College essays are not the place to "just tell your story."
It's not that “tell us your story” is wrong for college essays. It’s just severely misleading.
Yes, college admission offices give this advice all the time. But if you look at how they actually evaluate essays, you’ll see that what they look for goes well beyond “your story.”
This article will walk you through:
As college essay coaches who’ve helped thousands of applicants get into great colleges each year, we’ve examined the question of why the “tell your story” advice is so ubiquitous, and you need to know what’s really going on.
Read the Table of Contents to see what we'll cover in this article:
Let’s go on a journey of discovery through the internet. What advice do colleges give about writing the essays they require?
We found one striking pattern (emphasis added):
Here are some videos that popped up as we researched this question:
And here’s an article from the Washington Post that ranked high in our search:
True, not every admissions department used the word “story.”
We also found (emphasis added) —
In this category of advice, while the admissions offices don’t use the term “tell your story,” they’re still suggesting that you simply share something interesting about who you are, and connect with them in the way that you would with a friend.
However, when you look at how colleges actually evaluate essays, it turns out that this advice is wrong at worst and incomplete at best. So let’s do that now.
Let’s hop back into the internet for another journey of discovery. This time, let’s search for clues about what college admissions officers do when they’re in the process of actually reading your essays.
As some readers know, at Prompt, we’re pretty excited about a lawsuit that made much of Harvard’s admission process public.
The lawsuit revealed that “share whatever you would like with us,” as the college claims (see above) isn’t necessarily helpful advice.
Instead, admissions officers review “humor, sensitivity, grit, leadership, integrity, helpfulness, courage, kindness and many other qualities” in determining a personal rating for each applicant, according to coverage (emphasis added).
Yes, this means that Harvard admissions officers give applicants cold, hard numbers based on whether their essays reveal things like grit and courage. So what if, based on their advice, you simply shared an interesting story about your passion for the theater or for playing sports? So that they could get to know you?
You’d be out of luck. Because without specifically focusing on an interesting, authentic story that also reveals something about your character, you’re unlikely to write an essay that they rate highly.
There are also clues that other colleges are looking for more than just a nice story or the “true you.”
Here are some approaches we found to the process of assessing admission essays:
Some supplemental essays also show what colleges value. For example, these are all about intellectual curiosity:
Once you start looking more closely at how colleges actually make their decision, you see that colleges really care about a number of specific characteristics.
The point of a college essay is to prove you’ll be successful on campus and beyond. As Emory admissions dean John Latting says, “The whole [admissions] process is about finding potential.”
The way you prove your potential is by showing that you have 5 special characteristics. They go by various names, but at Prompt we’ve boiled them down to:
Go back to the last section and see how often these words (or similar ones) come up — you’ll see that it’s extremely often.
To take a specific example, here how these characteristics align with the categories unearthed from the Harvard admissions litigation:
Now if you’re carefully comparing this list to the quote above, you’ll notice that we’re missing:
That’s because it’s true that they don’t match up to our 5 Traits. Humor is wonderful if you’ve got it, but “your college essay might not be the best place to try on that funny writer voice for the first time,” to quote the dean of admissions at Lawrence. (Diversity of experiences is similar, in a way, in that it’s a wonderful-to-have, but not something you can force if you just don’t have it.)
Integrity is a must-have — but most good essays around the 5 Traits should demonstrate integrity. Needless to say, any essay that implies a lack of it is a bad essay. As to sensitivity, well, if you’ve got it great. Not sure that one’s really make-or-break.
The point is that your essays aren’t a friendly “get to know you” space. They’re a vital component of your application; the colleges are grading your essays. And to score high you need to write about an experience in which you showed one or more of the qualities that they’re looking for — one or more of the 5 Traits. (If the experience also happens to showcase integrity and a sense of humor, all the better!)
At Prompt, we study the pronouncements of college admissions officials obsessively. We’ve gotten to know them, we read books about them, we follow them on Twitter.
We don’t think that college officials are “lying” when they present this advice. Rather, there are many reasons why their advice isn’t as helpful as they probably think it is. Here are a few:
First, as we noted above, the advice to “tell your story” or “get to know us” or “be authentic” isn’t wrong. It’s just misleading because it isn’t clear about what actually gets evaluated. Most admissions officers probably think they’re giving helpful advice.
Second, offices are intentionally vague because it gives them more room to maneuver. If they say they’re looking for X in essays, everyone will write X. They want wiggle room for kids who write Y.
Third, they may be thinking in different modes when they think about “writing an essay” compared to when they settle down to “evaluate” an essay. In Originals, Adam Grant describes how different these two modes can be. His book describes an experiment that randomly assigned some participants to think like managers and others like creatives. Those in the “manager” mode evaluated novel products correctly only 51% of the time; those in “creative” mode were correct far more often, at 77% of the time.
This is kind of the opposite. Admissions officers likely think broadly when giving advice for writing essays — they might be thinking about how they’d like to read essays, or how great essays are original, or focus on small, everyday topics. But that likely goes out the window when it comes to getting through a stack of essays on their desk and using them to assign “personal scores” that can be used to advance or reject applications.
Bear in mind how overworked admissions readers are. According to an evaluator at Brown, “[W]e keep up a rigorous reading pace with the regular decision applicant pool. We were expected to read five applications per hour, which equates to 12 minutes per application. In those 12 minutes, I reviewed the application, standardized test scores, the transcript, the personal statement, and multiple supplemental essays — all while taking notes and making a decision on the admissibility of the applicant."
Make sure you write your essay to appeal to that “boring, bureaucratic” admissions officer. The one getting through a pile of essays, on a hungry prowl for qualities that will show success. We’ve got some stats to prove it can make up to a 10x difference in your chances of admission.
Our team of expert writing coaches have helped 50,000+ student write 90,000+ essays that have boosted their chances of admission. Create an account to use free college essay resources, or explore college essay coaching options today.
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