Every year, students repeat misconceptions and bad advice about how to write a personal statement. The internet is awash in videos and articles by amateur experts who just finished their admissions process and are trying to advise anxious students about how to write the “perfect” essay to get into colleges. Students often find their peers compelling, especially when those peers giving advice got into some fantastic colleges themselves. The reality, however, is that there is no secret to the perfect essay.
Really, those students don’t actually know why they got into a particular college—even a highly selective one. Colleges are not in the habit of telling students why they were accepted. Students just find out, “hey, I got in!” (cue excited screaming and IG/snap stories). It may have been the essay, or it may have been their GPA, extracurriculars, or a clutch recommendation. More likely is a combination of all of these.
Regardless, students do not know what the determining factor was, so when they say “I got into Harvard, so let me tell you how it’s done,” they do so without truly understanding whether their essay made a significant difference.
All that said, I will preface these tips by saying that there are absolutely exceptions to these general principles. But these are a useful guide for navigating the personal statement and separating a bland, perhaps cliché essay from a strong, unique one. As always, whether your story is an exception will depend on your circumstances and how you tell your story. That is why getting advice from an experienced college essay specialist can be beneficial. But if you are going through the process alone, use these tips to guide you.
Things To Avoid
Excessive Negativity
For starters, nobody likes a pity party. Making an admissions person feel bad for you will not guilt you into an acceptance. At best, you may come across like you can’t handle hardships independently and that your mental health could be a liability. At worst, the admissions officers might feel like you’re deliberately manipulating them, which will put you in a negative light and leave a bad impression.
And I will say, yes, colleges do want to support students with mental health struggles, and having these struggles is not inherently a weakness. But with these essays, it’s about how we frame the conversation that makes the difference between a mature, “I struggled, learned some important things about how I function in the world, and I have figured out or am in the midst of figuring out how to cope,” and being excessively negative: “oh my god, my family member got cancer and my dog was run over by a truck, and now I’m getting Ds; life is hard you guys.”
2. Overtly Bragging
Some students have no problem with this at all. More often than not, when brainstorming essay topics, students will say things to me like, “I’m pretty boring,” or “I’m just normal, I don’t do anything special.” Drawing out those personal stories or stand-out moments can be a big part of the challenge.
But for others, the challenge runs the other direction: toning down the language so that it does not sound like the student has an inflated sense of self. It’s important to highlight yourself and your achievements, especially in the activities and essays, but we should keep ourselves in perspective. Coming across as God’s-gift-to-whatever—be it athletics, physics, the arts, or humanities—might make you sound like a hard person to work and live with.
We can, and absolutely should, talk ourselves up—but only to a point.
3. Problematic Situations
Be mindful about any situation that paints you in a negative light. This can include cheating, plagiarism, and other forms of academic dishonesty. Or it can include deceit, lying, or other manipulations. It’s not bad to talk about these things per se, but how we talk about these situations will matter a lot. The worry is coming across as a dishonest person or someone who regularly cheats or lies to get ahead.
When discussing these lapses in judgment, focus on the outcome and struggles that came as a result—even if that outcome or struggle is long-term. Perhaps it took a year for that situation to “come back to bite you.” If so, talk about it.
4. Contrived Stories/Topics
Perhaps the most notable example of this is the cancer diagnosis essay. Every year, aspiring doctors-to-be write essays about how a family member received a debilitating diagnosis—cancer, MS—and how seeing them go through that has inspired the student to pursue medicine. Another common story is leadership in sports. Here’s how I look at the sports essay: there are ~10,000 high schools in the US. Each school has baseball, basketball, volleyball, tennis, track/field, football, probably soccer, probably swimming and water polo, plus some other sports depending on funding and the region. That’s at least 9 sports, 17 if you segregate the genders (minus “women’s football,” which does not exist competitively). That’s at least 17 team captains at each school, or a minimum of 170,000 captains. And that’s excluding club sports or co-captains. That’s 170,000+ people who can write about leadership and athletics. A lot of engineering students like to write about their first experiences with LEGO. There are also some common cultural/ethnic stories I see because of the geographic region I’m based in.
Generally speaking, I advise students to avoid these sorts of stories. There are two reasons for this. First, the colleges will see that you are active in sports on your activity list, and they should see your captain role in your activities. So telling them that you are a captain on a sports team is not new information that helps them understand you better. Secondly, it is exceedingly hard to say something unique about these topics given the number of people who have written about it in the past and who continue to write about it every year.
