Summer College Essay Tips

Today we’ll be talking about how to college essay tips. As the summer rolls around, prime essay writing time awaits many junior year students. We’ve started discussing college essay tips in past newsletters but will really dive deeply now!

Mindset Tips

• Be prepared to talk about your extracurriculars — to help you plan, think about what your extracurriculars have taught you. This can be hard, quantitative skills (ie coding, teaching/being a teacher, research) but (more importantly) how you’ve grown as a person!

  • Questions to consider: What are you more passionate about as a result of this experience? How has this extracurricular shaped what you want to do in the future?

  • Focus moreso on how you’ve grown as a person thanks to these extracurriculars and not so much what you specifically have done (there’s the ten activities section on the Common App for that!).

• Get ready to be personal as well — about your parents, siblings, friends etc. and how these key people have shaped your world view! Remember to remain positive however.

• Find inspiration everywhere — here are some quick tips for generating ideas.

  • Read New York Times articles of writers writing about their personal experiences! Take note of how they structure their stories and what kind of details are included!

  • Listen to albums, watch movies, TV shows — take note of how stories develop!

• You can start writing for your safety schools! It definitely can be intimidating starting to write for your dream school/top school choice: instead, start by writing essays for one of your safety schools to get the ball rolling!

Editing Tips

• Be prepared to edit - writing is mostly editing! Start by jotting down bullet points to your responses to the prompts but don’t worry so much about vocab, sentence structure - rather, are you saying everything you want to say!

• Be mindful of who you’re letting read your essay! Definitely get an opinion or two (of a few trusted adults like a teacher/counselor or a parent) but be mindful of whether you want to accept edits or whether you have too many eyes on your essay, which can dilute your message. RRA is here to help!

• Enjoy the process! It sounds crazy but put on some music and focus on telling your story! A recent New York Times article reframed writing college essays as “profound, the first draft of the most personal story their writers will ever tell.” You got this!

Essays are crucial to the college application process! However, they don’t need to be stressful - RRA is here to help with that! Tune in next week for help around your personal projects!