Which College Essay Topics Are Taboo?

Which College Essay Topics Are Taboo? Sign up for your free CollegeVine account and get access to our essay guides and courses. You can also get your essay peer-reviewed and improve your own writing skills by reviewing other students’ essays. When parents get involved in the nitty gritty of a college application, some families find conflict arises. If your situation is one where parents can offer opinions that are helpful and if you are the kind of student who is open to listening to suggestions, then surely parents can be good editors. Further, if you have parents who know grammar and writing conventions and can recognize flaws, go ahead and ask parents to help. For many students, finding an objective evaluator who is not a relative to help edit the essay is the best bet. Having a degree in English and being a published writer of college planning articles, and having edited hundreds of essays for students, I would be happy to help you too. It is okay for a parent to review a child’s essay; it is not okay for a parent to take over a child’s essay, tell her what words to use, what story to write, what message to send. College admissions officers tell us time and again that too many essays come to them sanitized. They want to read a genuine story written by the child in the child’s words and the child’s voice. If you’ve faced something difficult, something that affected you deeply, especially something that impacted your education in some way, colleges will want to know about it. But for students who haven’t, don’t manufacture hardship. Want help with your college essays to improve your admissions chances? The essay really gives you an opportunity to be creative. Allow yourself time and don’t throw it together right at the end. With all the competition trying to get into the good schools, your essay could make the difference. The best essays are the ones that provide real insight into who you are and how you think. You don’t need to write an essay about divorce to convince admissions officers that a divorce is difficult for a student. They have to help admissions officers get to know you better in ways that they never could have known from the rest of the application. A lot of students think that a hardship gives you some kind of automatic admissions advantage. And unfortunately, that means way, way too many essays are submitted about hardships that weren’t actually all that hard. I don’t want to sound cold here, but “When my grandmother died, it taught me to appreciate life more,” is pretty cliché in the world of college essays. Follow the five-paragraph or a modified version of that format. You will need a catchy introduction where you pull in your reader, supportive examples, and then a wonderful conclusion where you pull everything together and leave the reader with a smile, a tear, or a wow. There is no requirement to disclose your disability anywhere in the college application. In fact, usually the essay is the only way you would be able to disclose your disability. This is a personal decision for you to make on your own. It might help the admissions team to understand you holistically or explain a gap in performance. You may decide that it will not benefit you in anyway to disclose before you are accepted to the university or college. An essay is an important part of sharing who you are with a school. With increased competition for admission, the essay has become an important factor in consideration of your admissibility to a school. So if a school requires an essay it is VERY likely to be read. If a school has a writing section in their supplement to the Common Application you can rest assured that ALL of that writing is evaluated by admissions officers. Do your best and assume that it WILL be read and that it WILL have a bearing on your admission chances. You should discuss the pros and cons of disclosing your disability with your family, friends, and school counselors to decide the right decision for you. We have found that students write better college essays in less time with feedback and editing from someone who is experienced in offering guidance. When parents get too involved, the stories do not sound genuine. When a parent gets too involved, the story does not sound like an essay written by a 17-year-old student. We can tell when the student’s voice is missing; the colleges can tell too. If you were to take bets on the percentage of essays read by college admissions personnel, I’d guess that it would be in the high 90’s. Your essay should definitely provide perspective on you that augments what is found in the rest of your application….perhaps highlighting an area of passion for you that may not otherwise be obvious. The essays that read best are the ones written authentically, and from the heart. There is no definitive answer to disclosing your disability in your college essay. It is a personal decision that will depend on your own disability and how it has affected your life.