When you’re reading college essays and deciding who to admit, you tend to look for two things:
- intelligence
- personality
Your first priority should be writing a quality essay that sounds intelligent, and is free of typos or bizarre word choice. Beyond that; you just need to have some fun and be creative. Colleges don’t expect 17 or 18 year old applicants to have major life accomplishments. They just want their admits to be smart, funny, and diverse.
I assisted in the GW admissions office a while ago. We had the same prompt as #3 above. The best essays I recall reading for that prompt included…
- One about teaching a Syrian refugee how to play go fish
- One about the various creations that the applicant made in a sandbox as a kid
- One about a guy who had to carry a refrigerator up 5 flights of stairs
- One that included a rant about how hot Florida was in the summers
These essays all had deeper meanings and included more sophisticated ideas than I may have made them seem, but I hope you see my point. You don’t need to (and in fact, shouldn’t) boast about how you cured cancer in your kitchen and how you want to change the world by solving the South Sudan crisis. Be a funny and smart high school kid when you write your essay, because at the end of the day, that’s who a college wants to admit.