, which should be cut in half. Good luck!
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