By facing the blank page...
It’s your worst nightmare: you stand before your interrogators. Fatigued strangers with jaded eyes, Kafka-esque, they sit around a table dwarfed by towering stacks of file folders, which if piled, one on top of another, would rise higher than a 30-story building.
“You have a single page in which to woo us with your all-important college essay,” says one admissions officer robotically. “Choose a subject from the list below.”
A smart kid like you? CAN'T THINK OF ANYTHING TO SAY?
Actually you can—except it's just one word, not 500; the word is, "HELP!!"
By coming to Uniquely U., you've come to the right place. Your English teacher isn’t going to be much help. He/she is trying to assist 200 other students. The ten minutes he/she will be able to parcel out to you will probably be devoted to all you’re doing wrong.
Same thing with your parents—only they’ll spend shrill hours going over your mistakes.
Your guidance counselor, or your educational consultant, if you have one, will tell you to write about what they think colleges will want you to say: “How Losing the Big Game Turned Me into a Winner”; “My 15 Minutes in a Soup Kitchen”; “My Two Weeks at Outward Bound.”
And speaking of recycled topics, there are the essays you can buy right off the Internet… Except they’re all sooooo bad!
Probably your best source of guidance for writing your college essays are some of the paperback collections of sample essays that got some kids, once upon a time, into Amherst. But the trouble with published essays is, they’re sooooo good. You could never write something like that…
Then again, why would you? You’re YOU. In fact, if there’s one thing we at Uniquely U. believe, it’s write about whatever you want! Seriously. (Or comically, for that matter.)
Hmm. Since you can write anything, what’s that going to be? Let’s use Josh’s personal statement as a roadmap you can follow, step by step, how a Uniquely U. college essay actually evolves.
