Collegewise

What you leave out

During live performances, most bands play their best songs.  Any tunes they just don’t play as well don’t make the set list—they get left out.

When a chef opens a restaurant, she doesn’t serve a sampling of everything she’s ever cooked.  She puts her best dishes on the menu and lets those speak for her.  She knows what to leave out.

A lawyer doesn’t give a closing argument with five convincing points and two not-so-convincing ones.  He uses that time to drive home his five best points.   Anything that’s not as effective, he leaves out. 

When a good writer finishes a book, she doesn’t include every chapter she worked on in the rough drafts.  Those that didn’t add anything or that just didn’t work, she leaves them out (and if she doesn’t, her editor probably will).

When you do your college applications, don’t just focus on how to present what you’re including.  Think hard about what you’re leaving out.  The one activity that you never did again after freshman year, that paragraph in your essay that makes it go over the word limit but doesn’t really add anything, that description in the optional “Additional Information” section that’s really just repeating something you’ve already listed elsewhere, you don’t need them.  They’re not improving your application.  And they’re just making it harder for the reader to focus on what was really important to you. 

Every time you leave something out, everything that's left in will get more attention.

Product highlight: Our college essay seminar on video

We just released streaming videos of our three most popular seminars—college essays, financial aid and college interviews. All three are now available in our online store.  Today, I wanted to give a little background on our college essay video, why we made it, and what’s included.  

Why we made it
We learned early on at Collegewise that college essay advice does a lot more good when given at the beginning—before a student writes a draft—than it does at the end.  Before we started doing our seminar, if a student brought us an essay that was 600 words of full-blown cliché about how his time on the wrestling team taught him the importance of committing to his goals, it was  a difficult position for us and for the student.  We wanted to give the good advice we’d been hired to give.  And that's what the student expected from us.  But we also didn’t want to take over the process and veto a student’s story idea—that would be helping too much.  We knew we could have prevented those mistakes and done more good if we’d given our advice at the beginning rather than at the end. 

Our college essay seminar solved that problem for us.  Today, our Collegewise students learn everything they need to know to choose and write good stories before they ever start writing.  When students get it right the first time, we don’t have to give them as much feedback on their drafts, which helps us make sure we don’t help too much.  This video was shot at one of those essays seminars we gave to our families.  Now any student—whether or not you’re in the Collegewise program—can write better college essays by just spending one hour watching our seminar on video.

How we’re using it

I do the college essay seminar for students in our Irvine, California office.  But now we’re giving Collegewise families who work with us in all any of our offices free access to the video.  We’ll also use the video to supplement our trainings of new counselors and essay specialists.  And any family in our Irvine location who can’t attend one of our scheduled essay seminars can now watch it on video. 

How to use the video

The advice in the video applies to any type of college essay.  It doesn’t matter whether the required essay is long or short, a general topic or something more specific.  You can even apply the advice to questions about why you want to attend a particular school.

So there are a few ways you could use this:

1. Applicants can watch the video before you start writing your college essays.  You’ll pick better stories, you’ll tell them in a compelling way, and you’ll be a lot closer to a strong finished product when you take your first draft to your counselor or English teacher for feedback.

2. You could even view our video a you’ve already written the essays and are still looking to make revisions.  The advice on our video will help you evaluate your choice of story, how well you’ve written it, and whether or not the essay is going to be a positive factor in your admissions decision. 

3. A teacher, counselor, parent, or anyone else who is asked to critique college essays will know exactly what to look for after watching this video. 

Results

We’ve done this college essay workshop for thousands of Collegewise students and their parents.  We’ve done it at high school events, at conferences for counselors, and even for English teachers who were looking for advice about how to help their kids with essays.  We’re really excited to make this available to a much wider audience now and would love to hear what you think of it. 

You can buy your copy here and view it right away online for $12.99.

College essay, interview and financial aid videos are now in the Collegewise store

Videos of my three most popular Collegewise seminars are now available in our online store. 

• “How to Write a Great College Essay”
• “Financial Aid and Scholarships”
• “College Interviews”

Each video is 1-hour long and sells for $12.99 as a streaming download here.

Seminars have been a Saturday morning tradition since I founded Collegewise in 1999.  We serve up some muffins and coffee—then I spend an hour preaching the Collegewise way and making complicated subjects simpler.  We want everyone to leave feeling more confident about their college planning, and I always encourage them to take the leftover muffins so I don’t eat them myself.

But we thought the seminars might appeal to a wider audience of people who don’t live near one of our offices.  So we brought in a film crew, they set up their lighting and cameras, and I gave our regularly-scheduled seminars to the Collegewise families (who graciously signed release forms to appear on the video).  There’s no scripting here and these aren’t polished infomercials—just me teaching Collegewise families how to write college essays, apply for financial aid, and have memorable college interviews.  It’s what you’d see if you were attending live as part of our Collegewise program (minus the muffins and coffee).  And for families in our counseling programs, you’ll now have free access to the videos to view if you’re unable to attend a seminar. 

Later this month, we’ll also be releasing these videos as hard-copy DVDs for teachers, counselors, non-profits and anyone else who works with students and wants to share them with a class.  But for now, go here to learn more or to purchase your download.  And if you have questions or feedback, feel free to email me at kevinm (at) collegewise (dot) com.  Our Collegewise families have always enjoyed these and I think you will, too.

When The Onion parodies college essay clichés

You know that a college essay is a cliché when The Onion takes it on (thanks to Arun for forwarding it).  There’s nothing wrong with writing your essay about travel.  But if the message is, “I learned that many things are different in other countries,” beware—you’re heading straight towards the cliché.

Is it OK to recycle a college essay?

A father at a seminar last week asked me,

“Is it OK for a student to re-use a college essay for multiple colleges?” 

Great stories for college essays tend to be recyclable.  They have a lot of details and angles to them.  And if something really was important to you, you can apply that significance to a lot of college essay prompts. 

But there’s a difference between reusing a story and reusing the exact same essay. 

We once worked with a student who wrote an essay about how she had lost every election she’d ever run for in high school, but that each time she lost, she shrugged off the defeat and found another activity where she could be successful.  It was a funny, self-deprecating peek into her personality and it helped the admissions officers get to know her better. 

That story had a lot of meaning to it, so much so that it was actually the basis of a great response to several college essay prompts like,

“Describe a time when you failed or made a mistake.  What did you learn from the experience?”

“What is a talent, skill, activity, accomplishment or personal quality that makes you proud?”

“How do you hope to contribute to our campus community?”

“Describe a time when you faced a challenge or adversity.”

Each time she reused the story, many of the details were the same, but she tailored the essay to answer the prompt.  Those tailored versions addressed what each prompt was asking for—what she learned, why it made her proud, how she knew she wouldn’t be afraid to fail in college, and how she faced the challenge of getting over the losses.  She wasn’t taking a shortcut; that experience really was the basis for her honest response to each prompt.  When her real answer to a prompt had nothing to do with losing elections, she wrote different essays.  But her “I am a good loser” essay worked for the essay prompts at over half her colleges.

There’s nothing wrong with recycling a story especially if it helps the admissions office get to know you and it does a great job answering the prompt.  But make sure you give each recycled version a little tailoring.  Don’t just resubmit the same essay.  Use the story as the basis and tailor the writing to each college’s prompt.

You can find even more advice in our video, “How to Write Great College Essays.”  It’s $12.99 and available as a streaming download.

A college essay checklist

As seniors move into the throes of college application season, here’s a checklist of ten questions to ask about each of the essays you’re writing.  Go for “Yes” responses to all of them. 

1. Is the essay about you? 

The point of every college essay prompt is to help them learn more about you.  “Why do you want to attend this college?” is not the same question as, “Why is this college great?”  Yet a lot of students answer the first version as if they're being asked the second one.  If the reader isn't learning about you, you’re focusing on the wrong things.

2. Are you telling the truth?

“Soccer taught me the importance of hard work and commitment” may not be a lie, but if you’ve never actually thought it until you sat down to write your college essay, you’re probably not telling the truth.  Don’t try to impress the admissions officers.  Just be honest. 

3. Seriously, are you really telling the truth? 

Really, trying too hard to impress virtually guarantees your essay will fall flat.  If your story is, “I’m the worst player on my soccer team, but I still love soccer,” tell that (true) story.

4. Have you answered every part of the prompt? 

It’s easy to get wrapped up in your story and forget to answer every part of the prompt.  Something like, “Tell us about a time you failed or made a mistake and describe what you learned from the experience” is actually two questions.  Make sure you answer both.

5. Are you sharing a new story, one they don’t already know from the rest of your application?

Your activities are already listed on your application, so colleges know how you spend your time.  They also know that football is hard and that France is difference from the United States.  Make sure your essays tell a new story they don’t already know.   

6. Would you say any of this while on a first date?

You would never go on a first date and say the words, “Ultimately, my time on the student council has opened my eyes to new opportunities to be found working with others.”  Don’t write sentences like that in your essays (and for the love of everything, never say them on a date, either).

7.  Is it an essay that only you could write?

We teach our Collegewise students a concept we call “Owning your story,” which means that a story is one that only you could write.  You don’t own, “Community service taught me that it’s important to help people.”  To own your stories, inject as much detail as you can so that nobody else could tell the same story.

8.  Have you limited the input from other people?

Yes, you should absolutely seek advice on your college essays.  But don’t seek it from too many people.  When you shop your essays around for feedback, they end up sounding like they were written by a committee.

9.  Have you asked for advice from the right people?

You should only ask college essay advice from people who A) you trust and B) actually know what they’re doing.  The people you go to have to fulfill both roles, not just one.  For most students, your counselor and English teacher usually can.   Friends, your parents, and friends of your parents usually can’t.

10. Are you happy with what you wrote?

The college admissions process feels almost as judgmental as junior high felt.  Everyone from teachers to the College Board to the colleges are judging, grading, scoring and measuring you.  This is going to sound cheesy, but when it comes to college essays, just please yourself.  These are your essays, not anybody else’s.  As long as you can confidently say "yes" to all ten of these questions, you’ll probably have written good stories that will help colleges get to know you.  And that’s really all anyone could reasonably expect from you. 

You can find even more advice in our video, “How to Write Great College Essays.”  It’s $12.99 and available as a streaming download.

Before you critique a student's college essay...

Imagine a friend asked you:

"I really want to make sure I look nice tonight.  What do you think of this outfit I'm wearing?" 

Do you just blurt out your opinion?  Probably not.  You want to be truthful and helpful.  But you don't want to inadvertently step on a fashion landmine, either.  That's why it's a tricky question, and the best way to gauge just how direct you can be in your answer is to subtly reverse the question and find out how she feels about the choice.

Do the same thing before you critique a student's college essay.

Whenever a student hands us an essay that we haven't seen or discussed with the student before, we always start by asking:

"How do you feel about what you've written?"

If the student tells us that she worked really hard on it and she's happy with how it turned out, we approach it differently than if the student admits that she's struggling and can't seem to make the essay work.

I'm not suggesting you should be dishonest about essays (or fashion).  We've got an obligation to give good advice when a student asks.  But kids are under a lot of college admissions pressure.  And it's important that we don't tear down something they're proud of, especially when they're presenting us with a story about their lives.

Ask Collegewise: Should I write my college essay about a hardship?

Jason asks,

I’ve heard that colleges want to know if you’ve experienced any hardships, and I’m thinking about writing my essay about my parents’ divorce.  Is that a good idea?  Or is that too common?”

It's a good question, Jason.  I don't know the circumstances of your parents' divorce so it's hard for me to say if that's the right topic for you.  But here are a few things any student should know when you're considering writing about a hardship.

1.  Don't write about a hardship just because you think it will give you an advantage.

A lot of students think that a hardship gives you some kind of automatic admissions advantage.  And unfortunately, that means way, way too many essays are submitted about hardships that weren’t actually all that hard.  I don’t want to sound cold here, but “When my grandmother died, it taught me to appreciate life more,” is pretty cliché in the world of college essays.  If you’ve faced something difficult, something that affected you deeply, especially something that impacted your education in some way, colleges will want to know about it.  But for students who haven’t, don’t manufacture hardship.  Instead, tell a different story.

2.  Remember that the college essay has to be about you.

You don’t need to write an essay about divorce to convince admissions officers that a divorce is difficult for a student.  Your college essays have to be about you.  They have to help admissions officers get to know you better in ways that they never could have known from the rest of the application.

One of our Collegewise students wrote her essay about her parents’ divorce.  But only two sentences of the essay had to do with the divorce.  The rest of the essay was about a major change in the student’s life when she went to live with her father.  She didn’t want to change schools because she was afraid of losing credits and falling behind.  So she got up at 5 a.m. every day, took a train and two buses for two hours to get to school, then repeated that at the end of the day.  And surprisingly, she got the best GPA of her life because she spent all that time on the trains and buses studying.  So while the divorce was part of the essay, the story was all about her.

