A New Twist on the “How I Spent My Summer Vacation” Essay

During the summer, deans present our information sessions with our summer interviewers, all of who are rising W&M seniors.  At the end of the information session, after the dean discusses the application process in depth, the senior interviewer offers our visitors some sage words of advice as someone who successfully navigated (and survived) the essay process.

Last week I presented an information session with Tildi.  Her words of wisdom had to deal with the application essay.  I had also recently had a conversation with a guidance counselor about writing application essays so here are two very important tips from two very different perspectives.

1. Finish (or at least start) your college essay(s) over the summer.  Most applications (including the Common Application which W&M uses) are available at some point during the summer and many college essays are fairly unstructured (one of the Common Application prompts is write about a topic of your choice).  Tildi mentioned that her high school strongly encouraged students to take this route.  While it wasn’t her favorite thought at summer’s beginning, she was incredibly grateful at summer’s end.  Not only could she then submit her essays to teachers/counselors for review before they were bombarded with hundreds of such requests, she could also focus her senior year on being a senior.  There are important milestones to be marked that year — Homecoming, Prom, turning 18, graduation — and those events deserve your attention and your focus.  While applying to college is a senior year milestone it should not become the only thing being a senior is about.
2. Be unique with your topic.  I know it’s easier said then done and recently a college counselor asked me exactly how that is achieved.  While I told her honestly that I didn’t have any magic eight ball answer, it is fairly easy to avoid the truly cliche topics.  Basically, decide on a topic then determine if you know at least 5 people who could write a very similar essay.  If you can, you should choose a different topic.  Lets take a mission trip or a trip overseas or a season-ending sports injury for examples.  Admission officers realize that such experiences are often monumental but they are not uncommon.  If you wish to write your application essay about a mission trip or a trip overseas or a season-ending injury, determine whether or not you know 5 other seniors who also took a mission trip or a trip overseas or who suffered a season-ending injury.  Chances are you will all write a very similar essay.  Now take those 5 people and multiply by 100.  That is the likely number of essays on that topic that any given admission officer will read.  Hard to stand out from a crowd that way huh?  So try to find a topic that is unique to you.  Again, I don’t claim that this is easy to do but at least I’ve provided an example in a previous blog.

– Wendy Livingston