College Essays: Finding Definition in the Details

To be honest, it took me two or three years of teaching students to write personal essays before I felt like I knew what I was doing. Fortunately or unfortunately, the unwitting victims of my on-the-job uncertainty were cadets at West Point the students for my first teaching job. All too often, I encouraged them to zero in on the defining moments of their lives, and to find the meaning in those moments, and explore that meaning on paper oh, and to do all that in about two double-spaced pages. Not surprisingly, I received dozens of essays about... well, about huge, life-changing events: parental divorces, deaths of loved ones, faith experiences, and most frequent in their occurrence if admittedly less somber in their subject matter The Big Game and How I Won It. And most of these essays, I had to concede, just were not very successful although it took awhile for me to figure out exactly why.

It finally came to me that I was asking these young people to bite off too much to deal with topics that were entirely too broad and deep to be adequately handled in a two-page paper. It took even longer for me to recognize that the problem was the assignment itself. The defining moment part was all right, but I could and should have done more to narrow the scope for the students to encourage them to find those defining experiences, not in the big, overwhelming, life-shifting events, but rather, in the small, unobtrusive, easy-to-overlook moments. Once I made that shift, I started getting a greater number of really interesting, even surprising, essays essays that genuinely gave me a window into another persons soul.

Now, college essays are fundamentally personal essays, and I'd like to suggest that your teenager consider the same small-moment approach when she sits down to brainstorm topics, and approaches, for her own application essay. Teenagers are generally able to develop possible topics for these short writing pieces but its that approach part that is a bit trickier. (After all, they are listening when their teachers, college counselors, parents, and peers tell them that in a world in which the Ivy League schools are turning down thousands of applicants every year whose GPAs are 4.0 or higher their essays need to be new and different and attention-getting.) With that in mind, the turn-a-molehill-into-a-mountain tactic might be helpful. Mrs. Barbara Bruns, who looks at hundreds of college essays a year in her role as college counselor at St. Thomas Aquinas High School in Overland Park, agrees. She sees the college essay as a tool for the kids to communicate another side of themselves that is not necessarily visible in the test scores, the transcripts, or even the academic resumes.

Done well, then, the essay can help a student break out of the pack stand out, as it were, in bold relief from the mass of other deserving applicants. Mrs. Bruns clearly remembers an essay from a few years ago, in which a student had written about the rack full of t-shirts in her closet. The progression of sizes, colors, and logos had provided the young lady with some insights into how her interests, attitudes, and perspectives had changed over her high school years. It was a successful essay: the student had found a fresh and unexpected way to treat a relatively straightforward and conventional topic (How I’ve Changed) and one sure measure of its success rests in the fact that, several years later, Mrs. Bruns had no difficulty in remembering it when asked for an example of a successful college essay.

For my own part, I too can easily recall a lively and likable essay, written by a young man in Leawood, who wanted to talk about a lesson in maturity. This too is a common, potentially cliché-ridden, topic. Jim, though, gave it a fresh and engaging treatment by focusing on a Saturday night ritual in his family playing cards for pennies, a game in which Jim as the oldest child had a built-in advantage and by telling the story of how his father had used one such card game to teach him the perils of playing too ruthlessly to win. By focusing on an actual experience, by conveying its details clearly, and by exploring his own reactions while winning, and then losing, at penny-ante poker, Jim imbued his essay with a sense of authenticity which, combined with the fact that he had found an out-of-the-ordinary way to present himself to his readers, helped his essay, and indeed his entire application, to stand out favorably from many others.

That focus on the seemingly little moments can also help a teenager deal if he or she wants with issues that are more serious and demanding. One of the best student essays I ever read came from a young lady in Stilwell who wanted to think on paper about the reactions she had had when her divorced parents remarried, and she suddenly found herself in a new and mixed family. Rhonda decided to focus on a single Christmas morning, when as a six-year-old she stirred awake before dawn to realize that her new stepbrother, who was older than she was, was already awake and downstairs and basking in all of the parental attention that she had previously enjoyed and monopolized. She wrote that she felt like a stranger in her own house a remarkably sophisticated and admirably honest insight for a teenager to bring to this situation. Rhonda applied to several out-of-state schools and was able to use that essay for each of those colleges. They all accepted her.

Each of these student writers took on a relatively conventional, potentially hackneyed, topic change, maturation, adaptation and each treated it winningly by steering clear of broad, vague generalities in order to zero in on a specific, particular moment a tightly focused slice of a young persons experience that opened a window into that larger and more universal topic. In so doing, these students avoided biting off more than the form and restrictions of a college essay would allow them to chew. Even more importantly, they provided their admissions officers with genuine, sincere insights as to what made those young people click. If the goal of any college application is to encourage those admissions officers to say, We want that kid at this school, then such essays by thinking little, by concentrating on the details that less discerning viewers might overlook, by writing with authenticity offer great potential to create exactly that kind of positive response.

Chris Riley lives in Overland Park with his wife and college bound daughter.