Last year, I was pummeled with one question: “How’s AI affecting your college application essay work?” I shrugged. I didn’t know yet.
Answers are coming into focus. This morning, I read a story on Reddit about the Common Application Essay that convinced me I need to share my thoughts. And share what I’m learning about university positions on AI in admissions. We are at the starting gate of a complicated new world that’s growing more complex by the day.
A student wrote to the popular Reddit Applying to College forum (A2C), with this problem: After writing a draft of her Common Application Essay with no help from AI, she put it into an AI-detection site. The result: Many signs of AI. She asked the forum how to fix this.
I hear and read about this problem from many different people and sources. AI-suspicion is everywhere. And AI-use is everywhere, including college admissions. Cal Tech, Virginia Tech, U Berkeley, and the University of California in general have spelled out how they use AI in admissions and/or their AI admissions rules–which only reveal how complicated the whole thing has become. I’m going to try to make it simpler for those writing college essays.
What Not Let AI Write Your Essays?
Writing is a form of thinking. If you let a robot do it, you will never develop the patience to sit with uncertainty and never experience the joy of figuring out what you want to say–and how to say it. Writing is a skill, like soccer, reading music, or playing an instrument. You get better the more you do it. And if you let a robot do it for you, the thinking/writing part of your brain will not develop. This is neuroscience, not a scare-tactic.
I grew up with Susan Sontag’s famous comment rattling around in my brain: “I never know what I’m thinking until I sit down at my typewriter.” OK, I concede you no longer sit at a typewriter, but (it bears repeating) writing IS a form of thinking that needs to be nurtured, nourished, and practiced, like hitting a tennis ball or memorizing lines for the play you’re in.
Can Admissions People Tell a Robot Wrote it?
As students apply to college in 2026, how can you AI-proof your college application essay before you write it? And since there isn’t just one essay for most applicants, how to AI-proof supplemental essays too.
Are you writing about why you want to major in biology or why you want to attend the University of Fill-in-the-Blank? If you outsource your essay writing brain to a robot, it might save you time, but Claude’s electronic fingerprints will be all over it. How do I know? The New York Times just published an article that I highly recommend, “370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity,” by Rebecca Winthrop. And once you finish it, please read the many and conflicting reader comments at the bottom.
If you’re on the fence about using AI to write your college application essays, this reader comment might push you off:
We award scholarships to incoming freshmen for our university. Last year we had a tough time choosing since all the 150-word essays sounded exactly alike. This year we told candidates that using AI will immediately disqualify them. Yes, of course, we can tell. Now.
How to AI-Proof Your College Application Essay: Follow the most basic guidelines for ALL good writing!
Make it personal. I know, that sounds obvious, but how do you do that? Tell a story from your life that locates you in a place or a relationship or a conflict. Here are three first sentences of Common App essays, with tiny modifications for privacy.
Our boarding passes for the Delta flight to Singapore said STANDBY. Our boarding passes to everywhere say STANDBY: Paris, Rome, Geneva, Johannesburg. My mother worked for the airline, and we could travel anywhere–if we went STANDBY.
The apartment on Chimbai Road was not the comfortable sanctuary I had remembered.
I’m driving down I-95 in my 1997 Toyota, with 340,000 miles on it, when it starts to redline.
In addition to pulling us in, each in different ways, these openings are specific and personal. We’re in a location, and there’s some kind history or present conflict that demands the writer’s attention–and the reader’s.
Tell a story only you can tell. This doesn’t mean that it needs to be “original,” in the sense that no one has ever experienced this before. Colleges are looking for thoughtfulness, depth, and insight, not science-fiction or outlier experiences. You don’t need to write about bungee-jumping in Tasmania. A great college app essay might be about a family tradition and what it means to you, about auditioning for a play and how it opened up a new version of yourself, or how teaching yourself to play the drums/flute/electric guitar gave you access to creativity and rhythms that helped you appreciate Robert Frost’s poetry (“Some say the world will end in fire/Some say ice/From what I’ve tasted of desire…”).
Details, details, details. Have you ever shopped for lipstick? Isn’t it amazing how many different shades there are, all for red? Have you chosen Rouge Charnel, Amor Fou, Runway Red, Uncut Ruby, or Ruby Woo? Isn’t it fun to see what these lipstick people have done with variations on red? Believe it or not, you can do something similar when you write about your own experience if you’re committed to the details. I’m not talking about poetic metaphors and flowery writing, but specificity.
Examples of detailed specificity from college app essays:
When I was six, I wanted to marry my dentist. I liked the fluidity of her movements and the precision of her work. Yet I was afraid of all the equipment around me.”
My sister and I attached a camera to record our first kite flight, but instead, we got a video of the kite repeatedly attacking the ground while we ran for our lives.”
I’m a cello dropout. I’m also a flute dropout. In third grade, the school music teacher paired me with what was supposed to be my life-long musical companion, twice.
By the ninth grade, I was embarrassed by how much I liked philosophy. I didn’t think it would win me many friends, but when I mentioned Emerson to my classmate Sam—who insisted he didn’t like philosophy—he asked probing questions and engaged in a lively debate about self-reliance and intuition.”
Bottom Line on Generative Use of AI for Writing.
In the land of AI, which is where all of us live in now, it’s hard to keep up with all the changes in what AI can do, what we can and should–and should not–do with it. As a writer myself, I have never used generative AI to do anything. It’s never crossed my mind. The “serious writers” I know feel the same way. I don’t expect high school students in 2026 to share my feelings on this. But I do hope you will think twice–think fifty or sixty times–before outsourcing your precious brain to an AI-data center.
I’ve been helping students around the world apply to college for 18 years. Please feel free to get in touch with your questions and concerns about applying to college, writing college app essays, and presenting yourself in this highly competitive, ever-changing universe.
