S2E13: Common App Essay Topics, Using AI, Storytelling & Making the Most Of The Word Count
In this episode, we'll delve into why essays are crucial, the use of AI in college applications, how to find your unique voice, and how to make your application truly resonate with your top schools.
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In this episode, we'll delve into why essays are crucial, the use of AI in college applications, utilizing every word available in the Common Application and how to find your unique voice, and making your application truly resonate with your top schools.
Want to have your essay reviewed by our expert college admissions team? Now offering essay review services.
You can learn more at http://thomascaleel.com/services
Key Highlights
Why Essays Matter:
Essays play a pivotal role in the college application process as they offer a platform for applicants to convey their unique stories and experiences.
Unlike grades and test scores, essays allow schools to understand an applicant's life journey, values, and perspectives.
Essays provide context to achievements and allow applicants to stand out from the sea of similar academic credentials.
Crafting an Effective Story:
Stories can stem from seemingly mundane experiences but should reflect your passions and intellectual curiosity.
Sharing genuine interests, even if not overly dramatic, can showcase valuable qualities like curiosity, cultural awareness, and creativity.
While stories don't have to be traumatic, they should provide insights into your character and values.
Economy of Language:
Shorter essays require concise language and an efficient narrative.
Avoid excessive preambles or fluff; dive straight into the heart of your story.
Choose impactful details over grandiose language; focus on effective communication.
The Use of AI to help write your essay
It can certainly be helpful to help generate ideas but perfectly polished essays get lost in the stack of applicants.
Slick essays can raise suspicions about authenticity and the only person who can truly tell your story, is you.
Takeaway:
The college essay process is an opportunity to convey your unique story and character to admissions committees.
Embrace the power of storytelling and authenticity.
Be true to yourself, find your own voice, and use essays as a platform to showcase your passions, interests, and values.
Communication skills gained from the essay process are invaluable in both academics and professional life.
So remember, the journey of self-discovery and effective communication begins with crafting a compelling narrative in your college essays.
About Thomas
Thomas is a parent and alumnus of the University of Pennsylvania. After earning his MBA at the Wharton School in 2003, he moved to Silicon Valley. For three years, he was director of admissions and financial aid at Wharton School. He worked closely with admissions professionals, students, alumni, and professors to create the best possible MBA class.
Thomas has been an entrepreneur his entire life in the fields of finance, agriculture, wellness, and sporting goods. As the founder of Global Education Opportunities, he works with diverse and underserved communities to help them become successful college students. Thomas started the podcast Admittedly because he is passionate about demystifying the application process for parents and applicants.
Related Links
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TikTok: @admittedlypodcast
Instagram: @admittedlypodcast
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Hello, and welcome to the admittedly podcast. My name is Thomas Caleel. I'm the former director of MBA admissions and financial aid from my own the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. In this podcast, I don't promise easy answers or quick fixes. But I will use my decades of experience to help you achieve your education goals. Now, let's get started.
And today we're going to talk about essays. It's essay season, and on our TikTok, and Instagram, people are panicking is a good word to use. What should I write? How should I write it? What is a good topic? What is a bad topic? And I understand that can be a very stressful process. And there's a lot of advice out there about essays.
And so I wanted to talk to you today about the process of why essays even matter. Right, and I think that's a good place to start. Why do schools use essays? You know, we've seen comments where people are saying, well, you know, essays aren't used in company recruiting. So why would they be used in school? It's, it's ridiculous. And I think it's very important to kind of step back and say, All right, when you are 18 when you're applying to university, or even earlier for boarding school, there's very limited data set from that schools can use to pull from, and they're trying to figure out who you are, what matters to you what your life experience has been. Essays are a great way to do that. I know as an applicant, you're probably thinking, Oh, this is so confusing, and it's so unfair.
But really, it's your opportunity to talk to the school and tell your story. And why does that matter? It matters because when we think about grades and test scores, right, and those kinds of hard metrics of your success academically, what happens is, and I've talked about this before when we have 50,000 - 60,000 applications, there's a large chunk of them that have almost perfect GPAs and almost perfect test scores. And so it's impossible for schools to simply pick students who have the academic ability.
But also, we don't just want to limit ourselves to the top academic performers, because we need to take each student's particular experience life experience, and perspective into account. And so you know, a student with a 3.5 GPA may have a just as valid story as a student with a 4.0 GPA. Essays allow the schools to get inside that student's mind, understand their experience, and put their achievements and context.
