Any short story in an essay can conquer an American university, if you write attractively, demonstrate personal qualities and understanding of society.
Ms. Mai Thuy Duong, Master of Educational Assessment and Evaluation, University of Melbourne, Australia, has 16 years of experience in career counseling, university admissions counseling, international education and training, and project management. She is currently a university education consultant at Riga International School, Latvia. Below is her sharing on how to write a college essay that impresses the admissions committee.
Every summer, admissions representatives and counselors from about 2,000 colleges and high schools attend the International Association of College Admission Counseling (International ACAC) conference. Nearly every year, there is a panel that focuses on essays, how colleges evaluate essays, and what they look for in student essays.
I share some aspects that colleges look for in essays.
Master Mai Thuy Duong, education consultant. Photo: Provided by the character
1. Personal core values
The anthill. Grandma’s jar of pickles. A dead bird in the garden. Stickers on your computer. A trip. A misunderstanding. Whatever story you tell, it doesn’t matter. But throughout the story, the reader must see the core values or personal qualities that you pursue and build.
American colleges don't have a set of values to evaluate applicants. But from the perspective of the applicant, they categorize personal qualities into two groups: altruistic and selfless.
Qualities that are for the benefit of the student themselves and help them succeed in their studies, such as diligence, hard work, determination, or perseverance, are often taken for granted by schools and so are not often looked for in essays.
But personal qualities for the benefit of others, for the community, for spiritual, social, cultural values... will leave an impression of a beautiful personality, a profound worldview that is beginning to develop.
2. Imperfections and Weaknesses
Your imperfections, your frailties, your self-aware weaknesses will bring a humanity to your writing that no AI tool can compete with.
Stories like studying hard but not getting an A+, practicing all year but not winning a medal in the city competition, then tormenting yourself, suffering and using disappointment as a weapon to continue fighting in the race to win first place and finally succeeding are often trite and lacking in humility.
Truly personal and imperfect stories often reveal a humanity that AI tools like Chat GPT have so far failed to capture.
In three webinars I attended, admissions officers at top schools were able to 100% accurately distinguish between papers written by real students and papers written primarily by ChatGPT.
They said that with their experience reading thousands of essays each admissions season, they can distinguish by asking a few simple questions: "Is the language of the essay analytical, reporting, or narrative and contemplative?", "Does the essay originate from a deep place in the human emotional spectrum?", and especially "When reading the essay, do I imagine the author's true self completely naturally and feel closer to the author?"
3. Understanding
Your story may be touching and clearly show your personality, but if the whole article starts with the subject "I" and continues with statements affirming your strengths, the article is just the manifesto of a narcissist. You need to expand your story to see how you fit into the colorful social picture.
Top college admissions readers are open-minded and always looking for moments of surprise or admiration in student essays.
In 2017, Casandra Hsiao was accepted into all the Ivies (the top universities in the US), with an impressive resume, and an article about her and her mother’s journey of learning English when immigrating to the US from Malaysia. A simple, sincere topic about language and storytelling but containing layers of experiences and emotions of all ranges that any immigrant family can sympathize with.
Casandra’s story is not only about personal values such as her deep empathy for others in the same situation, her love for family and community, but also reveals a bit of mental weakness when having to doubt herself in the process of integration, and especially the sense of social justice. Casandra’s story is the story of America.
4. Writing level
Your story doesn’t have to be big or complicated. When I worked at NYU, I noticed that most students didn’t get to learn or practice writing a genre that is appropriate for American college essays: flash fiction wiring. Remember to use the structure and techniques of a short story, but don’t make up the content.
Those of you who sent me your first drafts mostly fall into two categories: writing like an IELTS essay and writing like a 6th grade narrative essay. In the first category, you should restart to get out of the IELTS essay and not be like ChatGPT.
In the second case, you need to understand that the narrative writing you learn in 6th grade is a narrative genre (retelling a real event that happened to you, often ending with direct feelings, suitable for 6th grade students). The essay of the American college application is a creative writing genre based on the structure of a short story. You must know how to apply the story structure with the elements: presentation - knot - development - climax/peak - conclusion and techniques of using literary devices such as metaphors, symbols or other rhetorical devices.
To My Ngoc’s exceptionally creative essay that got her into Harvard in 2017 is an example of combining all four elements. She wrote about bras, relating them to the cycle of life and the rise and fall of stars in the universe. Through this, she showed that she is a creative thinker and has excellent writing skills.
Mai Thuy Duong
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