College entrance essays range from the canned to the creative
By Olivia Barker, USA TODAY
There are as many correct answers to
college application essay questions as there
are candidates.
Still, thousands of anxious high school
seniors are spending as much as $300 to craft
the “right” response.
Essay editing is becoming a requisite
to the college admissions game as
standardized-test preparation. But as more
and more people—parents, teachers, college
councilors,
entrepreneurial
Ivy
League
graduates—apply red pen to word-processed
paper, bleary-eyed admissions officers
complain that essays are becoming
increasingly homogenized, or so polished that
they provoke raised eyebrows.
Colleges are growing tired of formulaic
compositions on 11th-hour community-service
stints and last-minute trips to exotic locales.
The best essays, they say, aren’t written over
the course of a semester, with the aid of
English teachers, but over a few days, in front
of desks at home.
Successful essays aren’t scripted like
history papers but penned like diary entries:
thoughtful, whimsical, reflecting what stirs
students. To sift the canned from creative,
some schools steadfastly eschew the Common
Application, which includes the predictable
personal statement, and offer their own
unusual, if not quirky, questions. Others are
more practical, downplaying the importance of
the essay altogether and more heavily
weighing
transcripts,
scores
and
recommendations.
“This is not something that should be
strategized,” said Robert Kinnally, dean of
admissions and financial aid at Stanford. “If
you haven’t taken on world peace before,
don’t tackle it in your college essay.” This time
of year, Kinnally said, his office gets any
number of worried calls from seniors stressed
out about sending the wrong message.
Too often, Kinnally and other
admissions deans say, thesaurus-armed
students write as though they’re checking off a
list: be funny, teach a lesson, write a poem,
talk about politics.
“We can tell when they’re trying to
impress us and when they’re passionate about
something,” Kinnally said. “They shouldn’t be
the person they think we want them to be.”
Essays generally require a signature
confirming the student’s sole authorship. But
sometimes, too-perfect pieces don’t jibe with
teacher comments that criticize a student’s
writing. More than once, Kinnally has caught
students pulling read-made essays off the
internet.
Kinnally said some of his favorite
essays aren’t about building latrines in a
Mexican village, but about punching the cash
register at a part-time job at a department
store.
Most students assume such
experiences are too boring, she said, “but
they’re learning about attitudes, responsibility,
people.”
Still, students and parents scanning
the best-essay books and web sites find a lot
of pieces about extraordinary situations. And
alumni magazines have showcased stories
about a sister who died of cancer and a boy
who was born with only a thumb on his left
hand.
“It’s hypocritical of schools to promote
essays in alumni magazines of disease,
handicaps and other impossible, rarefied
experiences and wonder why parents are
anxious,”
said
Sanford
Kriesberg,
a
Cambridge, Mass., essay consultant for
college and business school admissions.
“Eight-five% of kids read the examples
and say, ‘Nothing like this has ever happened
to me, so what am I going to write about?’ “
said Vedant Mimani, co-founder of New Yorkbased myEssay.com, one of a handful of essay
editing companies flourishing on the internet.
“But kids don’t need to go out and create
tragedy in their lives.”
Minami, who hails from a small New
Jersey town, applied to Yale eight year ago.
“Frankly, I had done nothing,” he said, “I went
to school, came home and played sports.” But
his essay, about playing games of street
football every day and letting his fantasies
wander onto the NFL field, helped get him in.
“With college essays, it has to be
something that sort of flows out, like a
College entrance essays range from the canned to the creative
freestyle rap over some beat,” said Dan
Weisman, 17, from West Newton, Mass.
Weisman, who’s applying to eight selective
schools, said he has changed his essay, about
leaving his native Los Angeles at age 15, very
little since he sat down a month ago to write it.
His classmates are having a tougher
time. Still, he said, “if you can’t find something
interesting in your life, you’re obviously not
looking hard enough.”
Harvard avoids the essay conundrum
by minimizing its significance. “We read them,
we take them seriously, but they’re not a
uniquely valuable credential,” admissions
director Marlyn McGrath Lewis said. “People
have always been able to get help on essays.
That’s the reason why we’ve never valued
them so highly.”
A beautifully written essay is a “nice
thing,” Lewis said. Conversely, a perversely
themed essay can be truly damaging. “It
raises questions about judgment, taste or
character,” she said. “We’re looking for a
person her, not an artifact.”
At the University of Chicago, essays
often carry a lot of weight. But since 1982,
they have been unlike those at any other
school. Intellectually charged challenges are
the norm: Applicants might have to invent a
metaphor based on a kitchen object, for
example, as in “the expanding universe is like
a loaf of bread.” Boasting a set of largely new
questions every year, Chicago fancies itself as
administering the “uncommon application,”
attracting subtle, imaginative, energetic
thinkers.
The goal is to elicit something fresh
from candidates, said admissions dean Ted
O’Neill, not something they have been writing
over the summer, showing to friends and
taking a class.
He concedes that the application
scares off the sort of kid who would prefer to
write just one essay for submission to a dozen
schools and get the process over with. “With
these questions, we tend to get a more natural
product, O’Neill said. “The essays come
across as mostly not perfect, a little naïve.
They mostly sound like kids.”