Writing the College Essay: How Strong Essays Come Together

Every applicant faces the same narrow space: 650 words to show an admissions committee who they are, what matters to them, and what they might bring to a college campus. Then come the supplemental essays, shorter still, asking about everything from academic interests to why a particular school is the right match. Students hear a lot of advice along the way, and not all of it agrees. More recently, questions about AI have added a new layer of uncertainty.

Our team recently hosted a webinar, How to Write the College Essay, where Senior Private Counselor Anita Doar walked families through how strong essays develop in practice, from a student’s first idea to a finished draft. We invite you to watch the replay. A few of the most useful points from that conversation are worth sharing here.

Why the Essay Carries So Much Weight

Grade inflation and rising application volumes have made it more difficult to stand out. By fall of senior year, most of a student’s profile is already fixed. The personal essay is one of the few places left where a student still has real say over how they come across.

Admissions readers move through an enormous number of essays each season. The task is to give someone a reason to remember the student who wrote it, and to advocate for them in committees.

A Few Things Worth Avoiding

Gimmicks. An essay written as a song, a recipe, or a courtroom transcript is hard to pull off and often reads as forced.
Well-worn topics. A championship game, a short mission trip, an Outward Bound trip. These matter to the student who lived them, but admissions readers have seen so many versions of these stories that it’s nearly impossible to stand out.
The full life story. Fitting an entire history into 650 words usually means nothing gets the depth it deserves.
A rehash of the resume. The activities list already covers what a student has done, so the essay does not need to repeat it.
Pressure to “be yourself.” This advice is always well meaning, but it rarely gives a student anything concrete to write toward.

What Admissions Readers Are Actually Looking For

Anita frames the personal essay as a space to show the impact a student will make on a college campus. Since colleges are academic institutions first, one effective approach is to build the essay around an academic interest a student has spent real time developing, whether that is a research project or an idea from a course that stuck with them. A transcript can show academic strength, but it cannot show intellectual vitality, that love of learning admissions readers are looking for.

Students without an obvious academic angle still have plenty to draw from. A cause they have volunteered for, a club they have led, or a meaningful part of their background can do the same work: give admissions readers a specific, believable sense of who this student will be on campus.

Many students feel like they have nothing remarkable to write about, and that is fine. A familiar topic approached from an unexpected angle, connecting a love of baseball to a philosophy reading, say, or a summer job in retail to a concept in business, can show just as much intellectual depth as a more obviously impressive accomplishment.

What Tends to Make an Essay Work

A hook that feels earned. The best opening lines aren’t gimmicks. They pull a reader in by directly and specifically naming what the essay is actually about.
Showing rather than telling. Specific, sensory detail lets a reader picture a scene and engages their imagination.
A narrow slice of life. The strongest essays focus on one slice of a student’s life, not the whole of it. Admissions readers want to know who a student is today, not who they were as a child.
A change in perspective. By the end of the essay, a reader should see that the student learned something or came to see a situation differently.
Knowledge into action. The strongest essays show what a student did with that new perspective, whether that meant starting something new, volunteering, or passing what they learned on to others.

Supplemental Essays and a Shared Theme This Year

Supplemental essays tend to reflect a school’s values and priorities. One theme that shows up across many selective schools this cycle is bridge building. Johns Hopkins asks what students have learned about working across differences. NYU wants bridge builders who connect people, groups, and ideas. USC asks whether a disagreement led to common ground. Schools seem less interested in what a student believes than in how they engage with people who see things differently.

Many supplemental prompts overlap in theme across schools, so rather than starting over for each one, it often works well to identify those shared threads early and adapt a strong core essay to each specific prompt.

Some schools are moving away from supplements altogether, including UNC, UVA, Georgia, Miami, and Tulane this year. Fewer required essays can mean less work up front, but it also tends to bring in more applicants and push admit rates lower, making the essays that remain matter even more.

On the Use of AI

AI can be genuinely useful for brainstorming, much the way a student might use an online search: tracking down a quote, explaining an unfamiliar concept, organizing scattered ideas into something workable.

The trouble starts when AI does the actual writing. Admissions readers spend their careers reading high school writing, and prose that is unusually polished or generic tends to stand out for the wrong reasons. AI works best in service of a student’s own thinking, not as a substitute for their own words.

Anita’s TTA Top Tip

Before worrying about polish, start with a simpler question: what is the one thing you want a reader to understand about you by the end of this essay, and what from your own life actually proves it? A clear answer matters more than a clever first line.

Looking for More Individualized Support?

Our Essay Guidance program pairs students with a dedicated counselor for one-on-one coaching through the entire essay-writing process — from brainstorming and finding the right angle to detailed feedback on every draft. We believe in mentorship, not ghostwriting: our role is to coach, question, challenge, and support students as they write essays they’re genuinely proud of. In a noisy, AI-enabled world, voice is everything, and we help students find and sharpen theirs.