I view a “personal” essay to be one that is written about the person rather than about the school. For example, in a “why us” essay, don’t tell them what attributes of the school you like, but share how you see yourself participating in certain activities, taking advantage of things they offer, and how you might fit into their community.
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You don’t have to tell ME. I could churn out 15 awesome supplemental essays every day; they would be charming and thoughtful and just the right balance of funny and earnest and slightly self-effacing, and every college would be clamoring for me. I’m kidding. Mostly. But, yes, I emphasized over and over again that the essays didn’t need to be some big, emotional thing–that good essays can come from things that seem trivial on the surface, blah, blah. I said it over and over, and it didn’t matter. My kids hated writing college essays. It felt fake and pointless to them. I guess it’s the “likable” thing that really got me. They were incredibly stressed out by stuff like that–by the idea that they had spent all of high school taking the right classes, doing the right ECs, getting great grades, and none of mattered if they couldn’t come up with a quirky anecdote that would convince a stranger in an admission office somewhere that they were “likable.” I would just like to speak up for the (likable! honest! my kids are likable!) kids who can’t really imagine anything worse than being told “be likable!” And who are not the least bit reassured by assurances that it should be easy to write these essays.
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IMO, it is to keep the number of applicants down. Thus far (at elite schools) it hasn’t seemed to work.
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My kids essays were terrible. Seriously. Even the aspiring journalist who was a terrific writer (and not just me saying that).
But the essays were terrible. They all had one thing in common- they were clearly written by a teenager. The one that I cringed when reading was sort of a “Day in the Life”. No big reveal. No humorous anecdote. Nothing that showed grit, tenacity, ability to take a punch, coming back from adversity.
Which is one reason (these datapoints- and my involvement as an active alum and having read many essays, plus me volunteering to help kids who need it…) that I think that “authenticity” isn’t what most teenagers think it is.
It doesn’t need to be “reflections upon finishing chemotherapy”. It doesn’t need to be “meeting my birth mother for the first time”. And it doesn’t need to be “saying goodbye to my dad as he deploys to the Gulf for the third time”. Unless of course- these things are actually happening in a kid’s life.
I think this is why kids get tied up in knots- “my life is boring”. Great, then show how and why it’s boring. But make it about YOUR boring life, not about your best friend’s boring life, or the schools valedictorian’s boring life.
If the only thing that works for a kid is NOT writing essays then great- there are many auto admit colleges. But having colleges eliminate the one element of the application that is entirely under a kid’s control- the essays and short questions- doesn’t strike me as the answer. You didn’t make Val or Sal because the kid who did figured out the loophole that taking the required health class senior year instead of freshman year meant an extra .01 for the GPA. Hey, you can’t control what other kids do or don’t do. But the essays- entirely under your control. Bang something out about your life. Check it for spelling errors. Have your English teacher read it to make sure it doesn’t accidentally plagiarize the essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson you read in class last month.
Done and done.
It wasn’t so much that my kids’ essays were bad; it’s that they didn’t sound like them. They didn’t sound like AI or like a hired tutor, either…they just sounded stilted and awkward. They didn’t reveal anything about them, really. Some of them. They all managed pretty good (IMO) common app essays, but that seemed to be all they had in them. Again, I very much like giving the option to submit examples of academic work instead (and my most recent reluctant essay writer just started at Amherst, so perhaps I’m biased in favor of this approach and what a good job it did of showing how great my kid is 
)
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Agree that submitting a paper is a great option!
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I realize that you are venting after the fact and I’m not referring to your kids specifically.
As much as people want admissions to be black and white, it isn’t. There is no magic formula. It doesn’t work like this.
- Take the right classes
- Do the right EC
- Get great grades
- Come up with a quirky anecdote to show you are likeable
Often on these forums, we see students ask what extracurriculars they should add or what else can they do to enrich their application. Over and over, people tell them to do something that they enjoy doing. Why? Because, if they enjoy it, it will enrich their experience and help them grow as a person. If they are just doing something because they feel it looks good to an AO, what are they getting out of the experience? How are they growing? How is it enriching their lives? When students write about their interests, passions and things that make their eyes light up, it comes through in an essay. They don’t need a quirky anecdote.
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What I’m saying is…no, it doesn’t necessarily. My kids certainly had interests and passions, but the pressure of trying to write about this stuff so that an admissions officer can decide your future for you (and, no, this isn’t how I or anyone else presented it to them, but it’s certainly how it often felt to them) got to them. I’m not really making some grand argument against supplemental essays here (as I’ve said, I’m entirely sympathetic to the idea that there have to be ways to distinguish students who might all have stellar academic records); I’m just pushing back against the idea that writing them should come easily if you only approach it correctly or even yield good information about a kid’s true personality. Not for everyone.
