INCLUDING: Picking colleges, writing essays, what NOT to stress about, etc.

PS: If any of you ever want an eye to look over your college essay, no matter who you are, feel free to email it to me at mistress[a]eye-fight.net and I'll try to get back to you ASAP. As I'm no longer applying to university, you can rest assured it will stay private and uncopied :) I love reading these things!

i know i sound like i'm repeating one of those guides everyone reads during their junior year, and i'm sorry if i seem condescending! i don't mean it! disclaimer: i don't work for college admissions, so i also don't actually know anything - these are just the tips out of the million out there that i found the most helpful/most guiding/most valuable. i've been helping people with essays and stuff for ages though, so this is all advice from experience, research, and actual admission officers' statements. hopefully this helps take some of the stress out of college app season and helps you darlings in some way :) anyone who has actually been to college for longer than 3 weeks is more than welcome to chime in :P

background (for context): I applied to nine competitive schools and was accepted by seven (Georgetown, UPenn, Brown, Northwestern, Tufts, UMich, NYU). I did rolling decision (accepted) & early action (rejected). I don't have any family-alumni connections and I did not apply for financial aid or under an athletic recruitment (HAH like ANYONE would ever recruit me for ANY kind of physical activity. Except maybe stalking, but that's not a varsity sport...)

Picking Colleges: making that goddamn list

• There isn't just one college for every person. That's probably the most important thing I had to learn - you may have your dream schools or places that seem perfect to you, but that doesn't mean they will be the ONLY places you'll be happy at. Think of this if you're choosing between schools, too. Colleges are so multi-faceted that if you've picked your list carefully, you should end up having a great time no matter where you end up. It's not a one-to-one matching process where anything less than your #1 choice isn't good enough. A lot of what makes up a school is the people, and you can find that almost anywhere. For instance, I'm totally in love with UMin's IT school after I visited, and I would definitely have gone there...
  
• Consider applying to a school with rolling early decision - UMichigan and UIllinois are 2 common ones. Not only does this help you get your act together earlier (ANOTHER DEFINITE RECOMMENDATION), but you could receive your first non-binding admission before early action/decision results come in, allowing you to reconsider your regular decision choices and possibly eliminate other safety schools. 
• Apply to those damn safety schools. I personally think that admission into the top colleges is always subject to a lot of pure dumb luck, now matter HOW kickass you may be...by nature, the most competitive schools receive applications from THOUSANDS of qualified people that they don't have space for every year. No matter what your qualifications, there are some places you can't just assume you'll be accepted to.
• Pick schools you want to go to. Seems obvious, but you'd be amazed at how many people don't, and then end up having to go places they are miserable at. You can change your mind later, but make sure you have a solid bunch of schools that you are confident you'd like to go to.
  
• Don't apply to a million schools. I'd say keep it at a maximum of around ten. It's good to have options, but after a certain point you're just being lazy - you want to choose a carefully researched and selected few that you know will suit you, not just spraying your hypothetical application pollen over a whole field of flowers. Yeah I know...worst fucking analogy EVER.
  
• Important factors to consider: 
• Student size. Do you want to be lost in a crowd of thousands and huuuge lecture classes? Be in uber-intimate 15 people classes you can't skip? Somewhere in between?
• Undergraduate attention. Is the school a huge research institution or grad school? Will your professors live off campus and be busy with their own research, or have plenty of office hours?
  
• Campus feel. Do you want to live in a big-city school where you can't distinguish your campus from the surrounding area? Want to live in a very distinct environment where people mostly stay/live on-campus? Do you like extremely rural areas? Fancy walking a mile to class? Will you be bored out of your mind?
  
• Availability of your interests. Don't end up accepting an offer only to find that they don't have your intended major, or any other passion that is extremely important to you.
  

My common app main essay was about a fight I had with my friend Rob after we both lost Senate elections (running against each other). It took me a month to pick a topic and maybe a couple hours to write most of it (followed by many, many hours of editing and revision).

• Don't write about service unless you are incredibly passionate about it and you have a truly unique point. I love service work and I respect people who love it as well, but there must be a million of the exact same service essay floating around...something around the lines of "I went to this new place...I met these impoverished people/children/farmers/etc...their strength inspired me to discover ((insert meaningful message here))..." I don't want to demean the nature of service work, so if it is something you feel strongly defines you, you should definitely go ahead and make it the topic of your essay. But it's all too easy to grow cloying, cliche, and boring (which is another of the problems I have with writing about poignant experiences in general, but that's another story...).
• Write about things you are passionate about! This is your one chance to be fun and really show what you are about. Think hard about things you care about...never try and game the admissions office by picking topics based on what you think they'll like.
  
• Start with a list of qualities you feel are important to understanding yourself - you don't have to include them all in the essay you write, but it can be a good starting point when you can't think of a topic.
  