As with all advice, there are exceptions and caveats when it comes to this process. Yes, it’s possible to write a unique essay about a contrived topic. Yes, it’s possible to individualize these essays. There’s a difference between an essay that tells me that you’re a team captain or that you are interested in medicine and an essay that tells me about how you manage conflict or hardship, and it just so happens to take place within the context of sports or a family member’s diagnosis. But sometimes making this distinction is hard. Without having a wealth of experience with these essays and what topics students have written about and tend to write about, it can be challenging to know what’s personal and what’s perhaps more cliché. This is when having an admissions or essay expert read the essay can be a benefit.
5. Knee-jerk Deleting
Writing in general is a really personal experience. Even with a school essay, students often feel anxious about having others read their writing. Whenever I used to read student work with the student present, they would stand anxiously, and as I reached different parts, I would hear “Oh, yeah, that part wasn’t the best,” or, “I wasn’t sure how to write that part,” as if to justify why the essay wasn’t spotless.
For many students, this anxiety is amplified 1000x for the personal statement because it’s about themselves. We are our own worst critics in life, and there’s a temptation to tear down everything we think, do, or say. I have had students who wrote part of an essay, then said, “eh, I don’t like it; the idea was stupid and not important enough. I deleted the whole thing and decided to start over.”
Don’t do this! As the writer of the essay, you are a biased observer. Let someone you trust read it and tell you what they think. It might be as bad as you think it is, but it’s far more likely that there might be something you wrote that’s worth exploring further or expanding into its own essay. But if you delete the whole thing without letting anyone else see it first, you may miss the chance to write that other essay entirely.
6. Excessive Thesaurus Use
Again, the goal is to introduce yourself to the college. To that end, you want to sound like yourself. An incredibly well-polished version of yourself; the you-in-a-suit-and-tie or you-in-a-blouse-and-blazer. Not you in sweatpants binging Netflix on your phone. So some thesaurus use is acceptable, especially if you feel like your writing skills need some honing.
But if you scour the thesaurus in order to upgrade every word you write, you will end up sounding like a deranged academic rather than an eager high-school student. Use this tool in moderation; it’s okay to use “basic” words in your writing, like “think” or “things” or “said.” But the key to good thesaurus use is to create a little bit of variation in your word choice. That’s all.
7. Careless Errors
Like above, your goal is to sound like a polished version of yourself. Check your spelling and punctuation. Make sure that every sentence contains some sort of complete idea (unless you purposefully wanted a sentence to be incomplete).
Leaving careless errors in your essay will make it look like you do things carelessly.
8. Reading Other Samples
This is one piece of advice where I get pushback from others in the field. Some people argue in favor of reading other essay samples. The argument goes: if you want to learn how to do something—anything—you will inevitably look at how someone else did it successfully. You will learn art by mimicking artists you like; you will learn civil engineering by studying past designs, successes and failures, and figure out how to improve them to mitigate failures; you will learn coding by looking at other people’s code. They say the same is true of the college essay. If you want to write a strong essay, looking at successful or strong essays is a good way to figure out how to do that.
The reality, however, is that unlike civil engineering, art, and coding, the college essay is about you. It’s a uniquely personal exercise individual to each student. And for some students, once they read something they like or find impressive, they will want to copy it. If you read another college essay that you really love, and try to copy it, then you are not introducing yourself to colleges. You are introducing a version of you that is trying to pretend to be someone else. That defeats the purpose of the essay.
Related to this, some students will read another essay and say, “Oh my gosh, that was incredibly well done. I can’t do anything like that! I don’t have a story like that!” and shrink. What they don’t realize is that the essay they read is likely the result of brainstorming, ideation, drafting, revising, editing, and polishing. Dozens of hours went into that essay; more time than they have likely ever put into a piece of writing before.
Now, for other students, none of that is true! There are excellent student writers who can read someone else’s work, analyze and dissect it, understand why it works, and then adapt that structure to their own work without overtly copying it and without being discouraged by the polish of what they read. Those students might benefit from reading another person’s essay in order to understand what makes it a successful essay.
But for most students, reading a sample piece without guidance and a targeted purpose for reading it will only make writing their own essay harder.
Do These Instead
Highlight Who You Are
In admissions, we talk about something called the “crumple test.” If you print your essay out, crumple it up, and throw it into a room full of other crumpled essays, can someone else who knows you very well read your essay and know that it’s yours? If so, then your essay passes the crumple test.
For this reason, you need to focus on stories unique or important to you. These do not have to be “cure cancer” moments, those monumental achievements that represent the culmination of years of practice or study (winning the big game, opening a play in the leading role, presenting at a national science fair, or curing cancer). They can be as little as having a conversation with somebody at the bus stop every week that has taught you something.
