AdmissionsAdvice.com has published a blog post on college advice from actual college admissions officers. No surprises here if you’ve read our article on How to Write a Great College Essay, which emphasized setting yourself apart and letting your true personality emerge. Yale’s Director of Outreach and Recruitment put it this way:

“I’m interested in this person as a 17-year-old. The best essays are not the ones with perfect punctuation or that cool Ayn Rand quote that they think makes them sound like an intellectual, but ones that are honest and real because that’s how we get a sense of who the student is.”

He went on to talk about the importance of being consistent with the rest of the application and teacher recommendations. For example, with if a student write about the situation in Darfur:

“I would expect that that student’s teacher recommendations would talk about her concern for others, her leadership skills, or her passion for politics, and that her extracurriculars might highlight similar things. If the teachers don’t mention any of these things, and her only extracurricular is some minor club, the essay wouldn’t resonate with the rest of her application.”

He also warned against allowing your essay to get watered down through endless revisions by parents and tutors.

“Parents want to protect their children. They want to hold their hands and make sure that the child doesn’t fail…Sometimes, when I’m reading essays, I wonder who the real writers are because they don’t sound like a 17-year old wrote them.”

The lesson here? Colleges want to learn about you as a person, not as a savvy applicant. Write about what you think colleges want to read about, and you’ll be guaranteed to write a boring essay. As long as you write honestly on a topic you’re passionate about, you’ll be fine.

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1. How to Write a Great College Essay
2. A Collage of College Catastrophes: What Not to Do During the College Process
3. The Definitive Guide to Acing Your College Interview
4. Online College Resource Roundup, August 09 – Virtual College Tours, First in the Family, NextStep
5. Hide and Seek: Facebook and the College Process