Blog

Picture this: You’re an admissions officer at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Just this semester you’ve read nearly a hundred essays by talented students from different backgrounds. Within that one-hundred essays, how many of those students do you imagine have participated in Model UN? Eighty? Maybe. Of those one-hundred essays, how many students do you […]

1)    Don’t forget this is not only you experiencing transition issues in the first year of college. The transition period is defined by William D.Taylor as “ stepping stones to maturity and new stages of life…” which means the majority of first-year students are changing from adolescents to young adults. Technically, there are 5 STAGES […]

While my students will often hear me preach that, “there are no bad stories only bad storytellers,” I can’t deny that there are particular college essays that set students up for a cliché-ridden, snooze-inducing, stock essay.  Although I have seen plenty of exceptions to the following rules, those essays are exactly that: exceptions. How can […]

Alright! Part II! Here we go! Last month I mentioned that there are a few “types” of essays that immediately place you within a pool of students who have written on very similar topics—topics that for one reason or another are boring or cliché. Before I finish up our list of essay topics that induce […]