College Admissions 101: A Guide to Painting Your Best Self
By: Vaishnavi Katragadda
Tags: College, Applying To School, Application Tips, Tips And Tricks, College Admissions

College Admissions 101: A Guide to Painting Your Best Self

Image from New York Times

After a long and grueling year, it’s finally December. While the holidays oftentimes mean togetherness, I imagine most celebrations this year look a lot different than in past years.

But one thing is still the same: the impending deadlines of college applications. Each year, thousands of high school seniors across the world spend the last few weeks of December fine-tuning essays and checking that all their materials are turned in, hoping that their profile somehow leaves a lasting impact on the admissions officers that decide whether or not that student will succeed at their institution.

I went through this process exactly a year ago, spending hundreds of hours writing essays, editing them, deleting them, and starting over until I was happy with the finished product. Applications were stressful and had to be perfect, and the lack of clarity around the admissions process was unhelpful, to say the least.

The process was extra confusing to me, with my parents having immigrated to the U.S. after college. Their experience in applying was not translatable to the American application process. They supported me in any way they could, but how would they know how to write the perfect essay and create the perfect profile?

I had extremely high aspirations for college; every school on my list had rather low acceptance rates. While I already had everything that was considered important, from a strong GPA and test scores to good recommendations and a variety of extracurriculars exploring my interests, I knew that applying to the more competitive schools often meant relying on luck.

I turned to my teachers and school guidance counselors for help, thinking that someone would have the magical formula that would guarantee me acceptances at several of these institutions. But the more I talked to people and the more research I did, I was under the impression that there really was nothing I could do to make my application more appealing.

So, I simply answered the essay questions the best I could and explained how I spent all my time in high school. I didn’t focus on building a cohesive application as much as I focused on emphasizing various parts of me that were important. I later realized that this was a mistake.

A year after the process, I wanted to compile a list of some of the lessons I learned in applying to share with high school seniors as they begin to finalize their applications. Thus, I present to you, College Admissions 101: A Guide to Painting Your Best Self.

COVID-19

My application process was admittedly different than the process seniors are going through this year. The heavy confusion surrounding admissions is not any clearer with a global pandemic disrupting education and GPA, not to mention the closure of many extracurricular activities and programs, an inability to take standardized tests, and other difficulties ranging from medical conditions, having a parent lose a job, or a decline in mental health.

But despite everything that may have been lost over the course of 2020 with the pandemic, there is much to be gained in terms of how you portray yourself to colleges.

Think about how you used the pandemic to learn, whether that learning was about yourself or a skill. Did you learn how to code? Did you learn how to bake the best cookies? Did you spend time catching up on reading lists? Did you take time to grow as a person?

Competitive schools want to see examples of your innate passion, and one of the clearest examples to demonstrate that is showing how you grew during such tumultuous times. The skills you gained or lessons you learned don’t even have to necessarily be something you can put on your resume; it can be anything. Let’s say you learned to bake the best cookies. Think about what larger character traits you can draw from that scenario. Does it show your determination? Your grit? Now, you have an essay idea based on baking cookies.

Even without the pandemic, the most minor examples can be the most memorable. During my year applying, I even wrote a successful essay about liking soggy cereal and tied that to my confidence and persistence.

Don’t be afraid to use the smallest example to exemplify how you managed to get through a challenging year.

What’s your story?

Play connect the dots with your experiences. What similarities do you find between them all? How does everything connect to paint a larger picture of yourself?

You can even find connections between extracurriculars like volunteering in a hospital to a sport. Think about the overall character that all of your interests build. Perhaps in playing a sport and volunteering in a hospital, you found one of your strengths is making a difference as part of a team. Find connections between everything you write on the Common App. Go through your application and see if you can find those connections explicitly. If not, it might be wise to make those connections more obvious.

The biggest mistake I made was not creating a truly cohesive narrative among my essays. All of my writing reflected three of the most important parts of my identity, all of which are very different and not at all connected. While it’s good to have essays all focused on different topics, I should have made an effort to explicitly show how these interests were connected, whether through an extended metaphor within the supplementals, through emphasizing certain character traits, or through showing how these interests build on each other to achieve one end goal. That would have allowed my application to better paint a picture to admissions officers.

Try to think about how each essay can support each other, like chapters of a book, to convey an idea of who you are.

Cater to the school you’re applying to.

Each school has a different set of values and a different set of students. Figure out what overarching theme draws all of these students together. Talk to alumni, talk to current students, reach out to admissions officers, and talk to your guidance counselors.

If you can figure out what the school values, you can figure out what parts of yourself to emphasize in your writing in order to draw in admissions officers’ attention. If a college values entrepreneurship, talk about how you found a problem and solved it. If the institution values community and volunteering, how were you able to make an impact in something important to you?

