<p>Welcome to the new College Essays forum, where you can discuss how to craft the best possible admissions essay. Please do NOT post your essays in College Admissions or other OT forums.</p>
<p>CAUTION: Please be careful what you DO post in this forum. Your posts are permanent, and viewable by everyone. Your great essay COULD be plagiarized. Also, beware of people who post open invitations to read essays - we don’t know what their intentions are. They may be helpful people, or they may be seeking to use the creative effort of others for their own purposes.</p>
<p>I think the most important part is to truely write something from your heart, otherwise it will come out fake and the admissions will be unimpressed. It may say cheesy but write something that means alot to you and it will be reflected in your paper.</p>
<p>What I realized while writing my essay is that I should just write, and not try too hard to get the reader to laugh or cry. I appreciate humor and wanted to write a funny essay, but I ended up talking about my EMT work and there really isn’t anything funny about someone who is injured and can’t breathe properly. I tried to put something more lighthearted in, and it just sounded forced. My essay was serious, and the anecdote was a bit sad. But I think it worked better that way.</p>
<p>How do you think the admission officers rate an essay? Any advice as to the components they might rate, such as overall concept, creativity, structure, grammar, etc. And how they would weight each rating?</p>
<p>Im not sure but creativity comes first. Then concept, structure and lastly grammer. They dont try to grade you like a AP english teacher but still…c’mon you should have had all those little things fixed.</p>
<p>Try to find a very creative way to write your essay. I suggest writing about something so bizarre that if you were to make it a news headline people would think you’re nuts.</p>
<p>The first thing is that no matter how creative or interesting your essay is, GRAMMAR still counts - big time. The whole reason they have you write/submit writing samples is to see if you can even compose a coherent sentence or paper, because that’s a big part of what you do in college, particularly if you plan to go into a writing-intensive major or want to become published or do research during your undergraduate career. Please, please, PLEASE have at least one person (preferably an English teacher or a friend who is a grammar nazi) look over your essay before you send it in. Basic grammar is something they will have expected you to master long before you reach college. Having you write in your own words shows a lot about how much you understand a subject as well. </p>
<p>After grammar, make sure you are answering what the prompt (if you are given one) has asked you for. It seems really simple, but being able to FOLLOW DIRECTIONS is critical in many aspects of life. You wouldn’t believe how many times someone has screwed up an entire section of a test or a lab assignment because they didn’t read or fully understand the directions. </p>
<p>Give them something that the average person would be interested in reading about; the strongest part of your essay should be the hook. If you can’t keep them reading, they won’t think much else about you. Keep sarcasm to a minimum; that type of material is difficult for people to undertstand only through writing. Also, if you’re sarcastic about the things you write, what’s to say you won’t take the rest of your academic life seriously? Don’t give the admission counselors a good reason to dismiss you. </p>
<p>Don’t think that you have to put on a grandiose performance to be accepted. Some of the people that read your essays are professors, too - and they know when someone’s fudging or fluffing things. Don’t bull around. Talk about things you are excited or know a lot about (as appropriate), or as if you were trying to explain to a friend how much a situation has impacted not just your life, but who you are as a person (but with better vocabulary). If you can connect with your audience, they can relate and will be more likely to admit you - that kind of power with words goes a long way, trust me.</p>
<p>Hey ChickenSoup, I’m also an EMT and wrote my essay about that along with a few other things. How exactly did you fit yours in? Mine was mostly about the diversity at the squad and some personal issues that I have had to deal with. Also, really random, but do you ride in Manhatten? Haha, talk to you later.</p>
<p>My sister-in-law had an interesting comment when she read ds’s essay. She said, that most college essays have two agendas. One is answering the question they asked (the prompt), but the second is who are you? You need to be sure you’ve answered both the question they asked and the one they didn’t.</p>
<p>From the ones I’ve seen, it seems like the most essential thing is that the essay is genuine and personalized. Looking at some samples (from books, from <a href=“http://www.ivyadmits.com%5B/url%5D”>www.ivyadmits.com</a>, etc.) helps to get an idea of how to structure them, but then it just has to sincerely come from the heart.</p>
<p>My essay was more about working to help the community, and how although not everything is as exciting as it is on tv, giving a patient oxygen is just as much saving a life as bandaging an MVA victim.</p>
<p>I also started the essay with what our chief said to me when I first applied to join the ambulance corps: “Do you mind seeing decapitated bodies?” I thought it was a rather interesting first sentence, ;).</p>
<p>I already sent mine in ED, we worked on our essays in class. Anyways, I have an article from the UVA dean of admission that was in U.S. News and World Report. It talks about the bad, the good, and the risky. Bad essays are those that are generic or talk in vague, general terms about big topics. The good have a distinct voice, instead of telling the reader, it shows through detail. Quote: “In a short, personal essay, precision is power.” The risky can be borderline offensive, and people can be penalized for taking a risk in their essay, because after all, there is a risk in taking a risk. However, there can be a great reward for doing so. They really emphasize in the article the power of voice, that “the best essays are crafted not from a formula for success but by a voice that is practiced.” Thus, everything everyone keeps saying about sincerity is obviously some of the best advice. Hope this helps! It certainly helped me in avoiding a “McEssay.”</p>