The College Essay Algorithm
Here's some background about myself: I am currently a high school senior, and I recently completed writing all of my college application essays to top institutions like MIT, Stanford, and Georgia Tech. If there's anything that I could say about that experience, it's that I don't think I have ever been as introspective and squeezed so much out of my brain in a given moment in my entire life.
Now, to many, writing essays is second nature. However, many of us (including me, and probably you considering you clicked this blog-post) can most likely encapsulate the entire experience of writing into a single word: difficult.
However, I can definitely say that after going through this entire experience, there is one system that helped me in writing. It has actually made me want to willingly write stuff on my own, a mindset which my past self could never relate to.
It may seem kind of counterproductive, but it goes like this: think before you write, but also don't think while you write. Trust me, I know how this sounds, but hear me out. Writing a good college essay (or any essay, for that matter) requires planning. It requires you to know exactly what you're talking about before you even put your first word on paper.
The Thinking
Now, to successfully achieve this plan, it can't be a vague idea; it has to be a solidified, emotional, and airtight plan. It has to be something that you look forward to writing about. It has to be something that keeps you awake at night. The best college essays showcase a wide range of emotions: fear, happiness, sadness, conformity, etc.
Anyone can write an essay about what makes them happy or what makes them sad, but the best essays write about things that are equally frightening/sad as they are hopeful/happy. Try to find happiness within sadness, sadness within happiness, the light within the dark, and the dark within the light.
Here's an example from my own college essay. I wrote about my relationship with my father and how it has been rocky throughout my life. However, within this rockiness, I found comfort. This is what I wrote in the final paragraph:
“Even after all of this, my father taught me how to love. His was the structuring absence of my childhood, and in his unfortunate silence, he was able to express more to me than I suspect he could’ve with words.”
Try not to focus on the months-long-polished-writing, but rather the premise to it: I realized that my father's affection was his own form of love, and even though it didn't inherently satisfy me, I eventually recognized it as the fullest extent of his love. This allowed me to live a more mature and relaxed life, one where I could safely say that I didn't hold any grudges to him.
That level of complexity was not easy to come up with, and it will be hard to come up with your own nuances. When I started, I knew that I wanted to write about my relationship with my father, but I didn't know that there was so much breadth and depth to what I felt about it. It came to a point where I was remembering feelings that I didn't even realize I felt in the past or remembering moments of sparse connection to him that — albeit retrospectively — made me feel more at peace with my relationship with him.
However, having had a planned thought that I knew I felt such a deep, rooted emotional connection to helped me come to these complex conclusions faster.
I digress; I can't give myself all of the credit for this system. That's reserved for my AP Literature teacher in my junior year. In this class, one of the final essays deals with writing an essay that elaborates on the conflicts that a character experiences. My teacher gave me this neat "formula" for finding a character's conflicts, which goes like this:
Conflict = Desires + Obstacles
Basically, the point to this is that a human being is not one-dimensional. Have you ever met someone that is always happy (like, seriously, ALWAYS happy)? No, you probably haven't. Why? Because human beings have this miraculous ability to have complex emotional thoughts, reactions, mental processes, and behaviors. When you are asked to characterize a person, what you are really analyzing is their inner conflicts, which, at heart, is really what they desire and what's stopping them from achieving this desire.
What keeps this character up at night? What do they regret? What do they fear? Why do they fear it? What makes them happy? How do they feel about that happiness from that source? Are they satisfied with their life? If not, are they doing anything to change it, or are they just wallowing?
Oftentimes, a character's obstacle to achieving their desires is none other than themselves. This also applies to real life. How many times have you wanted to do something, but have done something else knowing you should be doing that other thing? How many times have you subscribed to weight-watching YouTube channels, but then when you see that Twinkie in your pantry that looks oh so good, you give way?
After I was done with that class, I approached my AP Literature teacher for some desperately needed essay writing advice. I was struggling with some convoluted topic about community service when he told me one simple line: "Analyze yourself as if you are a character from an AP Literature prompt". I didn't get it at first, but when I started writing about my relationship with my father, it dawned on me:
I was the one that was standing in my own way of leading a happier life. If I just kept blaming my dad forever, then there would always be this one constant aspect about my life that was grey.
