FAQs

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The college essay is the only part of the application you have total control over. You can’t change your grades or your test scores or your extracurricular activities, but you can represent yourself well in the essay. Colleges are more competitive than they have ever been, and the essay is the only chance you have to represent yourself as an individual.

A good college essay not only reveals something about your value system and your personality, but it shows how your brain works in a way that no other data in the admissions packet can capture. Through a college essay, you can represent yourself as a human being to the admissions counselors who are judging you. It’s like your best self, standing there; it’s the real you, not the SAT scores. Words can do a lot more than numbers can to convey who you are, and if you deny yourself that opportunity, you’re nuts.

Most students fall into the middle of the applicant pool at the schools they apply to. You have to ask yourself, what’s the hook? What will make them choose you? They are looking for the extracurricular energy that you will bring to their campus, the vision, insight and passion that will make their school a vital place, as well as the talent and intelligence you will bring to your coursework. How can your grade point average and your SAT scores possibly show that? Only the college essay can really feel like you, can give them a slice of what you’re like.

A few years ago, the big schools just made decisions based on numbers. But now, according to admissions counselors, even the big public universities are moving in the direction of the whole-person review. Essays count. Standardized tests have been driven down somewhat in the process. Many schools have chosen not to accept standardized test scores. In some ways, the essay is your last chance. Don’t let it slip through your fingers.

I like to think there’s no such thing as a bad writer. There are people who have been told they are bad writers, and many of them believe it. Some of them don’t trust that they have anything important or interesting to say. Some of them haven’t mastered the structural model of school essays. Some people have internal editors that make them choke when they see a blank page, because they are so used to reading negative comments written in red ink by their teachers that they are afraid to speak on the page. Some students don’t know that you need to give lots of specific details and put the reader right there in your skin. Some just need spell-check. These are all fixable problems. The tasks we get graded on in school are somewhat different than the tasks real writers face. If a reader is moved by your essay, and feels like he or she knows what sort of a person you are after reading it, you are a good writer.

It's possible. Your own perception of your growth is important. If your performance steadily improved, a college essay might be able to explain why. If there’s a reason why you didn’t do well in school, the college essay can communicate that. I’ve had students write about overcoming a learning disability in their college essay. Perhaps the most dramatic case I have to illustrate the power of a college essay is a bright, funny student who earned Cs and Ds in his courses, and was advised by his counselor to go to a community college. He told me that his dad, who had become a quadriplegic several years ago after a boating accident, was a brilliant information technology specialist. He had taught his son to be his hands, and since sixth grade, he had been building computers and doing tech consulting. He found school boring, so he just shut down inn his classes. His essay got him into New Jersey Institute of Technology with a scholarship. I worked with a very bright and creative young man whose grades weren't exceptional. He didn't care about his grades. He cared about learning to express himself accurately. He wrote about reading, writing, and music, what he called his tools. He had been working passionately alone, with no mentors, creating ambitious art projects, writing a play, teaching himself to play guitar.  "I'm not sure where my dreams will take me," he said in his conclusion, "but an unfulfilled life is my greatest fear." He got into every single school he applied to, surprising his guidance counsellor. I wasn't surprised. His essay showed how his brain works. 

Every person is different, but in my experience, the time difference really represents the amount of procrastination each person allows themselves before actually putting the words on the paper. Procrastination and anxiety represent 90 percent of the time spent on college essays. The actual writing is nothing compared to that. People walk around for weeks saying they’re thinking abut their college essay, but then they write it one night. The Boot Camp just removes all of your procrastination excuses, and gives you easy tasks to do, one at a time, Then unexpectedly, you get interested in telling a particular story. And before you know it, there’s a page of text you like on your screen. Writing the essay is NOT the hard part. That's carpentry. Thinking of a topic that excites you, that feels deeply correct, is the hard part 

That’s impossible. You have lived for 17 or 18 years. Each day, some things happen to you that you could probably write a good essay about. You just don’t see it. It’s our job to help you see it.