9 Tips For Crafting A Successful College Essay

9 Tips For Crafting A Successful College Essay The admissions officers reads as 1 out of 1000’s and possibly even 10,000 or more. Your English teacher reads your essay to assign one grade out of many. Model United Nations is a large part of their personal growth as a high school student, and they can leverage their MUN experience to get into college. It takes more than good grades and strong test scores to get into competitive colleges like Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. High school students today have to stand out by excelling in their extracurricular activities. Many do this through sports, science, or the arts, but others join activities such as speech and debate, mock trial, and Model United Nations. Terrified by the mere thought of writing your college paper? Feel the joy of submitting an interesting, thoroughly researched essay with our expert academic writing help. The admissions officer reads to determine if they should offer you one spot out of probably relatively very few. Many applicants will have high GPA’s and SAT scores, volunteer in a local organization, or be the president of a club or captain of a sports team. Admissions officers are looking for something, anything, to distinguish your essay from the pile. I recommend that students try to find an adult other than their parents to help with essay editing. Parents are blinded by love and perhaps perfection. As you plan your essay, you definitely want to keep the length requirement in mind. Many applicants attempt to do too much with their essays and then struggle to edit them down to 650 words. Realize the purpose of the personal statement is not to tell your life story or to give an exhaustive overview of all of your accomplishments. Let your list of extracurricular activities, academic record, letters of recommendation, and supplemental essays and materials show your range of accomplishments. The personal statement is not the place for long lists or catalogs of achievement. I do not believe that parents make good essay editors because they are not admissions officers. They do not know what admissions officers are looking for. For the same reason, I do not think English teachers make great admissions essay readers. Your English teacher reads your essay as 1 out of 30. Now schools are putting those same students at a disadvantage before they even have the chance to submit their transcripts. If you're in the process of applying for college, be warned that it isn't just your grades and extracurricular activities that are being reviewed by schools. These practices could lead to schools favoring students based on financial incentives for the school, placing students from low-income backgrounds at a disadvantage. Dr. Allen Grove is an Alfred University English professor and a college admissions expert with 20 years of experience helping students transition to college. While not everyone who does MUN makes it their main activity, many invest a considerable amount of their time and energy into it. I think the five paragraphs for an essay is more of a rule-of-thumb number that is easy to teach students when they are first learning to write. Your teacher was just trying to make sure you understood how to write, not give you a rule you had to always obey. The writing must adhere to a specific format, APA format for example. A student is usually away from home when going to college, and loves the taste of freedom. Being tied down for hours each day for days on end doing research and writing an essay is not their idea of freedom. Low-income students already face an uphill battle when it comes to higher education. Costs associated with standardized testing, applications fees create a barrier to entry in the first place, and that is before those students are hit with a steep bill for tuition each semester.