A Red Flag in Admissions

A Red Flag in Admissions September 6 Alexander may have written terrible, horrible, very bad college essays. But your son or daughter should do no such thing. Many parents and students have been writing in to us of late with something like this: My son is just about done with all of his applications. Hes been fine-tuning his Personal Statement with his English teacher and hes knocked out almost all of the supplemental essays These parents and students certainly  arent regular readers of our college admissions blog because if they were, theyd know that this elicits an eye roll from us. Just because a student strings together 650 words, that doesnt mean he has written a tremendous Personal Statement that differentiates himself from every other applicant to a highly selective college. Just because he strung together 650 words doesnt mean the essay isnt completely cliche drivel. It likely is. We imagine your son has spent a lot of time working on his Personal Statement with his English teacher (if youre not familiar already, get a sense of what we think about English teachers helping with college essays). In short, English teachers should be ignored entirely. Thats right. Dont listen to a word. Not a single word. If you think, Well that may be true of many students English teachers but my son has a terrific English teacher Weve heard it all. This applies to every English teacher. Every single one. They simply dont understand what makes a great college essay. They dont understand that you shouldnt start a sentence with however or nevertheless. They dont understand that admissions officers read hundreds upon hundreds of essays, most of which are equally bad, and they dont understand what makes one particularly memorable. If your child has already written his or her college essays and would like us to review them, to let you know precisely why he or she shouldnt be writing the things that are on paper, wed be happy to do so. And wed be happy to brainstorm new directions for your essays during a paid one-hour evaluation. If youre interested in this evaluation, click on our orange button, fill out the form, and write essay review in the Comments section. If youd like to skip the free consult in which we will only discuss our service offerings and absolutely do not offer you any specific advice about your child, include your physical mailing address so we can email you an Agreement for the one-hour evaluation. We wont be mailing you anything. We only need your physical mailing address to put at the top of an Agreement that we send you via email. During this one-hour evaluation, we will also review the Common Application, including the Activities section, and the Early Decision / Early Action strategy. But know that we will not put pen to paper. We will not help with essay revisionsthats all part of an application package youd need to sign up for. But you will come away with a clear understanding of how you just avoided a potentially major (and we do mean major!) mistake by submitting those terrible, horrible, no good, very bad college essays that Alexander didnt write but your son or daughter sure did. And, yes, even your son or daughter may have written terrible college essays. Everyone seems to think theyre the exception. 99.9% of the time, they are most certainly not.