【智梦顾问专栏】A Very Brief Introduction to the College Application
A Very Brief Introduction to the College Application
1) What is the purpose of a college application?
To get into college. In order to do that, you must demonstrate that you have applied yourself both in and outside the classroom.
The essays that you will write allow you to demonstrate that you can critically reflect on your experiences and the values, points of view, priorities, and beliefs that you hold because of or in spite of them. They also allow you to demonstrate that you can do this in writing and in the English language.
Thereare two parts to that- your experiences and their effects on you. In order to think about their effects on you, first you must undergo the experiences.
2) Experiences
Though colleges don’t have one kind of “experience” in mind, but it’s useful to breakdown “experiences” into a collection of categories:
· Volunteer experience/service work
· Jobs held
· Athletics/sports
· Arts: visual, performing
· Extracurricular clubs
· Life circumstances, in terms of location, religion, family, financial situation, etc. (e.g. the experience of being anolder sibling)
· Unique habits or penchants
No one category is considered more important or “better” than another. Rather, when colleges take a look at your Activity Resume, what they call the list of experiences that you create and send, they’re more interested in the extent ofyour commitment to these experiences. It is obvious when you have participated in an activity merely to list it on your college application. Colleges prefer students who have demonstrated interest and commitment over a long period oftime to a certain activity.
3) Effects
When yousit down to brainstorm for these essays, you actually become two people, atonce: you the writer/thinker, and you the subject. To determine the effects that your experiences have had on you, you can begin to think about yourself asa character in a novel, asking the same kinds of questions that you might ask when performing literary analysis.
4)Example: business simulation
Let’s take the example of an experience that is common to all of you: this very business simulation competition. How can such an extracurricular activity be a valuable experience for a future American college application?
Before you even began preparing for this competition, you had to first convene or join a team. Already we can ask a lot of questions. Why did you decide to take part in business simulation? What did you think that it would offer you? How did youfind your teammates?
The next useful step is to think about moments that surprised you, either during the preparation for the event, or during this competition itself. Surprise is auseful emotion in all forms of writing, because it signals that something unexpected has occurred.
Finally, when you sit down to write your college applications, business simulation experience will give you a bunch of stories that you can use to describe your personal character and shining points, as well as reflect on the nature of teamwork, community, leadership, and even academic interest. Without personal stories, you can’t form a strong US college application…that’s why taking part in something like this is so useful and valuable.
5) Other applications
That applies outside of school clubs as well. In the next few months or years, as you are getting closer to your eventual application, start thinking about keeping a journal, and jotting down stories, both big and small, that happen to you and that seem interesting. When you’re sitting in front of your computertrying to think about what to write for your college essays, already having acollection of stories can be very helpful to you.
6) Prompts
It is likely that you will apply to at least one school through the Common Application. The Common Application provides five prompts for the Personal Statement:
1. Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.
2. The lessons we take from failure can be fundamental to later success. Recount an incident or time when you experienced failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?
3. Reflect on a time when you challenged abelief or idea. What prompted you to act? Would you make the same decisionagain?
4. Describe a problem you’ve solved or aproblem you’d like to solve. It can be an intellectual challenge, a research query, an ethical dilemma-anything that is of personal importance, no matter the scale. Explain its significance to you and what steps you took or could be taken to identify a solution.
5. Discuss an accomplishment or event, formal or informal, that marked your transition from childhood to adulthood within your culture, community, or family.
One mistake that students make is to labor under the false impression that they must precisely and exactly answer the prompts as they are phrased. That’s not the case! As you read over these five prompts, consider their variety, and note especially the open-endedness of the first. For the Personal Statement, you truly can write about whatever occurs to you as a promising topic. The questions don’t confine you to certain topics, but rather provide angles for you to think about the topics you consider.
7) Topic selection
Because this process is so subjective and intuitive, the first step towards a Personal Statement is often the most daunting--namely, topic selection. What to write about? At Zhimeng, we begin with an extensive questionnaire explicitly designed to get students thinking critically about their own experiences.
One mistake that many students makein selecting a topic, however, is thinking that big is better. Under this logic, only major extracurricular experiences or commitments can match the bigness of the PS. I like to encourage my students to think about the rich form of the Personal Statement as a place where they can explore a unique hobby or smaller aspect of their lives.
My advice, lifted from another college consultant’s essay, is to ask floundering students to compose a list oftwenty potential Personal Statement topics. The first five or so might be big and obvious, but for the next fifteen you will have to search in deep and unexpected places. What you discover might in fact lead to the most revealing essay.
8)Resources
The following are online resources pertaining to writing in the English language that you can consult as you write your college applications and in your subsequent writing endeavors:
· Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL): https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/
· Tortoise: A Journal of Writing Pedagogy: https://tortoise.princeton.edu
· “Writing Application Essays”, University ofWisconsin-Madison:http://writing.wisc.edu/Handbook/apessay.html
· “Overview of the Academic Essay”, Harvard: http://writingcenter.fas.harvard.edu/pages/overview-academic-essay