Reply to Admissions office take on application essays

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[quote=Anonymous]This letter was published in the NYT by a Smith College VP of Enrollment.   Apparently it is in response to a letter from a student who thought he needed to write about adversity/trauma in order to get into college.   I like her advice and hope that people take it to heart.  Both my kids wrote their essays on how a piece of literature/media and their engagement with it led to a better understanding of their own lives. They both were accepted everywhere they applied (although careful targeting of schools made a bigger difference in that statistic. ) Thought I'd share this for all those juniors getting ready to plan their essays.

To the Editor:

Re “I Didn’t Want to ‘Sell My Pain’” (Opinion guest essay, May 10):

I appreciated Elijah Megginson’s article, and I agree wholeheartedly that we do a disservice to college applicants when we signal that overcoming adversity is the only way to distinguish oneself in the college admission process.

Resilience is an important characteristic for future college students. But even more important factors for colleges to consider are how applicants approach learning, what they see as the purpose of their education, how they investigate their intellectual interests, and how they react when their assumptions are challenged.

Too many students worry that if they have not faced major adversity in their young lives, they don’t have a college essay topic. Is this really the message we want to send to our future scholars and leaders?

I’m coming to the end of a nearly 40-year career in college admission, the last 21 years at Smith College, a nationally selective women’s college that is known for a socioeconomically diverse student body. I have read thousands of essays. Those that I remember best are not the essays that reflect the greatest hardship or the most pain, but those that show the ability to make meaning from everyday situations, demonstrate a sense of humor, reflect a commitment to the community and, most of all, demonstrate the joy the student finds in learning.

Audrey Smith
Northampton, Mass.[/quote]

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