The following is an excerpt from the Essays chapter of our Best Book.
Approach to the writing process
The first thing I did when I was working on my essays was: I wrote and rewrote and rewrote.
It really started with establishing the whole concept of what I wanted to portray. Doing Stanford’s application first helped me go through that process.
Stanford asked three very specific questions. I decided, “OK. What do I want to portray about myself with each of my essays?”
I want to make sure that they know I love working with kids. I really love kids and I wanted my essay to reflect that. This is something that’s a very big passion of mine, building off of my main essay.
One of my big interests with regards to working with children is education policy and the achievement gap in education. So I wanted to make sure that those intellectual interests were very apparent in the essay.
I also wanted to make sure that the admissions people knew, in addition to being passionate and driven, that I had the ability to inspire and lead people.
Third, I wanted to show them that I’m intellectual. That was very important to my own vision of myself: being genuinely intellectual and curious about new ideas. No matter what I wrote, I checked it against whether it showed those three qualities.
How I chose the experiences
I wrote down a list of significant experiences I had in my life. Once I started to lay down the things that I was doing my entire time in high school, I managed to develop a picture of who I was, and how other people saw me. I was trying to find my strengths, and they appeared when I looked at a list of what I had done.
I had very tangible stories regarding each of my strengths. Often if you follow where the stories are, where the actual actions are, that’s where you can find the big ideas and inspiration behind essay topics.
You need to build your brand. That’s a pretty advanced method that most high school students don’t think about. No one is just a “type”, but it helps to have a clear story that you’re talking about “Tyler” through all of your materials. You have unique experiences and attributes, make sure your essay reflects those.