@lkg4answers I did something similar with my kids: they all looked through photo albums, back when that was a thing, and that prompted some great essays I think.
My son applied to Dartmouth because the tour guide had keys to the theater. At 18, my son loved having keys. Wonder what his “Why us” would have looked like!
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100% with you. My daughter is a high GPA, high test score, competitive athlete, and considers the essays a pointless exercise. They all do. She wrote a few and basically decided to simply not apply to schools who require supplementals that are not similar to what she already wrote.
I will apologize in advance because this may sound rude or condescending, but honestly, that’s part of the point. No one is forcing kids to do the supplements. 90% of the time they are optional, but optional is not really optionalfor most.
I’m not referring to hooked kids here, but the 50% give or take who will need to show they have “it” in their 50 word supplement. That was not my kid, who was an average excellent student. She applied to Brown and was rejected. Also rejected by Tufts. She wrote a bad supp for them, and I told her to think about rewriting it, but she ignored me. And clearly neither school was right for her and they knew it and she didn’t.
The colleges do what they like. Kids will write the right things, or not. I just had a student contact me about help with her supps. Probably 20 in total for a bunch of top schools. I think she has no clue about the amount of work involved. I had a chat with her mom, who is going to talk to her daughter. I have to make people aware all the time that if they are going to submit a lot of supps, it is going to be a LOT of work. Far more than they realize. Some kids will do that work willingly, and others realize that maybe that college should come off the list. I see the supps as a very deliberate effort by the college to help them narrow the field before the game really gets started.
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Great idea but we visited a bunch of top-20 private schools and they told us how all their students were unique, with amazing extracurriculars, and natural leaders. By definition applicants like that don’t have boring lives! So, naturally, if I were an applicant I wouldn’t want to waste my time writing an essay about how my life is boring and average. It would guarantee me non-acceptance, no?
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If the kid is a good writer, their boring and average life will be a great topic.
I mentioned my student whose essay is about watching the sun rise. It’s one of my favorite essays ever. The student has something interesting to say about a completely ordinary topic.
Probably the best ways to guarantee rejection are bad teacher recs, criminal activity, proven record of repeated plagiarism/cheating, and probably something else I haven’t thought of. Writing about a boring and average life will not guarantee rejection.
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I was joking of course. The only value of an application essay in my mind is to assess the practical ability of someone to write coherently and grammatically correct. A fairly rare skill these days unfortunately. Honestly, I think a mandatory essay written as a part of the SAT or ACT at a proctored test setting would be far more valuable in assessing such abilities than 10 supplementals.
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I think there is a lot of potential in that topic of being average. Could be creative and also refreshingly modest.
My older kids love an Instagram or YouTube video series (I forget which medium) done by a guy who documents getting up, making coffee, taking the dog out, basically nothing at all. It is very popular!
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Just genuine, and of course written with the help of a professional to really bring out that genuineness.
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However, not everyone is a great writer. Writing should be grammatically correct and get the main point across, sure, but where is this expectation coming from that every 17 year old should be a great writer? Even if they’re a STEM or art student, they should also be a great writer? We don’t expect every 17 year old to be a great artist or science/math genius so why the expectation for being a great writer? It’s ok to be gifted at different things, and even that is rare. For the tippy top of schools, maybe that is a fair expectation, but even average schools are asking for multiple suppl. And at the same time, we ask why our teens are so overstressed. I really think one common app essay and 1-2 supplements should be more than enough, especially when applying to average (not highly competitive) schools. These kids need a break. They should be enjoying their senior year at least somewhat, not just writing a dozen essays, taking 4-5 AP classes, doing multiple ECs, and holding down jobs. I find it very sad what our college admissions competition/ race is doing to these kids.
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So opt out of the rat race!
Apply to fewer schools. Only apply to schools without extra essays.
No one is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to apply to 20+ schools.
Also, what’s an “average” school?
(My 3 kids applied to 6 schools, 10 schools, and 1 school, so they/we took my own advice)
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I don’t see your comment as condescending, just a difference of opinion. I understand that colleges are using supplements to weed people out. And I know a lot of kids apply to (IMO)way too many schools. I also think, that when kids narrow down their choices and apply to a definitely-not-unreasonable number of schools…like 5 or 6 schools total,
The resulting work load should not be 20 essays. That’s just more than we should ask of kids, in my opinion. When a single school has 5+ supplements it makes it very hard on kids with very little added value to the school beyond what they could get from 1-2 supplements.
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Except that when a kid is not at the top of their class, and facing competition from so many straight A students, it makes it difficult to apply to just a few schools, especially if finances play a factor.
My kid is applying to target and safeties only (plus one reach) that’s how we’re opting out of the rat race. Even then, there are a ton of extra essays, especially if she wants chance at honors programs at even the safety schools.
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