So my goal when trying to write this essay is to stand out in the 1000 essays a admissions officer reads a week. I don’t want to write a generic topic about how a extracurricular sport or club made me who I am. I’ve spent weeks trying to think of an idea, an attention getter. Finally I thought of something, but its a real risk. It could pay off amazingly, showing that I think out of the box but also could make a admissions person think I’m crazy…So I’m in my school’s marching band, I have been all four years and this year I am the band president. My idea is to write about band through the perspective of my mellophone, instead of me. I don’t know exactly know how I’d organize it but it would be as if my Mellophone was writing. I think I’m going to start it with the thoughts that go through the instrument during a performance. Throughout the essay the instrument will be also talking about its player, me. I want some comments and suggestions from people. Do you think I might have something here or am I gonna hurt my application by doing this?
Sounds gimmicky to me, @mmiatke . After all, what insights would a mellophone have that you couldn’t have yourself?
To me, the main risk for you here isn’t whether or not the admissions officer will think you’re crazy. While your idea is definitely original, you wouldn’t come off as insane. My main concern is that the perspective of a mellophone won’t give the admissions officers a good idea of who you are as a person. Like @marvin100 pointed out, your mellophone probably won’t have special insights that would make admissions officers know much more about you than the fact that you play in band, which is something that they can see just from a quick look at your extracurriculars. If you decide to write this essay, you need to be able to convey something extra that they can’t tell about you from the rest of your application. Yes, generic essays can get a little boring, but they achieve the writer’s purpose of lending insight into what kind of person the officers are admitting.
And anyways, essays aren’t quite as important as your academic achievement. Even if you did decide to write a generic essay, although it probably wouldn’t make your application stand out as much as you want it to, it definitely wouldn’t hurt your chances as long as they got a better picture of who you are as a person.
I’m not sure; that topic feels a little risky to me. The point of a college essay is to be about YOU, not your instrument. I think a really well written generic essay is better than a poorly written creative one. My college councilors have always described the college essay as a “selfie” you are the main focus of it, but you also have to choose your background carefully, and you may have to edit it a little, etc… I personally think writing a generic essay is fine as long as you keep your voice in it. I think one problem people make is having so many people edit their essay that they eventually lose their voice in the essay. I also don’t think you need to write about a club or extracurricular—if you look at the John’s Hopkins essays on their site, some are as simple as a girl writing about making paper cranes, or of course there’s the all-famous Costco essay. The anecdotal part is not as significant as what the essay says about you.