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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.
Lesson to take away from this essay:
If honest and not manipulated, emotional prose can have a powerful effect on an application.
To us, this essay is stunning: while poetic and evocative, it also resonates with the innocent longing of a teenaged girl. We won’t describe why we found the images, metaphors, and succinctly expressed thoughts of this author so powerful, but we urge you to read through the essay again. What does it make you feel? Can you sympathize with this girl’s plight? If you were an admissions committee member, how would this essay interact with the test scores and grades you already had for this applicant?
One of the primary goals of your essay is to humanize you for the admissions committee. The essay isn’t just for evaluating how well you can write; rather, it’s your opportunity to show the committee who you are, what’s important to you, and what makes you tick. If you can help the reader to empathize with an emotion you feel deeply—here, a desire to thrive in an environment where the author feels like an outsider—then you can move the reader into knowing you as a person, rather than a set of numbers and data on a page.
In the best of worlds, you can encourage the reader to actually get behind you and take up your cause (in the case of an admissions officer, to recommend you to the rest of the committee). Just like the underdog at the end of a good movie, the author of the above essay likely has most readers rooting for her to succeed—to finally grasp, through admission to a prestigious college and perhaps financial aid, the elusive American Dream.
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