Acing the Personal Essay

Tips for the narrative side of the college application.

By Leif Johansen

1. Consider your audience

I mention this first in part because it’s probably the best advice I could give to a young writer, whether it's for a college application or not. Before we even start outlining a piece, we need to think about who is going to be reading it, and why. For a student’s Common App personal essay, the audience is generally going to be undergraduate admissions officers. These people are smart, but they’re not specialists. Sometimes students use jargon related to their field of interest to demonstrate their academic chops. That might be fine if the student is applying to a particular program where their application will be reviewed by field-specific professionals. But ninety-nine times out of a hundred, that’s not the case.

It’s also important to keep in mind that admissions readers are probably looking at hundreds, if not thousands, of college essays over the course of an application season. They’re usually expected to review a minimum number of applications every day. That means each essay may get only a couple of minutes of dedicated attention before the reader has to keep moving.

What does that mean for students? Sometimes, when I tell students about how the review process works on the inside, they start to feel like writing a “good” essay doesn’t matter, since so little time is spent reviewing it. That’s the wrong lesson. These reviewers are professionals, and they know how to digest a piece of writing efficiently and thoroughly.

A more useful takeaway is to create a piece of writing that can be read and clearly understood by a complete stranger in a couple of minutes. There is certainly nothing wrong with creative writing, but it’s important to avoid convoluted writing. If someone would need to sit with a piece for 30 minutes to grasp its meaning, then its meaning probably won't be grasped.

2. Make it personal

Students often ask me what they should or shouldn’t write about in their college essays. I answer that question the same way I do when they ask which extracurriculars they should pursue in high school to make their applications competitive: What do you care about? What means something to you? I’ve read essays spanning the full range of subject matter, from the remarkable to the traumatic to the mundane. The best ones weren’t outstanding because the topic was outstanding; they stood out because the character of the writer shone through. They were about something that mattered in the student’s life, told in a style authentic to them.

That’s the problem with AI. I’m not anti-AI. I think there are situations where it can help students in the editing process. But a student’s own voice is one of the most powerful tools in their toolbelt on a college application. Outsourcing it to a large language model (LLM) will produce an essay devoid of spelling errors, but also of character. In my final years working in admissions, as LLMs exploded, I noticed a regression to the mean in the essays I reviewed. There were fewer really gnarly ones, but also fewer rockstars. There’s ChatGPT for you. The good news for students today is that it’s easier to make an essay stand out than it used to be, just by putting in the work to write it in one’s own voice.

3. Show, don't tell

This is one of the toughest challenges for many students on their college applications. You’re a leader in your community? You’re a loyal, trustworthy, intellectually curious person? Admissions officers hear all that a lot. It doesn’t mean much. The trick is for students to prove these qualities about themselves through evidence, and to let the reader draw conclusions about the student’s character themselves. It’s not easy to do that in 650 words on the personal essay (or in 150 characters for each activities list description), but that’s the essence of the task at hand.

4. Draft it

Students sometimes assume that all their English teachers are wrong, and that they can sit down and write a final, primetime-ready college essay in one sitting. Here’s the thing: the best writers in the world don’t write a novel one day and send it to the printing press the next morning. Writing anything worthwhile takes time. And with any luck, writing the college essay can be a fun, engaging process where students can learn a thing or two about themselves along the way.

When I applied to college, I considered myself a pretty strong writer. The essay I ultimately sent to colleges was draft number seventeen. Not every student needs seventeen drafts to get to the finish line, of course. What matters is that the final essay adds meaningful depth to their application and is something they feel proud to share.

Here’s my point: throwing a seemingly random mishmosh of ideas on paper to get started with their personal essay is an awesome, healthy part of the process. It’s one of my favorite things to work on with students. We start by thinking big and brainstorming potential topics and what they want to communicate about themselves to admissions committees, and then we narrow down, refine, edit, and revise.

One last important tip: students should leave themselves plenty of time to go through this process. If applications are due the first week of January, this is not something they should start thinking about halfway through December. This is a September project, especially if students have early decision or early action applications that need to be submitted in the fall. College applications are stressful enough without adding a last-minute scramble to the mix.

5. Get feedback

And finally, this. Writing is already a deeply personal experience, and writing a college essay can feel even more so than usual. It’s normal for students to feel uncomfortable about sharing their work with others before submitting it, but this is truly one of the most important parts of the essay-writing process.

When a journalist has been working on an investigative piece for months, they typically have colleagues with minimal knowledge of the subject matter read the story before it goes to press. This is often how glaring errors get caught. When we’re too close to something (such as we are when we spend weeks or months working on a one-page college essay), it’s that much more important to have someone read it who can zoom out and see it from a first-timer perspective. After all, that’s the perspective that an admissions reader will bring to the essay as well.

I encourage students to pick five people they trust to read over their essay and provide feedback. Ask teachers, family members, mentors, and friends: what was the strongest element of the piece? What’s it missing? Was anything unclear? If you were a college admissions officer, what would your biggest takeaways be from this essay? Students can choose which suggestions to incorporate and which not to, but outside feedback is the best indicator of how the essay is going to be perceived by admissions teams.

Let's get into essay mode. I work one-on-one with Catskills students and families, online. Get in touch