So let's talk a little bit about how you are successful in the essay process. And I would first urge you to go to our TikTok. And look at the series that I've done on storytelling because storytelling is such an important component of this. And to those people saying, well, why do essays even matter? I don't need this skill, you do need this skill. You need the ability to communicate your thoughts, and your ideas to other people, You need to communicate in the workplace via email, instant message, Slack, or whatever it is that you need to communicate, to bring people on board, you need to be able to interact with people to get information from them to build friendships, alliances, relationships, all of these things relate to storytelling, and reading and writing are still fundamental skills. These are skills that you need in any aspect of work.
And I can hear my stem candidates saying yes, but I want to be, you know, a programmer, I want to study computer science, I want to sit on my computer all day and crank out code, and yes, but also, you need to as you're learning that you need to interact with other people. If you have a good let's say you write a genius piece of code, you need to be able to communicate that to others. Maybe you need to raise money around it. Maybe you need to deal with investors or a board or sell your idea to accompany all of this involves communication and all of it involves storytelling. Storytelling is very important because there are so many different ways to tell the story and throughout the history of mankind throughout the history of humanity. People have been telling stories, either through cave paintings or oral tradition, or writing things down misses an important part of who we are. It's how we share ideas. It's how we communicate values.
And I think the important thing when we're thinking about it essays is, how we tell our story. There are a lot of different ways to tell a story, right? So if we put this in a high school English context, right, you have Hemingway, you have F. Scott Fitzgerald, you have Dostoevsky, you have quinoa Cabaye, you have all these different differences, storytellers, right, there are so many ways that you can tell a story, it's important to find your voice, it's very important to find that modality that suits you best. Because if you're trying to force yourself to tell a story in somebody else's voice, you will not be very successful, you certainly won't be persuasive, or the most persuasive that you can be.
And so the first thing we need to do is think about what is my voice. How do I tell a story? The second thing is, what story am I telling? Now, some applicants certainly may have had things happen in their lives where they have a story that seems dramatic or flashy. And, you know, and sometimes, sometimes those are good experiences, sometimes bad experiences, but most, I think students have led, what I would say is a somewhat normal life, they have studied hard, they've had various family and friends, relationships. They may have done sports or arts or volunteering, you know, all these things that kind of make up that journey.
And so a lot of students will come to me and they'll say, I don't have this big dramatic thing. I didn't summit Mount Everest, I didn't start a nonprofit that raised $5 million with Greta Thun, and Berg, and I didn't speak at the UN. And that's okay. Part of the series on storytelling on TikTok looks at different creators, right, some of them telling big stories, some of them telling very mundane stories, right? When you look at it from the outside, but as you listen to the story, and they draw you in, then you start to realize, okay, I'm learning a lot about this person about this individual through this story.
A good resource that I always recommend to people is The Moth, on NPR, on social media, as a podcast, and what it is, is a collection of people telling stories, very different people, very different stories. And so if you're struggling to figure out what your voice is, this is a great resource for you to go in, and listen to people telling their stories, and get a sense of okay, how do I get that introductory hook? How do I grab the listener's attention? Or the reader's attention? Then how am I building my narrative arc? How am I creating tension that I that I ultimately resolved in the conclusion, looping back to the intro, and kind of square the circle if you were, but sometimes that conclusion can be somewhat basic, sometimes that conclusion can be a bit of a twist, or a surprise ending? I think, again, that comes to you finding your voice. And it depends on the story you're trying to tell.
But at the end of the day, I think what we need to do is think about what I want to communicate to the admissions committee in this application. And that brings up another question we're getting a lot, which is, I have a lot to tell. So where do I put what in the application I think a mistake that a lot of applicants make is that when the common application opens, they jump right in, and with very good intentions start cranking away on that common application essay, What I would encourage you to do is kind of step back, right? First of all, think about it, I have all of these things that make up who I am as a human, as a student, and as an applicant.
And what I would like you to do is step back and say, okay, there are too many things, or too many parts of me, in most cases, to put in this application, if I try to put everything in, I'm going to just cause a lot of noise and confusion and muddy the waters. So what we want to do is want to look in and say, Okay, we have the activity list, for example. So that's going to tell the admissions committee very specific things about what we do, how we spend our time, how we allocate our time and our resources.
