Surviving the College Essay

My daughter Rachel, now a second year student at Emerson College, was probably the only high school student who looked forward to writing her college application essay.  After all, writing was her favorite pastime, and something she did well.  She was a reporter and a columnist for both her school paper and the local newspaper; she took Creative Writing as a class; and she wrote essays and poems on her own, including one of which won an award and was published.   The application essay would give her the chance to show off her writing ability and hopefully set her apart from the many others vying for admission.  

My husband and I pushed her to start working on it as soon as her junior year ended, so she would have all summer to edit and polish it.   “I’m not going to need that much time,” she said, full of confidence.  “It’s not going to be that hard.”  Soon after, she proudly handed us a few sheets of paper for our review.  She had written about working as a volunteer at Atria Senior Living at the same time that she was dealing with her grandmother’s memory loss.  It sounded great in theory – an essay that highlighted her volunteer work and described how her experience at Atria and interactions with my mother helped her grow as a person and become more compassionate and patient.   But in practice, it didn’t work well.  While everything she said was true, the writing felt forced and unnatural.  She wrote the type of essay she thought she should write, and that colleges would want to read, but it wasn’t the essay she wanted to write, or felt comfortable writing, and it showed. 

Disappointed but not yet terribly discouraged, she chose a different topic, writing about someone who had been a very close friend of my husband and mine for years, someone we expected to play a significant part in her life.  He was a talented writer and musician who had suffered an emotional breakdown shortly after she was born, and had disappeared from our lives, rejecting our repeated efforts to get back in contact.   She had always been curious about what happened to him, and how he might have influenced her if we had remained friends.  But her attempts to write an essay about him fell short.  While the essay wasn’t formulaic, like the first one, her thoughts were jumbled and her main point unclear.   It just didn’t work.

Now came the difficult search for a new topic.  We suggested countless ideas, all of which were discarded – “not enough to write about,” or “everybody writes about that.”  She complained about her comfortable, happy suburban life, which most days suited her fine  - “nothing really interesting or exciting has happened to me.“  There had not been many obstacles to overcome, or traumas to deal with.  That made for a very good, but boring life.   She eventually decided to take a difficult tack, not writing about something that had happened to her.  Instead, she wrote a witty, smart essay about one of her favorite celebrities, and why she wanted to be like her.   This essay really captured her personality and was true to her writing style, but we were concerned that it was too light and fluffy for her college essay.  She reluctantly agreed.

Off she went to a 3 week intensive creative writing program.  She came back invigorated by the experience and ready to tackle the essay anew.  The next one she wrote was deeply personal, and more poetic in nature.  It was well written, but I was concerned that it was too introspective for a college essay.    Rachel and her father felt that her willingness to write about herself so critically and openly would make her stand out, and would be appreciated by schools.  I wasn’t convinced.  So we sent the essay to the head of the guidance department for her opinion.  She advised against using it, saying that while it was interesting and different, it was a little too “dark.”

Now we were in early September and back at square one.  Not only was there no finished essay, there still wasn’t even a topic.  After a few more attempts at different subjects, Rachel decided to try topic number two again.  She wrote and rewrote for hours, yet each draft still needed work.  It didn’t flow well, or was too much about our friend and not enough about her.  Even after she made countless changes, it still wasn’t coming together, but it was hard to pinpoint why not.  By this time she was totally frustrated and defensive, drained by the time and energy she had put in.  We were drained as well.  The essay had become a true family affair.  While she was the one ultimately writing it, we were all intimately involved in the process.   My husband would think something worked well and I would disagree, or vice versa, leading to arguments between the two of us.   As a former editor, I was especially frustrated by my inability to coherently articulate what I thought needed to be done.   I knew, but just couldn’t seem to explain it well.  It was so tempting at times to just write part of it for her, just to get it over with and end the agony.    I didn’t, but oh, how I wanted to, for all of our sakes.

Eventually, after no blood, but a lot of sweat and a few tears, the essay was done, and we all sighed with relief when the guidance counselors gave their thumbs up. When it was finally submitted, we all relaxed for the first time in what seemed like forever, secure in the knowledge that she would never have to do another college application essay again.   Or so we thought.  At the end of her first semester of college, Rachel advised that she wanted to transfer schools.  One of my first thoughts was no, you can’t - that means another essay.  But this time Rachel did it all on her own, and she did a great job.  The earlier experience had taught her a lot – the dangers of being overconfident in your ability; how important it is to be able to step back from your own writing and look at it objectively; and that it doesn’t matter if you have written something wonderful if it doesn’t answer the question.  The college essay process left her battered and bruised, but it made a good writer into an even better one.