Emphasize your specific experiences, interests, or background with what you write about. Make it unique to you. Ensure that your essay sends a message to admissions about who you are or what you value. And don’t feel pressured to make it about some big achievement; small moments can be just as impactful.
2. Demonstrate Maturity
Maturity involves making mistakes, owning up to them, and then learning from them. It involves discussing hardships—not in a way that makes you seem like a victim—but in a way that explains why you are the way you are or have the experiences that you do. Don’t be afraid to discuss setbacks or challenges, just make sure you talk about how you grew as a result of the learning that happened. Failure is in itself not a bad thing; it’s important to know how you bounce back from failure—or not.
For those who are more fortunate, demonstrating maturity can also involve recognizing the advantages you have or the hardships that you are fortunate enough not to have to deal with. If your family is well off enough to send you on some transformative trip, it’s okay to talk about that trip, but it’s also a good idea to recognize your good fortune. You can also recognize that you do not have to worry about where your next meal will come from or working to help your family make ends meet.
Whether dealing with challenges or acknowledging when challenges are few-and-far between, how we talk about these moments can show a lot about who we are and how we view ourselves and the world around us.
3. Focus On Growth + Lessons Learned
In short, anything negative should come with a lesson learned, and the majority of the essay should be spent on the learning, not on the negativity.
You also want to focus on what you learned from this situation. Hopefully the lesson wasn’t something like, “This worked out perfectly, and I can get ahead by taking shortcuts!”
4. Write More Than You Need
Most college essays are between 350–500 words. The Personal Statement is 650 words, and there are rare colleges that give as many as 800–1000 words for some of their essays. But the majority of significant essays are in the 300–650 range, and many supplements are merely 100–300 words.
I always tell students that 650 words is the limit, not the requirement. It’s totally okay, even preferable in some instances, to fall 10-20% shy of that limit (in the neighborhood of 550–620 words). Fluffing these essays is unnecessary and undesirable. There’s something nice about someone who can tell their story and convey their message succinctly. If we’re much shorter than 550 words, however, it’s very likely that we’re leaving out important details, or we’re not reflecting as much as we should on the experience we’re sharing with admissions.
But getting to that place is counter-intuitive. You don’t get to 50-100 words shy of the limit by purposefully writing less. You actually write more and then edit shrewdly (see this article on my writing process and pay special attention to step 2). By getting all your ideas on the table, you can then decide which parts of the story are crucial and which ones perhaps are less important and can be cut.
5. Proofread!
I know that for most students, writing an essay for school is a last-minute affair. The teacher always says, “Don’t leave this until the last minute! I’ll be able to tell if you write this the night before it’s due!” And they say that because students tend to do that. You sit down to write, write, finish, and hit that “submit” button just minutes before the essay is due. Or you print it out at 6:30am in order to rush to school and turn it in first period. If you’re diligent, you might write it the day before, and have someone proofread it for you so you can make edits the night it’s due.
This essay is not that. Many of my students go through maybe two drafts and six-to-twelve revision cycles on their essays. Writing is a process, and the personal statement is often a student’s first exposure to what that process looks like.
This is another way that you can get your essay down below the 650 word limit. Make sure you’re using strong verbs instead of adverbs, fix your verb tenses and take longer expressions and use shorter equivalents. This can easily remove 2–4 words per sentence, and in a personal statement, that can easily add up to 30–70 words saved. Then comb through your essay and ensure that every sentence is purposeful and all your spelling, capitalization, and punctuation is on-point.
Summary
Try to avoid extremes: don’t be extremely negative, or extremely positive to the point of arrogance; don’t try to come across perfectly (mistakes are okay, even preferable!), but also don’t talk about the time you cheated and then lied about it in order to beat your friend in a competition.
Not every essay is going to be a “cure cancer” story; not every essay needs to brag about your achievements and highlight how great you are. It’s okay to have struggled, failed, and learned from that challenge. In fact, in many ways, colleges prefer to see that resilience and reflection laid out for them. Whatever you write, however, make sure that you do it thoughtfully, and that you polish your grammar, spelling, and punctuation as best you can.
Remember, the whole point of this essay is to introduce yourself to admissions in your own words. So be you, not who you think colleges want to be, and not who your parents think you need to be to get into college. You’re still a teenager; it’s okay to write like it.
It’s me, hi, I’m the secret, it’s me! Schedule a consultation so that your child has an expert editor with a demonstrated track record to help them put their best foot forward. It’s free!