So we don't want to use the essays to simply regurgitate, I did this, I did this, I did this. You've heard me say this before, right? We show not tell. We give examples of things that we have done. We create the atmosphere where the reader understands why we're doing things, and what our motivation is.
But what you also have to do, as you're thinking about the common application essays, you need to go in and look at the supplements, right? So each school in the Common Application will have a supplement. Some of them will have additional writing, some of them will not. If a school does not have additional writing, then you need to think about communicating everything that you want to communicate in the Common Application Essay itself. But for schools that have supplements, right? Some of them might have one essay or three essays. Stanford has multiple short answer questions, short essays, and small prompts. In that case, you need to look at the entirety of the application and say, Okay, here's my message.
Now, how do I break it up? And where do I put those different pieces, so that the reader gets an entire view of me, because what you don't want to do is have essays that overlap too much and are repetitive. So if the reader reads a common FSA, and then they go to the supplement essay, and they say, I just read most of this in the Common Application Essay, we're losing an opportunity to talk about ourselves. So be judicious, be smart, and be strategic as to where you are breaking these things up. Now. I think it's important to talk about topics.
And I've talked about this idea of big topics, little topics. One of the examples that I give in my series on storytelling on TikTok is of this person, Jim, who's a sandwich idiot. And he loves sandwiches. I mean, it is something he absolutely geeks out on. He goes in, he researches the history of it, he looks at ingredients in the region, he looks at culinary traditions, in that particular region, or state or city or country. He makes the bread, and he looks for the spices if he can get them, but he's not overly fastidious about it, he'll say, Look, I have limitations. I can't fly there and try this, you know, these ingredients aren't available.
So I read the recipe, I thought about it. And I thought this might be a good substitution. And so I played around with it, I made 16 varieties, and this worked, but this didn't work. And you're probably asking yourself, well, what would sandwich making and what wouldn't obsession with sandwich making have to do with college admissions, but what it shows is a relentless intellectual curiosity, right, and a passion for something. So you can tell by these videos that he makes, this is something he cares about. And it's something that he thinks about very deeply. And it's something that allows him to connect and share with family and friends.
And so as you are looking at your own life, and your own experiences, think about those things that really are meaningful to you, right? Think about those things that you talk about, when you talk about your eyes light up. Think about those things that if given a chance you would do if you had a free day. And I know that that's a cliche question.
But the heart of the matter is, what is it that wakes you up in the morning, excited to greet the day, feel free to talk about that, you don't need to be trauma dumping, there doesn't need to be some big another movement where you need to tell about this trauma and how you survived it and how you resolved it. And, you know, if that's been your journey, certainly, we can talk about it, we want to make sure we don't dwell on the trauma itself. Right, it's perfectly fine to say this happened. Boom. Now let's focus on me because that's what the essay is about. Right? It's about me, you can also keep in mind, and illustrate different aspects of your personality through one example.
So if we go back to the sandwich example, right? We're looking at, as I said, intellectual curiosity, we're looking at cultural awareness, we're looking at an ability to think creatively and laterally, right? To adjust to things on the fly. These are all values that you can communicate in an essay that is seemingly unrelated to admissions, specifically, but you're communicating these values to the reader. Now, another topic that's come up quite a bit is AI, chat, GPT, etc. And I get a lot of questions or a lot of comments on hey, I'm just gonna have chat GPT write my essay.
And I want to take a stand here and just say, I think that's a terrible idea. I think the chat GPT can be good for generating ideas, right? So you can write some prompts, especially if you're kind of trying to figure out how to connect seemingly disparate things that you do, or if you're having trouble, like forming things, but the issue with chat, GPT, that is that it's overly slick. It's overly processed. And what do I mean by that? What I mean by that is that these admissions officers are reading 1000s and 1000s of applications each cycle, and they're spending maybe four to five minutes maximum on your applications. They open that application, they start reading your essay, and if what they're reading is overly processed and slick, it might be grammatically perfect. It's constructed well and correctly.
The problem is, is that they don't get a sense of you They can't break through that. And you become one of the 10s of 1000s of essays, that tells a story but does not resonate or connect with the reader because it is not genuine. And in a hyper-competitive admissions cycle, you are going to get kind of knocked to the side, you'll be they'll say, Oh, I mean, fine, they do fine here. But we were they really missed the point of this exercise. So feel free to use chat GPT to generate some ideas, but then write de novo starting from scratch, blank screen blank piece of paper, and write in your own words, because what happens is well, and this is a danger with over-editing, right, so a lot of students will write an essay and in very well, meaning they'll give it to their parents, they'll ask them for input, they'll give it to their English teacher, I've talked about this before.
