Please read my admission essay!

coconutcake
Fri, 30 Nov 2012 17:17:23 +0000

A mom’s advice: This essay will probably get you rejected. Here’s why. The overall message is, “I’m a sheltered rich kid who is disgusted by poverty and have no empathy for anyone who lives outside of my own privileged bubble. Homeless people? EWWW! So now I’m applying to your school so I can hang out with other rich kids 24/7 and so I never have to see any of those disgusting poor people ever again!”

I am NOT saying that this is the type of person you really are. I hope not, anyway. But this is how your essay comes off.

Okay, so you noticed inequality and you felt really upset and shocked by it. That’s fine. But what did you DO about it? How are you helping to address at least one of the needs you saw? Did you even bother to meet or talk to anyone living in that area?

And poverty did NOT cause you to lose your match. This section tells the ad coms, “I’m the type of kid who blames others for my own mistakes.”

The “cheap gasoline” comment made me laugh. What, exactly, does expensive gasoline smell like?

Your mind can’t “quarrel.” I don’t think you understand the correct usage of that word.

I really wouldn’t bring up how depressed you were in your beautiful neighborhood. Mental health issues in general are not something an ad com wants to hear about. This screams, “This kid is going to be a problem in our community.”

A much, much better essay would have a message more along the lines of, “When I moved to X city from Y city, I was shocked and dismayed by the socioeconomic inequality I witnessed for the first time in my life (homelessness, all the other things you noticed). This was a painful experience and I had to do something to help my new community, so I volunteered at X organization and raised X amount of funds for X cause and as a result, Y happened. It’s a drop in the bucket, but it’s something. I’m committed to doing what I can to improve the quality of any community of which I am a part.”

But DID you do anything to help? Or did you just flub your tennis match and blame everyone and think, “Wow, poor people would make a great essay topic. I even saw some real ones!”

You have to realize how shallow you come across in your first draft. As I said, I hope that’s not the case. But that’s definitely the way the ad coms are going to view you if you use it. Ad coms are looking for students who can show empathy and who are problem solvers, not problem tellers. If you can demonstrate those two things in your rewrite, your essay will be greatly improved.