10 Tips For Writing A Great College Admission Essay

10 Tips For Writing A Great College Admission Essay Rice requires applicants to submit three short responses and an extended essay in addition to their Common App materials. Students applying to the School of Architecture will respond to two additional prompts in place of the extended essay. The Rice/Baylor Medical Scholars program requires a second application with three additional short essays. Improve your essay and impress admissions officers with our free Peer Essay Review. As I got to know him better through our frequent email exchanges, I soon discovered that he had a great sense of humor, in addition to genuine sensitivity. Remember that the admissions officers are more interested in your perspective of what happened than the events themselves. In our experience, the main worry that applicants have is that their essay won’t stand out. This is a legitimate concern as you will likely compete with numerous applicants who have backgrounds similar to yours. Therefore, follow these tips to ensure that your essay shines in the competitive admissions process. And how long your application to the school should take? Here’s what every student considering Rice University needs to know. If you are writing about a sensitive subject matter, do not include unnecessarily graphic or macabre details as they may isolate your reader. Remember that the ultimate focus of this prompt is your perseverance, not a detailed account of your suffering. Rice’s Residential College System randomly places students in one of eleven colleges and the majority of students live in their college for all four years. Rice considers diversity of perspective and experience fundamental to the Residential College System, so your response should demonstrate how you would contribute to this system and the broader Rice community. When selecting anecdotes for your essay, pick vivid ones that you can tell succinctly. If a story would require 450 words of a 600 word essay, then you’re not going to have a lot of space to express self-reflection and analysis of the situation. Writing concisely expresses to the admissions officers that can organize your thoughts and that you respect their time. Advanced vocabulary should be the spice of the essay to give it flavor, so you’ll use plain language most of the time. Essays that are riddled with advanced vocabulary can seem pompous or even inadvertently comical to the reader. Your essay does not depend on having an intensely adverse experience, as not everyone will have had one. You don’t have to write about tragedy, like death, divorce, parent job loss, or abuse. When we began discussing ideas for essays, I encouraged him to choose a seemingly mundane event from his everyday life and develop it using his unique humor. As you'll see here (with Mike's permission), he followed my suggestion with smashing success. This year's seven prompts offer a wide variety of approaches for you to display your writing skills. Each one has potential -- either obvious or hidden -- for you to make a meaningful impression on your admission readers. Can you substitute an advanced vocabulary word for a phrase? other ways to research a college for this type of essay, so you can write the strongest response possible. Want to learn what Rice University will actually cost you based on your income? This story originally appeared on the USA TODAY College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. While the data collected from students admitted to Harvard and Stanford is the most specific, AdmitSee also collected interesting information on other Ivy League schools. This prompt uses adversity as a means to see your personal growth and development. Choose a topic that will allow you to illustrate that. Carefully choose the details you provide about your adverse experience. Avoid discussing taboo topics such as personal drug or alcohol use.