I apologize in advance if this post is a bit long and lacks coherence.
May I ask for some advice on how to get started with my college essays? I plan to apply to seven colleges (3 early, 4 regular), and in total, they have 28 supplemental essay prompts (I’ve finished my common app essay over the summer).
The total word count of the 28 essays is 7,210 words (essays without word count are estimated).
The sad thing here is that I am a very very slow writer. Usually I take time to plan out what I write and read sources for inspiration. On average I take around 2-3 minutes per word (yes, embarrassingly slow, for essays, but for other types of writing like this post it is around 0.05 minutes per word), so it will take me around 15,000 to 20,000 minutes to write my essays. But the good news is that some of these are similar in nature, but the slight difference in the prompt may mean a world of difference in the actual essays.
I cannot start writing until the 20th of August because I have the International Olympiad in Informatics (basically a programming competition).
So if I start on the 20th of August and I have until the 1st of January, I have around
This is the first time I searched for the essay prompts, and most of them are bad if I am a boring person, which I am. Most of my time is spent preparing for the IMO (where I won gold at 2016 and bronze at 2015) and the IOI (which is upcoming). I have other activities but they make up altogether < 35% of my non-school / non-sleep time. I also do not see anything interesting in my olympiad preparation or from my school life or from my sleeping time or from my daily routine (altogether takes around 95% of my life) that would be interesting enough to write an essay about, so I have to take from the remaining 5%. Does this mean I am essentially screwed in applications since I can’t seem to find a way to at least make myself look interesting?
Also you might have already noticed this by now, but I am an extremely bad writer (I think the quality of the writing in this post is indicative of this), so this would give me additional trouble with my essays.
I forgot to finish this sentence: “y, I have around”. It should have been "I have around 160 days for essays, so I should spend around 100 to 120 minutes a day for essays, and i’m not sure if I have the time.
Visiting certainly helps by “fleshing out” campus life. Contacting professors who specialize in areas you will pursue can give you a leg up if you have some unique skill set they need. Meeting alums, especially ones in a relevant field, can either signal what the admissions officers are looking for or add more perspective to specific aspects.
Read everything the colleges say about admissions, what they value and look for, and see the sorts of kids (ideas, energy, accomplishments- and side involvements) that they brag about. Don’t create a target list until you have done this.
The best advice is to breathe. (And don’t obsess over the number of words or other other counts- unproductive and distracting.) Each piece of writing is meant to show something about you. Of course, it will overlap. You will “show” them in what you choose to write about and how.
Photos and FB aren’t it. Not when you think you want a top tier. How did you make your list? If you know enough about them, have pieced this together, the essays become easier- and genuine.
@Oregon2016 Thanks for your advice, but I have a few clarifications.
" Contacting professors who specialize in areas you will pursue can give you a leg up if you have some unique skill set they need. " - How do I do so - do I just look up their contact details from their websites? Also the skills I have (math and programming) seem to be pretty common
“Meeting alums, especially ones in a relevant field, can either signal what the admissions officers are looking for or add more perspective to specific aspects.” - I’d really like to do so, but the problem is that I am an international student so there’s probably not too many of them from my country. But of course there is the internet - any advice with this?
@lookingforward I just checked the top schools in my major and checked their website to see if there is anything that I particularly would not like about the school. If there is none, I include it in my list.
Well, to get an admit to a top school, that’s not even close to enough. That’s no energy, no drive, too easy. Being generic is a kiss of death for any school with the fierce competition of your A and B lists.
I don’t mean to sound harsh, but I have an expression: “If you want to be Harvard, you have to think at the Harvard level.” Insert any college name there.
Contacting profs doesn’t give a leg up in admissions if the basics aren’t there. Just stop where you are, OP, and figure what those basics are, beyond your stats and “I want to go there.” Spend time reading what these colleges say, the kinds of kids they look for. MIT has superb admissions blogs- you need to be the sort who can find these pieces of info.
Professors publish their research in academic journals. You can check their bios for where they publish, and/or course catalogs for the specialties they teach. Departmental sites usually update on faculty news as well. More professors are hooking up with industry and business enterprises so you can even find references to them in magazines like Fortune or newspapers like the Wall Street Journal.
Similarly, alums don’t need to be from your country, just have some nexus. For example business incubators, micro lending programs, humanitarian efforts, exchange programs. Once you dig you might be surprised who you find locally.
Good luck.
I would think that the judges for the International Olympiad event would also be a good resource. Surely some of them went to the US schools you will be applying to???
No matter how many profs a kid contacts, if a kid answers the Why Us, “you have my major and I didn’t see anything I didn’t like,” he’s in trouble. Did you see the A and B lists OP noted in another thread? They’ll have thousands of kids applying who can show their match with more gusto. And even schools which do not specifically ask Why Us, will be looking for it in the other written parts.
Have you compared all the essay topics? It’s likely many of the prompts are similar enough that you can use the same essays for different schools with minor edits.
Take a look at this site – collegeessayorganizer.com. It claims to be able to show you where essays overlap, which could reduce that amount you need to write
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