Topics to avoid for admissions essays

[Anonymous]

from william and mary admission officer, how much you love your grandmother is not an appealing topic.

[Anonymous]

My DC wrote about her service trip to a poor rural community in the Caribbean. I think the key is that she focused on how she was forced to take a risk and step out of her comfort zone. It was good enough to get into several Ivies.

[Anonymous]

Hookers and blow: how I spent my summer vacation.

That has a nice ring to it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:first sexual experience.

This is fucking gold.

No, this is fucking a person. Fucking gold just sounds painful.

[Anonymous]

The real problem is that something that's profound in the individual becomes cliched in the aggregate. The admissions officers' eyes glaze over as they're trying to figure out how to differentiate the kids in the wealthy suburbs of major cities with 4.0 GPAs who edit the newspaper, were an Intel semi-finalist, did a trip with their church to the third world one summer and play an instrument. I only interview a small number each year and when I go over my notes if I couldn't write the interview up the same day I find myself asking myself "which one was she again?"

Professing religious faith is not a negative. Don't overthink what kind of music the admissions officer likes. Maybe some mission trip essays get in, but it's going to be because you wrote something that made the reader laugh or created a memorable image.

[Anonymous]

How I went to Africa on a spring break service trip, read to orphans in the morning and went to the beach in the afternoon. It was a totally life-transforming experience for me.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:first sexual experience.

This is fucking gold.

Ha! Imagine Admission meets Animal House. The admissions committee meeting would be like reading from Penthouse forum.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:No, seriously, no mission trips. Unless something funny happened and that's the topic of the essay. But they're a joke among admissions officers - pp got the sentiment right.

I got into an Ivy by writing about my favorite pop band.

OK. So my daughter went to Panama for a school trip and the trip had a homestay component (four nights) where they were living with a Panaman (?), non-English speaking family. Would it be appropriate to write about that and the communication thing?

First, since you asked (or implied you were asking), it's Panamanian. And the 'a' after the 'm' is a long a.

Second the reason that mission essays are usually frowned upon is that the majority of students write it from a completely condescending position. The English teacher has it right. The kids talk about how downtrod the poor people are, while their parents are buying them an intercontinental trip plus expenses. The kids are not used to manual labor so it makes them look spoiled and they act as if helping poor people for a few days and having a pretty trite epiphany is supposed to make them look good. What it does is makes them look spoiled and pampered that they had to take a summer vacation just before college to find out how insulated they were from the world.

If you change the perspective and make it meaningful without looking pampered, then it might sell. An essay should not make the writer look privileged and condescending towards the topic. It should be about personal growth that isn't trite and cliched. Talking instead about going on a trip, looking forward to spending time with another family and learning about another culture and learning to communicate through mutual appreciation of each other (rather than she, the privileged American, trying to Help(TM) them, the downtrodden heathen, through their hardships). Rather than learning that most people deep down aren't that different, talk about the richness of the culture that she learned from them and what values or lessons that she learned that make her a better person.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My DD wrote about a trip to an orphanage in Ethiopia and got into an Ivy. She is a non-Christian who traveled with a Christian youth group simply because they were going to the orphanage where the little girl she tutored (after having been adopted) lived. She wrote about being an atheist and how uncomfortable she was with what the youth group leaders would say to people in a third world country, how it affected her to see where her tutoring girl came from and meeting the women who'd taken care of her, etc.

I think this is different because she had a personal connection to the trip. But, in general, these essays just tell admissions that your parents are wealthy and trying to buy you an essay topic. Much better to write about the job you had over the summer working in fast food. In fact, colleges want to see that applicants have actually worked a job. That helps more.

Assuming your daughter DID get into an Ivy, then its highly doubtful that it was the essay that did it....had to be a combination of test scores; grades etc. and THEN possibly the essay. But it wasn't "just" her essay.

I'm not saying she got in based solely on her essay. Just that she wrote about a mission trip to a third world country and got in. So it's not always a rejection sentence. That's my only point here.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Hookers and blow: how I spent my summer vacation.

That has a nice ring to it.

Worked for Barry.

[Anonymous]

Too funny!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:How do you think this essay would be perceived by most colleges? I think it would be hard for admissions to read this without serious eye rolls.

http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/co-ed-don-hate-rich-article-1.1489621

That wasn't a college admissions essay. Not sure where you got that impression.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:With the admissions season nearly upon us, I thought I'd pose this question to the 'seasoned' admissions parents, or those who are familiar with this processes.

What are some essay topics to avoid? I hear that 'mission trip' essays should be avoided. Why? What are some other ones?

What are the prompts this year? The ones last year were pretty specific.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My DC wrote about her service trip to a poor rural community in the Caribbean. I think the key is that she focused on how she was forced to take a risk and step out of her comfort zone. It was good enough to get into several Ivies.

Are you my DH? My DC wrote this essay about a rural Caribbean community and got into several Ivies. DC wrote about how they had planned to do one thing, but when they arrived they found they were expected to do a totally different thing and the community had no use for the first thing. They were totally unequipped to do this other thing, with no way of equipping themselves in this remote location, and DC wrote about how they handled it and managed to be useful after all.

The difference here, I think, is that neither of our DCs wrote about how "we're all the same under the skin" or "I appreciate my immense privilege so much more after this trip." They wrote about challenges and how they faced them.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My DD wrote about a trip to an orphanage in Ethiopia and got into an Ivy. She is a non-Christian who traveled with a Christian youth group simply because they were going to the orphanage where the little girl she tutored (after having been adopted) lived. She wrote about being an atheist and how uncomfortable she was with what the youth group leaders would say to people in a third world country, how it affected her to see where her tutoring girl came from and meeting the women who'd taken care of her, etc.

I think this is different because she had a personal connection to the trip. But, in general, these essays just tell admissions that your parents are wealthy and trying to buy you an essay topic. Much better to write about the job you had over the summer working in fast food. In fact, colleges want to see that applicants have actually worked a job. That helps more.

Assuming your daughter DID get into an Ivy, then its highly doubtful that it was the essay that did it....had to be a combination of test scores; grades etc. and THEN possibly the essay. But it wasn't "just" her essay.

I'm not saying she got in based solely on her essay. Just that she wrote about a mission trip to a third world country and got in. So it's not always a rejection sentence. That's my only point here.

Or course! I'm 11:11, and all our DC's who wrote about their mission/service trips and got into Ivies also had very competitive test and GPA stats.

But as we all know from DCUM and elsewhere, even top SATs and GPAs are no longer enough to get into Ivies. You also need the passions and good essays. Bringing this back to the topic, our kids knew enough not to blow the essay part by writing about how their parents paid $4K for the mission/service trip; instead, they made the essay more about challenges.