Your personal statement and supplements are critically important these days. For MIT applicants and University of California applicants, with their unique sets of essays, they are just as important.
Essays matter whether you’re a top student with outstanding ECs or an uneven student who needs to demonstrate academic seriousness.
As an essay coach-tutor for 17 years, I know that even the best essays alone cannot overcome a uneven record for most. But dull essays can hurt an outstanding record.
The competition these days is unprecedented. You need essays that present your interests, talents and goals with clarity and detail–and just enough emotion.
Everyone knows about the Common Application essay–a new genre of its own in American life. Good news: the prompts for the coming year are the same as last year’s!
I’ve written many posts about how to approach this. But did you know that the supplemental essays are just as important these days? The more selective the universities, the more demanding and more important they are. Universities whose supplements are especially demanding: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Stanford, UChicago, Barnard. Acceptance rates to these universities are three to five percent–which means they turn down 95 percent of the applicants.
What Matters Most?
There’s no secret sauce or magic bullet — choose your metaphor — for gaining admission to these and other top institutions. When people ask, “Does it matter if my son has taken six APs and gotten all fives on them?” Yes, it matters. But so does everything else in his/her/their record! One element will not “make the difference.”
Your application is a mosaic made up of dozens of pieces of information, both hard (grades, test scores) and soft (letters of recommendation, ECs, essays). Additional factors you have no control over include your zip code, your school district, whether you’re first generation college student, and who in these areas you are competing with.
For everyone, it’s critically important to apply widely and apply beyond your list of “reaches.” Even top students are turned down from colleges that everyone thinks they “should get into.”
As a coach, I work on college application essays with students applying across the board, from Stanford to Florida State U, from Harvard to Texas A&M. I also work with transfer students and applicants to medical school, law school, and even summer camp programs that require essays.
Acceptances This Year
This past year, I worked with many talented students who were accepted to Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Duke, Wharton (U Penn), Northwestern, Northeastern, UMichigan, UCLA, Purdue, Emory, Barnard, Colgate, Mount Holyoke, Colby, Bates, Florida State University, Arizona State University, and the College of Charleston. A student applying to medical schools was admitted to Yale, Brown, GWU, Georgetown and New York Medical College. Another client was admitted early to Columbia Law School. (I helped her with her application to Barnard some years before.)
Someone once asked me if I care more about the kids who apply to Harvard than those who apply to less selective colleges. I was shocked by the question. I care about all the students I work with, regardless of where they’re applying!
A Stanford Mom’s Testimonial: