In general, no matter what prompt you’re answering, your essay should be a story about you, focused on you.
It’s not about the children you met on a summer trip to Ecuador or your grandmother who raised you from the age of five. It should not be about your favorite novel, your Great Aunt Lucy, or the time you ran for student government. Those events and people can figure in your story, but you are the only star of your college essay.
Consider these two questions: What do you want colleges to know about you that they couldn’t find out from the rest of your application? What do they already know? College application readers already know from your application if you are a member of the National Honor Society, got all As but one C+ in calculus, earned a varsity letter, or served meals to the homeless on Thanksgiving Day. But they don’t know if you are creative, kind, decisive, determined, or cautious.They have no idea how your experiences have shaped you. Or how a person, book, challenge, or other experience affected you. How does your story demonstrate who you are? Did you learn something meaningful about yourself? Any type of college essay is an opportunity to show admissions what you want them to know about you. Colleges use essays to help select a diverse class from among the hundreds or thousands of applicants whose transcripts(grades, types of classes and test scores, if appropriate) can make many students look alike. The number of essays and their length vary, depending on the colleges you apply to.
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