The Two Kinds of College Essay, and Only One of Them Works

I read two kinds of college essays.

The first kind is a list of accomplishments dressed up in nice sentences. Here is what I've done. Here is why I'm impressive. Here is why you should want me.

It's the natural thing to write. Every signal a kid has received for four years says an application is a place to display achievement.

It reads as narcissistic. Not because the kid is. Because the form is.

The second kind shows a change. And it's the only one that reliably works.

Let me describe one, with the details stripped out because the young man is real and this happened to him as a child.

He was quiet. Withdrawn. He'd been treated badly enough by other kids that pulling inward was a reasonable response, and it had become who he was in public.

But there was one place, a community he belonged to outside of school, where he was somebody else entirely. Funny. Confident. Fully himself.

An older man there noticed, and said something that turned out to be the hinge of the whole story. You are a very different person on the inside than the one you show on the outside. I'd challenge you to be the inside guy when you're outside.

So he tried.

Small steps first. He joined a club. Then he ran for a leadership position in it. Then he won an office at a level well beyond his own school. Somewhere in there he started a business, made real money at it, and then taught other people how to do the same thing, including a military veteran.

He got into the schools he wanted.

Now hold the two essays side by side.

The first one says: look what I've accomplished. The second one says: here is who I was, here is what changed me, and here is what I did with it.

Screenwriters have a name for the moment the elder spoke up. The inciting incident. Something happens, and the person is not the same afterward.

That is what an admissions officer is reading for, and almost nobody gives it to them.

Which brings me to the thing I harp on constantly. The thread of continuity.

Your kid's application is not a pile of puzzle pieces. If they want to be a doctor, that does not mean every activity has to be pre-med. That's not what anyone is looking for.

What there should be is a thread. Something running through the essays and the activities and the recommendations that adds up to a coherent person, and that answers a question the application never asks out loud.

What would this kid bring to our campus?

Not what have they collected. What would they bring.

An application without a thread is a list. A list is what everybody submits.

Onward.

-Andy "The Inciting Incident" Lockwood

P.S. Almost every kid has a moment like that one. The hard part is that they rarely recognize it as the story, because from the inside it just feels like their life. Finding it is a lot of what we do inside the Lockwood Inner Circle, the same as with our private 1:1 college advisory clients. A dollar gets you in: lockwoodinnercircle.com