3.    Maintain your perspective.

It’s important to be thankful for what you have and to remember that lots of other people aren’t so lucky.  I mention this because when a student writes an essay about switching schools when her father changed jobs, and that essay treats having to say goodbye to her friends as if it were a devastating tragedy, it paints that student as being a little immature.  Saying goodbye to friends is painful.  But if your dad still has a job, and that job is going to pay for you to go to college, and everyone in your family is still healthy, you’re a lot better off than a lot of other students.  It doesn’t mean you aren’t allowed to really miss your friends, but you’ve got to be able to differentiate disappointment from real hardship. 

4.    Use all the parts of the application.

You might not need to write an entire essay to explain a hardship.  A lot of colleges have a section on the application that allows you to share anything that didn’t fit in the other spaces, or to describe any circumstances that affected your education.  If a student writes:

“In February of my junior year, I broke my leg in a soccer game and had to keep my leg in traction for six weeks.  I had my younger brother bring me all of my assignments from school, and my teachers let me do take home exams so I wouldn’t fall behind…”

How much more really needs to be said?  An admissions officer knows the important facts.  If there was a slight dip in your grades second semester of your junior year, colleges can now put that situation in context.  You don’t need an entire essay to explain it to them.

5.  Try the best friend litmus test.

Great college essays are the kinds that when your best friend reads them, he or she says, “This is totally you.”  You only get limited space on the application to share what you want to share about yourself.  So don’t waste it trying to wedge in a hardship just because you think that’s a good strategy.  Pick a topic that actually means something to you, something that you’d be excited to share, that hasn’t been described in detail elsewhere on the application, and that would pass the best friend litmus test.  If the story that fits the criteria is a hardship, go ahead and share it.  But if not, be thankful that you’ve had a pretty good life, and share another story about it.

Thanks for your question, Jason.  If you've got a question of your own, email us at blog [at] collegewise [dot] com.  If we pick yours, we'll answer it here on our blog.

And you can find even more advice in our video, “How to Write Great College Essays.”  It’s $12.99 and available as a streaming download.

Stephen King on (college essay?) writing

Before he became one of the best selling authors in history, Stephen King taught English composition to high school students.  If he ever looked over any of his students' college essays, I’ll bet he gave them some of the same advice he offers up in “Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully - in Ten Minutes.”

Here's what King would have told students who insisted they needed to go over the word limit to tell their stories.

"Remove every extraneous word...Get to the point. And if you remove all the excess garbage and discover you can't find the point, tear up what you wrote and start all over again . . . or try something new."

He would have told them that using big words kids don't normally use won't lead to great writing.

"Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule."

For kids who insisted on getting feedback from multiple sources (especially from those who'd never taught writing or worked in college admissions)....

"Listen carefully to what they tell you. Smile and nod a lot. Then review what was said very carefully...if everyone - or even most everyone - is criticizing something different, you can safely disregard what all of them say."

And most importantly, he would have told them not to get so attached to a story that you couldn't let it go. 

"If it's bad, kill it.  When it comes to people, mercy killing is against the law. When it comes to fiction, it is the law."

 

Don't take college essay advice from the Domino's Pizza CEO

Here's a snippet from David Heinemeier Hansson's Speech "Unlearn Your MBA" at Stanford.  College applicants should take this advice about business writing and apply it to your college essays:

I have a funny example…This is Domino’s CEO David Brandon talking a few days ago:

‘The weakness in our value chain was really in our core product.’ 

What?  What does that even mean?  Well, I tried to translate that into human. 

'Let’s be honest.  Our pizza used to suck.  I’m sorry.  I swear the new ones will be better.'

… I’d say the most important technique, the most important competitive advantage we have at 37Signals is good human writing.  And you just don’t have good human writing when you say sh*t like this.  Nobody’s going to take you seriously because it’s just meaningless stuff.  Try to get into the frame of mind that you’re speaking to humans.  And nobody’s going to be impressed by big words.”

If you write sentences like, "Working on the student council taught me many important lessons about how to work with others," you're writing like the CEO.  Write like a human, instead.