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Brody's Guide to the College Admissions Essay
Brody's Guide to the College Admissions Essay is available at bookstores and at online retailers such as Amazon.com. The book was written by a college counselor and writer who has appeared on national television to discuss admissions-related issues, and a dean of law school admissions at a major university. It has been used in high schools and in after-school programs.
For those students who would benefit from professional help with their college admissions essays, we recommend EssayEdge.com, which has been praised by the Washington Post and the New York Times.
Lessons to take away from this essay1:
1. Your best essay subject, not surprisingly, is often the one thing you love to do and are most passionate about.
Can you imagine this author writing his essay, not about filmmaking, but about some vacation experience or sports accomplishment he had? It sounds preposterous—not because those would necessarily make poor essays, but because filmmaking is such an integral part of his life.
Not only does your “#1 activity” give you something to write about and show the admissions committees where you’ve chosen to focus your time, but it also frequently provides the fuel necessary for you to do your best writing. Isn’t it easier to write about something when you’re actually excited about what you’re describing?
When students write essays about the activities they’ve chosen to pursue, those essays are often infused with an excitement and a passion that’s contagious. If you have the opportunity to write such an essay, you should think twice about discarding it in favor of something else.
2. Details provide credibility.
In our experience, one couldn’t do a much better job than this author in putting together a college admissions essay about filmmaking experiences. To be good, your essay doesn’t need to be nearly this complete or full of expert reflection and analysis. However, when writing about your experiences, details are crucial. Details are essential to the telling of an interesting story—perhaps more importantly, they help convince the reader that you’ve had real-world experiences and that you’re not inflating the importance of something for the purpose of the essay.
Too frequently, we read an essay from a student about, say, his love of travel. It turns out, though, that the essay is in actuality based upon a few trips to Europe. The student (often spurred by parents) has determined that this is his or her most “impressive” accomplishment to date. The essay is invariably dull because there’s no real evidence that the student enjoys travel or has gained measurably from his experiences abroad. It’s lacking details—descriptions of experiences or observations that would buttress the author’s claim of being passionate about traveling.
Similarly, we also read a lot of essays about charity work that are long on platitudes (“It felt good to help the less fortunate” or “The look on their faces made it all worthwhile”) and short on credible details about what the author did to help or how the experience made an impression on her. That’s because, usually, the author did little to help (served soup five times) and it didn’t really make much of an impression.
When you can write about such specifics as analog, digital, Django, film festivals, and temperamental editing software, your essay takes on an aura of authenticity that’s especially valuable. By providing these details, you prove that you’ve put time and energy into whatever it is that you’re writing about. Write about something in a way that no one else could
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