Maranathas College Essay Workshop Coming Soon!

Maranatha’s College Essay Workshop Coming Soon! With increased competition for admission, the essay has become an important factor in consideration of your admissibility to a school. So if a school requires an essay it is VERY likely to be read. If a school has a writing section in their supplement to the Common Application you can rest assured that ALL of that writing is evaluated by admissions officers. Do your best and assume that it WILL be read and that it WILL have a bearing on your admission chances. There is no way to determine a typical scenario regarding a college’s method for reviewing applications. You might wonder how a huge school would manage reading thousands of essays, but you can trust that they hire extra staff, if necessary, to make sure the entire application gets a close look. The number of readers depends on how “borderline” the applicant is, and the number of applicants being processed. So do your best on that part of the application. Even colleges who say their essay is “optional,” you shoulod definitely write one. For many students, finding an objective evaluator who is not a relative to help edit the essay is the best bet. Having a degree in English and being a published writer of college planning articles, and having edited hundreds of essays for students, I would be happy to help you too. It is okay for a parent to review a child’s essay; it is not okay for a parent to take over a child’s essay, tell her what words to use, what story to write, what message to send. College admissions officers tell us time and again that too many essays come to them sanitized. If your situation is one where parents can offer opinions that are helpful and if you are the kind of student who is open to listening to suggestions, then surely parents can be good editors. Further, if you have parents who know grammar and writing conventions and can recognize flaws, go ahead and ask parents to help. It can make all the difference in your admission decision. Different colleges have varying review processes. At almost all selective colleges however, every college essay will be read by multiple people. The number of reads and the process for reviewing application essays vary from college to college. Among the top 250, I know my colleagues review essays because some are moved to “check” authenticity or to contact the school source to verify veracity of the context as provided by the student. It is my understanding that if essays are required by an institution, they are actually read. Sign up for your free CollegeVine account and get access to our essay guides and courses. You can also get your essay peer-reviewed and improve your own writing skills by reviewing other students’ essays. Essays give admission officers real insight into the applicant. They want to read a genuine story written by the child in the child’s words and the child’s voice. When parents get too involved, the stories do not sound genuine. When a parent gets too involved, the story does not sound like an essay written by a 17-year-old student. We can tell when the student’s voice is missing; the colleges can tell too. Want help with your college essays to improve your admissions chances? There are many different kinds of schools, however, so it would be impossible to know how each of them handles the essays which are submitted. I do know that some schools have a group of readers, each receiving one set of essays, with each individual essay being read by just one person. In all cases at least one admissions officer will look at your essay. If a school uses an admissions committee the number could jump to three or more. In any case, what YOU can control is how well your essay describes who you are and gives the admissions person a chance to see things in you that will be an asset to the school. Based on my experience, we read every essay at the institutions were I served. Typically, applications received two reads and a third if the decisions were split. If a student is on the fence, not an early admit or deny, essays will probably be read multiple times by multiple people while an applicant is being discussed. If you were to take bets on the percentage of essays read by college admissions personnel, I’d guess that it would be in the high 90’s. An essay is an important part of sharing who you are with a school.