College essays that made a difference - Princeton Review 2010

Introduction

Why did we produce this book?

For a couple of reasons. First, we wanted to provide a little inspiration to students sweating over their application essays to highly selective colleges. Too many freaked-out high schoolers with outstanding academic and community service records, enviable SAT and ACT scores, and impressive sports achievements have complained that they don’t know what to write about or where to start. Hopefully this book will show that there are a million different ways to approach the essay and that if a student reflects on what’s most important, he or she will indeed have something to write about. Our evidence is enclosed herewith: actual essays that got living, breathing high school students—kids with crushes and acne and big feet—into the colleges of their dreams.

These students wrote about scores of things, from their love of horses to the shortcomings of being short to the importance of personal hygiene. There are sad tales full of tragedy, homesickness, and civil war, as well as funny stories involving puberty, public embarrassment, and infomercials. There are stories of achievement and of failure, of love and death, of relationships with God, and of spirituality.

Like most collections of prose featuring many diffirent authors, the pieces in this book display a range of creativity and sophistication with the written word. Some essays are so good they may intimidate you; others might make you say to yourself, “Hey, I could write something like that.” Others are so strange and unexpected you may wonder how on earth some of the most discriminating colleges in the country accepted into their freshman classes the people who wrote them. Which brings us to the second reason we produced this book: to give you a better understanding of the regularities and irregularities of selective college admissions. Along with each essay in the book, you will find the high school GPA; extracurricular activities; hometown; race; and SAT, SAT Subject Test(s), and ACT scores, where applicable, of the student who wrote it—all criteria competitive schools may consider in their admit decisions. In addition, we provide the college or university each student enrolled at and their expected or actual year of graduation. Sure, you can find average SAT scores and GPAs of last year’s freshman class in most college guides, but what you’ll find here are the profiles of individual applicants who are currently enrolled at, or have graduated from, the most selective undergraduate schools in the nation. To top it off, we’ve also included interviews with admissions officers at thirteen stellar schools to help shed a little light on what happens on the other side of the admissions fence.

How can this book help you?

We don’t comment on individual essays, applicants, or admissions results; we simply present the information to you. After considering the information for the applicants who enrolled at a given college (for most colleges in the book we profile more than one successful applicant—see this page), you’ll start to get an idea of what you need—in terms of academic competitiveness, essay quality, extracurricular activities, etc.—to gain admission to it. What’s more, we provide a list of the other schools to which each student profiled in the book applied and the ultimate results of those applications. By studying these results, you can start to gauge what your own success rate will be at the various mega-selective colleges in America. Even if you do not plan to apply to the same schools as the students included in this book, the quality of the essays and the strength of the students’ overall applications can be used to measure your own writing and credentials.

Ideally, these essays will inspire you, supply you with paradigms for narrative and organizational structures, teach you ways to express yourself you hadn’t yet considered, and help you write exactly what you wish to communicate.

This book should also help prepare you to encounter both success and failure with your college applications. You’re going to be a bit perplexed when Harvard accepts, Columbia waitlists, and Stanford rejects a student in the book. As you’ll see, even wunderkinds—we’ve profiled plenty of them—get denied admission to top-flight schools. In fact, very few of the students you will encounter in this book got into every college to which they applied. So what should this mean to you? It means that failure is a part of life, even when you’ve busted your hump working on whatever it was that ultimately failed. But even if you do get a rejection letter, there’s no reason to feel completely bereft: a few fat envelopes are probably finding their way to you.

Why’d they do it?

Why would students allow us to publish their essays, test scores, grades, and personal biographical information? They realize the value their stories have for prospective college students. After all, successfully navigating the process of selective college admissions is no small feat. Many said they were honored to have been chosen for publication and to have been given the chance to help the next generation of applicants.

Which students did we accept submissions from, and why?

We only accepted submissions from current students at, or recent graduates of, colleges and universities that received very high selectivity ratings in our flagship book, The Best 373 Colleges. Students and alumni of the following schools appear in the book:

Amherst College

Bard College

Barnard College

Brandeis University

Brown University

Bryn Mawr College

California Institute of Technology

Carleton College

Claremont McKenna College

Columbia University

The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art

Cornell University

Dartmouth College

Davidson College

Duke University

Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering

Georgetown University

Hamilton College

Harvard College

Kenyon College

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Middlebury College

New College of Florida

New York University

Northwestern University

Pomona College

Princeton University

Reed College

Rice University

Smith College

Stanford University

Swarthmore College

Tufts University

University of California—Los Angeles

University of California—San Diego

University of Notre Dame

University of Pennsylvania

Washington & Lee University

Washington University in St. Louis

Wellesley College

Wesleyan University

Whitman College

Williams College

Yale University

In limiting submissions to students who gained admission to the nation’s most selective colleges and universities, we hope to give you an idea of the highest standards you may encounter in undergraduate admissions. We received many more responses than we were able to publish and, in selecting students to profile in this book, our goal was to assemble the best-possible cross-section of top applicants—a group of students who were accepted to different schools, submitted high-quality essays on a range of themes, and had varied academic and extracurricular accomplishments. We did not aim to produce line-by-line instructions of what to do and what not to do in your application to a given school. Rather, we wished simply to show you how real students fared in the admissions jungle.