Everyone — no matter who you are — experiences complex thoughts. Everyone has nuance to them. Everyone feels an incredible array of emotions for every waking moment of their lives. The trick is to channel that spectrum into your essays. Guide the storm of emotions that you feel in a cohesive, specific, and nuanced way that will leave the admissions officers wanting more of you at the school. Have a certain flair that will make an admissions officer undoubtedly want to select you for the school, and don't settle for anything less.
With that being said, the point to all of this is that this form of introspective thinking makes you feel like a real person with real thoughts. Often times, prospective college applicants write about what they think admissions officers want to hear and not what they truly feel. That's not to say that they don't feel these complex emotions, but they'd rather subdue them for the sake of crafting an essay that'll make them look like the "perfect applicant".
The Writing
Now that all of that very emotional thinking is done, it comes to the actual writing. When Common App releases their yearly essay prompts, thousands of students scramble to craft the most perfect introductory sentence in the history of college essay writing. But if you did the first step right, the next step is much easier. Once you have planned, it's time for the step that many people won't tell you about: the Word Vomit™.
This is a phrase that I personally coined that literary pundits prefer to call stream of consciousness, but that seems a tad too pretentious for a term that basically means this: JUST WRITE WORDS. Write whatever fleeting word pops into your mind. Write as if it's 11:55 PM and the deadline to your dream college is at 11:59 PM. Write every single word that pops into your mind, every single lightbulb-idea, and every single emotion before they inevitably fall into the inescapable void of forgetfulness.
Don't worry about proper punctuation, or grammar, or structure (for now). Don't worry about paragraph length, symbolism, metaphors, or any other shiny shenanigans. For longer projects, such as novels, this might not be the most effective method, but for a relatively short 650 word essay, it seems to work
While all you may see is a mess of thoughts (isn't that what the human mind really is?), writing this way lets you pick and choose, drag and drop, organize and delete every single possible thought you have. It gives you an incredible range of motion that will leave everything on the table. Not only that but approaching an essay like this will inevitably have you writing down any sort of feeling you have towards your topic, which is incredibly useful for finding those serendipitous moments where you encounter a really, really good idea.
Once you have Word Vomited™, you now have the ability to refine. This is most likely the longest part of the essay-writing process. This is where you organize your essay into the most logical form possible. My trick for this step is to think, what do I have to say first for this paragraph/sentence/idea to make sense? Your essay has to follow a clear path. Each sentence has to flow with the next one, and the end of each paragraph must flow with the beginning of the next
Now, for the cherry on top: your artistic flair. Many people think that word choice means opening thesaurus.com and substituting every single adjective in your essay, but that's not what a strong essay features. Good writing is clear writing (credits to AP Lit teacher for that one, too). Your word choice should not distract the reader from the heart of the text, but rather illuminate it. Your admissions officer should not need to reference a dictionary while reading your essay.
For example, in my essay, I also talked about my stepdad and how he introduced me to computer science. As a kid, I would constantly compare his presence with my father's, so I decided to write this in my essay:
“It was a simple binary of the kind children grasp easily: my stepdad was there, and my father was not.”
The word "binary" hearkens back to my stepdad's passion for computer science, but it is also being used as a vessel to understand my relationship with both of my father figures. Double entendre's such as this one are a pretty cool way to add some artistic flair to your essay while also sticking to the heart of the essay. Additionally, some strong essays have one cohesive motif that is sprinkled throughout your essay. A motif is a distinctive feature/idea that persists throughout the essay to unify the heart of the text
The one caveat to this planning system is that it requires a lot of time before your deadline. Your first few drafts will probably look like a discombobulated mess but take it from me: that's normal.
I guess what I can say that helped me the most in writing these essays is to feel a genuine connection to your essay. If you don't have a genuine connection, it will come across like that when reading it (especially to admissions officers). Remember, the essay should be used as a vessel for all of your emotions, and you are the captain of that vessel.
About the Author:
This post was written by Gabriel Gutierrez-Ruiz, a hard-working tutor at Full Potential Learning Academy.