• Zoom in. Be specific. Consider picking a moment rather than an era - nix the crappy generic "Why I Love" essays (I wrote one of these as a first draft. I thought it was great, but it was complete crap) and choose instead to narrow in on one small experience you can describe. Not only does it make writing the essay much easier, but you can pack much more meaning into an analysis of one event than you can in a general one-pager on your entire life. Small routine things can be powerful too! (Of course, this depends on the kind of essay question you're answering...I'm just talking about the main common app question here) The best essays are usually about small things: tendencies, OCD obsessions, random everyday tasks, etc. Of course if you have something exceptional that no one else will have experienced before, this can also be a good time to bring it up :) 
• Don't talk about stuff you can see elsewhere in the app already - Like your experience as class president, or being awarded Student of the Year or whatevs...unless you have some new insight that can come out in essay.
  
• Don't preach! There's nothing more annoying than an essay that wraps up with a "And because of this experience, I learned that _____" - you want to show learning, but make this point through description rather than blatant narrative. Show them proof of what you're saying, don't just summarize without any descriptive evidence.
  
• "WHY ____?" essays are really important. Make sure to RESEARCH and RELATE TO YOURSELF. Don't write an essay that's just all about how amazing College X is, or how the arts program at University Y is ranked #1 in the country. They already know how badass they are! Instead, write about how YOU would use those amazing resources, or that revolutionary facility - how your interests connect directly with the strengths of the school, and a little bit about how you've shown committment to those interests (through club involvement, personal exploration, childhood obsession, etc.) Look up the university's website and the specific pages for the subject areas you're interested in - make sure to use lots of detail. I talked about specific classes that were interesting, events/organizations/resources that I wanted to take part in, and sometimes even quotes from the mission statements of particular departments.
• Ask your friends what you should write about. The decision should ultimately be yours, but your friends can pick up on aspects of your personality or interesting/unique things about you that you yourself may never have thought about.
  
• Read THIS by my lovely fellow Brown student Charis, which I have linked in a stalkeresque fashion, because she says this stuff much better than I ever could. And she's funn(ier).
  

• Your transcript. For the most part, what's done is done. Work hard your senior year but there's no use fretting over grades that are already set in stone...keep in mind that most colleges will completely recalculate your GPA based on their own standards, so spazzing over that one-tenth of a decimal point is useless. A "lower" GPA with a higher courseload is worth more than a "higher" GPA earned by taking 4 easy classes a year, and the difference between a "3.75" and a "3.84" isn't important compared to the bulk of your app.
• Not being 'good enough' for your dream school. Listen, it's good to be realistic: if you're batting a 2.0 GPA with no extracurriculars, no ambitions, and no personality, you are probably not going to get into Princeton. But that's okay, because who wants to go there anyways? (Just kidding. Christina & Kat are having a very good time there and I love them). The point is, though, that it doesn't hurt to go ahead and try, within reason. Give it your best shot and if they still don't want you, chances are you don't need them either - you'll find another place to go that will suit you. And don't even get me started on the fact that THE MOST COMPETITIVE COLLEGES ARE NOT NECCESSARILY THE BEST COLLEGES, let alone the best colleges for YOU. Harvard and Yale and Princeton may be fantastic institutions for some people, but if your learning style/ideal environment doesn't suit them, you won't learn a thing and you'll be miserable forever.  Many public universities are not only significantly cheaper, but also have academic/other programs that rival many so-called "top" schools. (Case in point: I'm fucking jealous of UMinnesota - Tech) So try hard, and don't beat yourself up :)
• SATs - those things are ancient! Their only purpose is a) to qualify you for a certain 'quadrant' - ie once you're above a certain standard, your exact score becomes almost irrelevant and the rest of your application is taken into account & b) to confirm the rest of your exam scores, so if you got As in Bio but only a 450 on the SAT II Biology test, that would be a warning sign. So buy your Barrons and Princeton Reviews if you want (those publishers must make MILLIONS), but don't worry lah, all is good :)
  

• Write a resume with all your extracurriculars, job experiences, and the DATES of these things before you start filling in apps...then when you have to type in the same information a hundred times over, you'll have all the details right in front of you and you won't have a chance to forget anything!
  
• Take your essay to English teachers - if you're at HKIS, make sure you find Mrs. Tan! They shouldn't be dictating your essay to you, but they can tell you what is crap and what's not. Thanks to them, I realized that my first essay was COMPLETE bullshit and was able to throw it out.
• Become best friends with the college's website - not to try and game your way in, but to get a better feel for how it fits you and what you can write about to connect yourself to it in your app. 
• Ask other students what it's like, but don't trust them absolutely - different colleges do different things for different people. What they can do is describe their experience to let you decide if you'd like it or not, don't just rely on an unsupported "I LOVE IT!!!" or "FUCK THIS SHIT I HATE THIS PLACE"