Is Every College Essay Read? How Many Admissions Officers Read Them?

Is Every College Essay Read? How Many Admissions Officers Read Them? Nice, confident kids who've worked hard don't ask us this question. So don't let the pressure of college admissions influence you to lie on your college application. You don't need an admission to Princeton or NYU or UCLA badly enough to lie. If you've made mistakes, be mature enough to own up to them. The problem with that question isn't that the answer should be obvious. It should include a few general statements about the subject to provide a background to your essay and to attract the reader's attention. It should try to explain why you are writing the essay. Remember that the college essay has to be about you. I was taught essays should be 7 paragraphs long, not 5. My teacher said 3 central paragraphs never gives enough detail to the topic, so we should write 5. I am reminded of my thirst to travel, to explore new cultures utterly different from my familiar home in Modesto, California. I have experienced study abroad in Spain, visited my father’s hometown in China five times, and traveled to many other places such as Paris. This is a college essay that worked for University of Pennsylvania . I attended the SPK Program, a five-week enrichment program with New Jersey’s best and brightest students. I lived on a college campus with 200 students and studied a topic. We worked together to discover in the box was a siphon, similar to what is used to pump gas. We spent the next weeks building solar ovens, studying the dynamic of paper planes, diving into the content of the speed of light and space vacuums, among other things. We did this with no textbooks, flashcards, or information to memorize. This is a college essay that worked for Duke University. This is a college essay that worked for Harvard University. I reach in and let my fingers trail around the surfaces of each object. I select my first prey arbitrarily, and as I raise my hand up to eye level, I closely examine this chosen one. A miniature Flamenco dancer stares back at me from the confines of the 3-D rectangular magnet, half popping out as if willing herself to come to life. Instantly, my mind transports me back a few summers before, when I tapped my own heels to traditional music in Spain. On the first day of class, our teacher set a box on the table and poured water into the top, and nothing came out. Then, he poured more water in, and everything slowly came out. We were told to figure out what had happened with no phones or textbooks, just our brains. As a result, I have developed a restlessness inside me, a need to move on from four years in the same high school, to take advantage of diverse opportunities whenever possible, and to meet interesting people. This is a college essay that worked for Cornell University. It makes sense to me and that is how I’ve always done it. I think five paragraphs is a good number to shoot for when writing, but it isn’t a hard-fast rule you need to hit every time. Each essay is different and require more or less paragraphs depending on the information you need to provide in the writing. It's a stupid question because lying to your colleges is a stupid thing to do. And most students aren't posing the question hypothetically. They're asking because they're considering telling the lie. If there was a slight dip in your grades second semester of your junior year, colleges can now put that situation in context. You don’t need an entire essay to explain it to them.