Hi, everyone. My name is Andrea, and
I'm currently a junior at Harvard studying psychology. And today we'll be talking
about writing the college essay. So when I was writing
my college essay, I remember looking
online and seeing all these picture-perfect essays
that were quirky and funny, and they sound really smart,
and all these really amazing characteristics. And I was like, OK, I
want my essay like that. The issue, however,
is that I just didn't know how to get there. I knew where I
wanted to end, but I didn't know how to start or
any of the path in between. And so, hopefully,
that's what we're going to be helping you
address in this video today. Part one, choosing your topic. So unlike an essay that you
might have written in the past, the college essay is
a little bit different in that you can write about
quite literally anything as long as it fits
into the 650 word limit that the college
application imposes. This means that it's up to
you to really figure out, is there a specific story
that you want to tell? Is there a specific
trait about yourself that you want to make sure
that you show to the admissions office? What is it exactly that
you're trying to get across? A really critical question that
you can start asking yourself is, what makes you
happy to write? If there's a story
or a quality or trait that you think
that you can really talk about that makes you
really proud and really happy to write, that means that
is probably a really good sign that this is something that
the admissions office should see about you. And so once you start getting
into this general realm, then there's this
feeling of like, OK, now there's so much
that I could write about. How do you really focus it back
down to the 650 word limit, and make sure that again,
at the end of the day, this is very uniquely
your own essay? Part two, writing the draft. So once you figure out what
it is that you want to say, the question is, how do you
actually go about writing it? A big thing that you're
going to have to think about is structure. So unlike things that you may
have written for class before, you really want to
try to break out of that five-paragraph essay
structure, where you have the introduction,
the conclusion, and three-body paragraphs
that match one-to-one with your thesis. In this case, you want to be
a little bit more free form And to help encourage a
sort of free-form writing, there are a bunch of
different tools, including, but definitely not limited
to things like, word webs, where you start with one word
and sort of just free associate a bunch of different ideas of
words that are really like, in any way, just related to
the word that you or the topic that you have in hand. Another thing that
you could possibly do, which is something
that I actually had chosen to do myself, is
essentially just get down all the ideas that
I could potentially have about this
idea or this topic onto paper, just so that
I could come back later and reference it again
and potentially reiterate and maybe even revise
it to the point where it'd be good enough
to actually submit. Something that I have
always really stressed when I'm thinking about
these sort of essays is that you have to write the
bad drafts first before you can get to anything good. Everything that's online,
for example, none of those started out the
way that they are, when you see them online as the
accepted essays, blah, blah, blah. So another thing that
you want to think about is just your voice. You just want to make sure
that your essay sounds really authentic to who you are,
that this is a story that you can only tell in your way. Your admissions
officer should be able to tell what
kind of person you are and how you like to approach
the world in a greater sense. Part three, proofreading
and submitting. Now that you've done your
draft, you might be at a point where you just need an
extra set of eyes on it. And so something that we
always recommend people do is to ask someone
that they trust to take a look at your essay
and offer any advice or feedback that they might have. So this could be a parent. This could be a teacher, a
sibling, or a friend, anyone that you think would
be able to offer you honest feedback on what
you've written and hopes of making it better. That being said, you
want to make sure that what you're submitting
to the admissions office is your own work,
and it's something that you're really proud of. And if that means
scrapping your first draft or your first essay,
that's also completely OK. This is meant to be
an iterative process. And, again, no one
is going to get there to the final product
within a moment or within just one draft. At the end of the day,
the application essay is an opportunity for you
to reflect on yourself and provide an authentic story
to the admissions office. If you follow
these steps, you'll be well on your way to
perfecting your college application essay. If you have any other questions,
or want any more advice on the college application
essay or around the college application, in
general, we highly encourage you to reach out to
us at the Harvard Undergraduate Admissions Council
on our website, which you can find at the link below. We at the Undergraduate
Admissions Council are made up entirely
of current students, and we love talking to
prospective students both about our own
application processes, why we chose Harvard, and then
also our experiences here. So if you have any questions
at all, please, please feel free to reach out. And we're so excited
to hear from you. Thank you for watching. Good luck with your
application and make sure to like and subscribe. I feel like such a YouTuber
this is really exciting. You're not a true
YouTuber until you tell them to smash the Like button. Oh, yeah, yeah, you're
right, you're right. Smash the Like button.