And what happens is that as a reader, you see those changes in tone cadence in syntax, and you don't know who made the changes, but you know, that changes were made. And it's distracting to the flow of the essay. And certainly not something that's going to be positive in your favor, it is much better to have a less perfect essay that gives the reader the sense of who you are, than something that's highly polished and grammatically perfect. Likewise, big fancy words.
A lot of people think that using big fancy words, makes them sound intelligent makes them sound erudite. I would say please don't do that. Right? Think more of Hemingway than Dostoevsky. You don't need to have these big, weighty run-on sentences full of all this, just heavy, heavy prose. Alright? help the reader, understand you help the reader move through these essays, and say, Ah, okay, I see what you're doing here, I see where we're going with this. Also, this is a little bit of an aside.
If you write your essays, you submit your application, and you realize you made a mistake, there's a small grammatical error. Maybe even put the wrong name of a school in there. Please don't panic, don't send emails to the school saying Please, can you replace my essay, They won't do it. And it simply calls attention to the error. Nobody's that worked up about a misplaced comma or a misspelled word, you know, I would urge you to be careful and check your work. But if it happens, it's usually not fatal. And it's something that you shouldn't get overly invested in. So keep in mind, as we're talking about essays, we know it's not a perfect system.
But it's the best one that we have. It's something that certainly is going to prepare you for the rest of your life, being able to synthesize ideas and communicate them effectively. Certainly, in school, you're going to have to write papers, you're going to have to give reports, these are things that will continue to follow you throughout your professional life. And I'd say 98% of all cases of things that you're going to do. And so we want to focus on that. The final piece of this is, as we loop back to where to put what is that conversation? Yes, you have this 650-word common application essay, but you also have a series of shorter essays and supplements. Be thoughtful about how you use your words.
So a 150 or 200-word essay is extremely short. So I want you to work on the economy of language. You don't need large preambles. Right. You know, I've always been interested in biosciences since the seventh-grade field trip we took to the Science Museum. Right, that is lengthy. It burns a lot of words, right? Seeing the frog dissection, or my first frog dissection hooked me on biology period, right? Boom cuts right to the point and gets you right in the middle of the action. We don't need lengthy preambles you can you can take some shortcuts and condense your prose in the shorter essays to make sure you get your point across. Likewise, if you are talking about why you want to attend a particular school and most schools will have some version of the essay, why do you want to attend our school?
Using things like course titles can waste a lot of words you can talk about studying with a particular professor and relating them to your interest. Think about ways you can be economical with language you can burn off extra words, I was going to say superfluous words, but then I'm not following my own advice and, and put those in a way that just is clear and direct to the reader.
So I hope that we've been able to communicate today why essays matter and why communication matters. To practice your writing. The other thing that is great for communication for storytelling is reading. I know that in today's world, none of us reads as much as we want to, especially, you know, high school students who are doing loads of homework every night and have all these extracurricular commitments.
But reading, reading, fundamentally, from a young age parents, get your children invested in reading, read with them, read to them encourage their reading on their own, because reading absolutely helps this concept, this idea, this foundation of storytelling, and then will give you have a fluency and comfort with language. That is very important. And finally, for international students, I think that a little what I would say essays that are a little rough around the edges are fine, right? So English is a tricky language. And certainly, you know, in communicating in translating over from, let's say, your mother tongue, there will be some inconsistencies.
And that's okay, what I don't want you to do as an international student, what I advise you not to do is write an essay. And then, for example, run it through chat GPT to smooth it out. Because if I'm reading your essay, and I see that you're from another country, let's say you're from Norway, and I read this essay that is in you know, perfect, perfect English. It's going to make me a little bit suspicious. It's going to make me doubt the authenticity of everything else that you've put and written in that application.
So you know, to thine own self be true. Be sure you are being honest. Be sure you are using your own voice, you've discovered your voice, you find that voice that works best for you to communicate your own personal story.
Thank you for listening. Please follow us on our socials to get more nuanced takes on these essay questions. Thank you for joining us today. Please take a moment to subscribe to the admittedly podcast and download this episode. I welcome you to share your thoughts and questions with me. You can find us on social media at admittedly podcast. I look forward to continuing our journey together.
