Coalition Application Essay Prompts

Coalition Application Essay Prompts Maybe that's your parents or your high school guidance counselor, or maybe it's a trusted friend or favorite teacher. Ask them to read it over and tell you whether the point you're trying to make is clear, and whether it rings true to who you are. At Bucknell, we give every application the attention it deserves, which means your application and your essay will be reviewed by two different admissions counselors. But while enticing and intriguing are good, bewildering and unintelligible are not. Before you paste your essay into the Common App or Coalition App, hit spell check, then read it one more time in the application window to make sure nothing was left out and there are no formatting problems. Now that you've got an essay you're happy with, it's time to see what others think. Share it with a few people who you trust and who know you well. These are not amusing at 11 PM after ten hours of essay reading. College application essays can be an effective way for you to communicate your uniqueness to admissions officials. Some students try so hard to be creative, or to entice the reader with a sense of intrigue, that they sacrifice clarity. If your reader is one paragraph in and thinking, “I don’t have a clue what this student is talking about,” you’ve moved from arousing interest to creating confusion. It’s certainly possible and often effective to begin your essay with a description that piques interest without necessarily revealing exactly what the description is about. Finally, colleges can use the essay to begin picturing how you’ll connect with and make the most of resources within their specific campus communities. The essay is valuable to you and the colleges to which you are applying. If you think of the application as pieces of a puzzle or as independent voices coming together to tell your story, the essay is part of the puzzle over which you have complete control. The essay also provides you with an opportunity to say what hasn’t been said in your application and do so in your distinct voice. Your college essay gives you the chance to talk about your best assets. While your essay should convey your best qualities, you want to avoid bragging too much. If you write about an activity or an experience, focus not on how good you are or what you have accomplished, but instead on what the experience/activity means to you. We don't want it to be an intimidating process â€" rather, we want to get to know you, and your essay is the best opportunity to show us who you are. So to help, we're offering the following tips for writing your college essay. My College Options ® is an online college planning program that connects millions of high school students with colleges and universities. Before you begin to tackle this essay prompt, there are a few points of which you should be aware. First off, don’t reiterate information that can be found in other parts of your application. Instead, use this opportunity to showcase an additional side/aspect of yourself. , the college essay is your best chance to put your individual, unique stamp on your application. Another very simple tip, but many of the less compelling essays we read each year fail to focus. Think about the special nugget of information you want the reader to know about you at the end of your essay and write with that central theme in mind. Secondly, you must recognize that schools don’t only view “big” achievements as a viable topic. You don’t need to have worked on a cure for AIDS or helped send a rocket into space to write a compelling essay. Don’t just say that volunteering in a soup kitchen allowed you to see the importance of helping others. They're real human beings who care about admitting the very best class for the University we love, and they want to get to know you. The best way to help us understand and remember who you are is to tell us a story that reveals your personality. , start mulling over how you might reply to these prompts. Jot down any ideas you want to return to later in one place, whether that's a notebook, the notes app in your phone or somewhere else you can easily find them. When you start writing, do it in a word-processing program, not the application website itself, so you can revise, spellcheck, autosave your progress and come back later.