College Application Essays - The Definitive Guide

It's that time of the year when Year 6 students get down to business preparing for their college applications.  The process normally starts by writing up a personal statement or admissions essay of some sort. What most people come to realize, is that the process can become horribly painful. Every year students are reminded to start early, and I think we seniors are the prime examples of why you should not start late, but that's what everybody says, and that's what nobody does. 

So here's some help for those who are starting on your essays:

1. Write in reusable blocks. Many questions from universities are actually paraphrases of the same kind of question over and over again. Why do you want to do a particular subject, what's special about you, what have you done that's significant, why do you want to attend a particular university?
2. Draft, draft and draft again. It's not uncommon to go through drafts numbering in the tens in order to come up with something that is remotely acceptable. This is one of the most important essays you will write in your life, and it pays to put in more effort.
3. Make full use of help available. The College Counsellors exist for a reason, and you help them do their job by coming up with something to seek their advice on. I've never been turned away whenever I asked for help, and I daresay you won't be so long you provision ample time.
4. If all else fails, I've found that using Application Essay Generators helps. As part of the wide-spanning series of upgrades we've planned for CollegeTalk we've been putting together something like that based on our understanding of application essays. While we don't proclaim to be experts, and we admit that we did rush this out, you should be able to get a bit of inspiration. If at all, it should also help take some stress off the tedium of writing essay after essay with looming deadlines. 

Click here to go to the Application Essay Generator Beta

So how many of you did we manage to fool? Unfortunately there's no such thing as an application essay generator, though I'm sure we all wish one existed. Inspiration often comes from unexpected sources, so start early and keep at the writing!

Oh, and from all of us at NUSHSCollegeTalk, Happy April Fool's.