By Katherine C. Lee

The world of college admission can often feel like an overwhelming, pseudo-fictional place. You toil for hours on end, cranking out essay after essay, application after application. You begin to have dreams about grade point averages and SAT scores. It’s true that many of these “admissions overload symptoms” are naturally unavoidable, however if you are able to somehow tap into minds and thought processes of the actual people in the admission world that seem to lay just outside of your realm of knowledge, you may begin to see that your “symptoms” begin to recede into submission. Well, your lucky day has come. The following words chronicle the adventures of a fly on the wall in a college admission office.

You may be astounded to discover that there actually are people behind the monolith that is college admission. Just like you, they have tastes, preferences and can get bored fairly quickly. Just like you, they get “admissions overloads symptoms” after literal months of reading essay after essay, application after application. And I am certain that they too have visions of GPAs dancing in their heads. So, as someone contributing to the yearly college applicant pool, you can help to brighten their days. As someone who has worked in an admission office and heard countless gripes and groans as well as praises from the readers of potential student’s applications, I can assure you that the most important thing you can do to secure your admission to a college or university is to be yourself. Whatever you write or submit should be something you would feel comfortable actually telling someone in person. It’s very easy to write something and try so incredibly hard to make it sound “academic” that it comes out sounding very pretentious and robotic. Free up your style of writing. Of course, use the full extent of your vocabulary and proofread, proofread, proofread (spelling and grammatical errors add up against your credibility very quickly) but try to write on a topic you would bring up in an interview or even a casual yet dynamic conversation with a friend or trusted adviser.

I think one of the main mistakes that applicants make is paying too much attention to how other people have written a college admission essay. I have literally seen dozens of essays that are virtually indistinguishable. Imagine that you are an admissions officer that has to read fifty essays that have the same format and the same content. You would get pretty bored right? So, when you set about writing your college admission essay, think about the question they have asked you. The first idea that pops into your head is probably not the way to go. Most admission essay prompts are fairly uniform, and this is for a reason. The admission office wants to see what distinguishes you as an individual, they want to see just what exactly you can do with a seemingly bland prompt. If you write an essay that knocks down a lot of the preconceived clichés about “how to write an essay” the reader will read the entire essay. It might surprise and dismay you to know that some admission officers will not even finish an essay if they feel it is just too redundant. But, this doesn’t have to worry you if you go out on a limb and take action. Of course, it there is such a thing as going too far with “creativity”. Readers at a prestigious Ivy League school, for example, might get a touch wary if you submit an abstract beat poetry representation of why you want to go to MIT, but for other schools that are more based in the liberal arts it might actually catch someone’s attention.

Constantly keep this question in the back of your mind: If you had to sit in a tiny office all day pouring over hundreds of college admission essays, what kind of essay would you want to read? What kind of essay would peak your interest and make you want to know more about an individual. As you move into the college admission process, keep reiterating these questions. Tape then to you desk if you must, but do everything in your power to help allay the symptoms of admission overload, and you just might receive a large packet in the mail in a few months with the ticket to the college of your dreams.

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