How to Write the College Admission Essay

Writing my college admission essays would have to be a very significant moment in my compostion development. For the first time in my educational career I was challenged with a writing assignment in which I could not completely understand. College applications essays presented me with prompts such as "Who was your greatest influence in life?" or "What are your life dreams?" At a first glance, I was not sure how to properly respond to these essays. Of course I had received similar writing prompts in school, but never had my target audience been so difficult to approach.

How was I suppose express myself in an essay addressed to people that would have a lasting impact on my future? For the first time in my life, I was forced to write a paper that did not truly come from my heart.

The problem with admissions essays is that they forced me to create a reserved, censored response to the prompt. In my past writings.

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I had always written exactly what I had felt, regardless of how controversial the issue, because my target audience was always a high school English teacher and not a college admissions officer. The college admission office could never truly understand what kind of person I was unless I had opened up and expressed my true uninhibited emotions and wrote about myself without reservation. Of course I could never have written this way if I wanted to remain competitive in the admissions game. Colleges did not really want to know everything about me, but were only out to discover my good qualities.

For instance, if I submitted an essay on how my life changed when I got out of drug rehabilitation or how I my greatest influence is a high school dropout, I would reveal a weakness in my personality.

Shameful personality traits are pieces of my life that would have misguided the effectiveness of my essays. When I finally got down to writing my admissions essays, I managed to create several essays that both displayed my greatest character traits, and failed to disclose my shameful side. What confuses me is how all the admissions prompts were always geared towards topics that required me to write about my "greatest" or "inspiring" traits. If a college really wanted to know what kind person I really was, they should of asked questions such as, "What is something that you really regret?" or "What is your biggest weakness?"

However, if I had to respond to this kind of prompt, I would have put a spin on the topic in order to show that I had learned from my weaknesses and became a changed person. Which demonstrates that even in situations where I must expose disgraceful character traits, the tone and attitude of my writing can still be directed towards an optimist approach. In my academic writing, I have always taken into account who I am writing for and for what purpose. With my college admissions essays, I wrote conservatively and with the purpose of being admitted to a university.