I’m not advocating for changing your own personality for a college. Once you do that, you’ve lost the game. While getting into college may seem like an obstacle to overcome, it’s also a matter of the schools determining whether or not you would fit in with their student body and enjoy yourself in that environment.

However, understanding what the college values can show you how to draw out certain lessons learned from the experiences you describe in your essays. I made the mistake of presenting myself in the same way to each college. That’s like applying to 10 completely different jobs and sending them the same resume. Why would anybody do that when you could highlight various experiences to better demonstrate fit? You can even change the Common App in between each submission, perhaps reordering your activities to be sure that admissions officers see the extracurriculars that demonstrate better fit.

Think about which experiences you highlight to show how you align with the college’s values.

Focus on your impact.

In the Common Application, you have space to enter 10 activities you were a part of in high school along with a brief description of that extracurricular. Spend more of those words describing the impact you made rather than describing what you did. How did you leave the extracurriculars you joined better than you found them?

Top institutions want to hear more about how YOU are a change maker. They want the people that will leave their campus better than they found it. They want people that will motivate members of the community to instigate change. Emphasize that in your activities section.

Don’t be worried about making the impact too explicit. When I applied, I left my impact open to interpretation rather than explicitly stating how I changed my community. When admissions officers are reading thousands and thousands of applications, they don’t have time to creatively interpret your words to find your impact. So, make it easier for them and state it outright.

In expressing your impact, don’t stress about how “cool” your activities were. You don’t need to have started a non-profit, written a book, or published in a scientific magazine to get into college or to show how you changed your community. Think about even the smallest change you made. Even if you impacted one person, that is a noteworthy story to tell.

Remember, quality over quantity. It’s all about how you express your impact rather than the size of the impact.

Use your voice, not some stranger’s on the Internet.

Before even drafting my first few essays, I spent a lot of time reading examples of the best, most successful essays published in various magazines and newspapers.

Was that helpful?

Not really.

In all honesty, reading other essays gave me more writer’s block than helping me think. By reading other people’s stories, I was worried about whether or not I had something as unique to share. I thought my topic needed to be so spectacular that no student in the past few centuries would have ever thought of it. Reading stories about exploring one’s hometown at night or about going to Costco made me think I needed a topic as bizarre as those. I also was under the impression that I needed to use thesaurus.com for every single word to show how impressive my vocabulary was.

Both of those things were simply not true. I eventually realized that no matter what I wrote about, the way in which I told my life story would inherently be unique; nobody else has lived my life. I also realized that vocabulary was not important. I didn’t use thesaurus.com a single time. Instead, I used words that I would use to talk to any friend.

Rather than using word choice to make my essay stand out, I used figures of speech. I went through my essays, finding key sentences and points that needed more emphasis. Using rhetoric and various tropes and schemes, I rewrote important sentences to make twice the impact on readers. I found my favorite trope was syllepsis.

By changing up your sentence structure, you’ll make your reader read over that sentence twice and think more about it, leaving a larger impact.

Why do you want to go to the school you are applying to?

This question is perhaps the most important one and the most difficult. If it’s solely because of prestige, you may want to reconsider applying there.

It’s important to have a concrete reason for applying to that school. What do they have that other schools don’t? I don’t mean find a reason like a specific professor doing specific research; any student can easily find research appealing to them. In some applications, that was my approach: finding a certain professor doing interesting research. But, those essays were never as successful as others with more specific details.

Instead, try to find something truly unique that any other institution cannot offer. In talking to my friends about what they wrote for their “Why Dartmouth” essay, I heard some topics brought up so specific that I did not even know about before attending. Some of my friends wrote about our library’s tea time, and another wrote about our language class drill sessions designed to practice speaking. I chose to write my essay about specific internships through the Dickey Center connecting that to our outing club, the largest collegiate outing club in the nation.

While you can find these unique things through research, you will likely find something more unique about the school by talking to current students there. They have firsthand knowledge about what the school prides itself in and what is truly unique about it. Use those students’ knowledge to your advantage.

Why do you want to go to college in general?

I’m someone who grew up knowing exactly what I was interested in as a career path. College was going to be a necessary stepping stone to higher education, and many more years of education after that.

I had always found my ambition in chasing after my dream to be something that defined me. And because that was so important to me, I emphasized my end goal heavily throughout my entire application.

Reflecting on that now, I think college admissions counselors got the idea that I only wanted to attend college pre-professionally rather than learn anything else. But, none of the schools I applied to were pre-professional, because I wanted more from my undergraduate years than a pre-professional program could have offered. College is a place to grow as a person, learning new skills both in the classroom and through the friends you make.

If you are like me and know exactly what you want to do, I highly suggest that you emphasize other reasons you want to go to college. What new skills do you want to learn? How do you want to grow as a person? Essentially, show why you are applying to these competitive schools rather than applying to an institution focused on pre-professional programs.

Make sure admissions officers understand how you want their institution to help you both achieve your end goals as well as help you grow.