Help is Here for Students Writing Supplemental Essays

By now, most seniors are well into the process of applying to college with all teacher recommendations in, main essay written and perfected, and supplemental essays in the works.

If you’re lagging behind and need help, email me. I can help you find a topic for your main essay, or if you’ve started to write it, I can help you edit it and move on to the supplemental essays.

It’s time to start wrapping things up.

The supplements take longer than you might imagine, so don’t wait until the last minute.

Be sure to proof your supplemental essays carefully. I’ve seen errors that would not reflect well if not corrected. Often students cut and paste one essay into another school’s application, but inadvertently leave the first school’s name in the content.

That could be a deal breaker., so let’s get started and get it done!

I’m here to help if you need a professional set of eyes on your essays, email me at winningcollegeessay@gmail.com.

12 Tips for Writing Your College Essay

Care to discuss these tips? I’ll be at the J.V. Fletcher Library , 50 Main St., Westford, on Thursday, Oct. 10 at 7 p.m. to answer your questions, help you find a topic, and show you a writing technique that works for the essay. I can be reached at winningcollegeessay@gmail.com.

Your college application essay can be the ticket to the college of your choice. The essay gives you a chance to differentiate yourself and highlight assets that don’t show up elsewhere on your college application. This is your chance to shine so give yourself the necessary time to make it the best it can be. Joyce Pellino Crane is the College Essay Confidantè. If you need help, email her at winningcollegeessay@gmail.com.

1. Focus! You’ve got a total of only 650 words for the essay. That’s the equivalent of slightly less than one single-spaced page. Cut to the chase and keep it simple. Zero in on a specific event or happenstance that illustrates you learned something, gained insight, matured, or progressed in some other way.

2. Avoid chronology. You don’t have the luxury of endless space. Too often, I’ve seen students write beautiful stories that start from some long-ago beginning. The essay grows to 1,200 words and now the writer is in trouble and the heart of the story must be cut. That’s a painful process and the essay inevitably turns into something unrecognizable to the author.

3. Mine your brain and everyone else’s. Finding a story topic that reflects something meaningful takes time and deep thought. The most effective process I’ve found for generating ideas is brainstorming. Bounce ideas off your family members and friends – look for people in your life who are deep thinkers, write for a living, or know you well. Each spring and summer I hold workshops for rising seniors for the sole purpose of getting to know them and helping them to know themselves. We sit around a conference table and share information. You’d be amazed at the stories the students have inside them without realizing it.

4. Use metaphors to depict life lessons. Show your readers what you want them to know about you instead of telling them. One student, who was planning to become a lawyer, started her second draft like this: “The girl on the bus was my best client. Whenever the driver reprimanded her, I would step up to her defense. That’s me, defender of the weak or the clueless.” Her first draft began like this: “In the second grade I decided that I was going to be the first women president of the United States. I wanted to be the President because I wanted to outlaw smoking, and I wanted to make shelters for black cats.” Do you see the difference?

5. Know your truth. This is the essence of all good essay writing. There is the external you and then there’s the internal you from which springs your emotions, beliefs, and philosophies. The most successful essays I’ve written have come from a scene or occurrence that stirred emotion inside me – an event or feeling I can’t forget. When you are compelled to write about a topic you will know you’ve found your truth. It’s the thing that makes you tick. It’s the stuff that makes your friends love you. It’s the engine that motivates you to reach further and try harder. Pay attention to your emotions and you’ll find that elusive topic.

6. Choose a topic that truly interests you. The Common Application has seven essay prompts. Look them over and decide whether you want to write a personal statement or if you’d prefer to make a persuasive argument. A personal story requires less research but more creativity. A persuasive story requires a lot of thought, research, and accuracy. Regardless of which, your story should stir passion or deep commitment in you. If it doesn’t, search for another topic because if your story doesn’t interest you, it won’t interest your readers and you will be forgotten in the pile of applicant rejects.

7. Just do it. There is no substitute for putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard). Every author will tell you that no book was ever written inside someone’s head. The process of writing helps you reach a deeper level of thinking. This is the area where your subconscious and conscious mind intersect – from where your best ideas gush. Like Dorothy and her red shoes, you have the means for going home, you just need someone to tell you how. Here’s how: write your first paragraph. Then write your second paragraph. Then your third and finally your fourth. Don’t worry about grammar, spelling or typographical mistakes. Don’t try to make it pretty. All of that can come later. For now, just get the story onto the page.

8. Use action verbs. The best writers eschew adjectives. If you do this, you’ll not only present a more vivid picture, but you’ll save space.

9. Revise! The process of revising and editing your essay will almost certainly spur insight that will improve your writing. Pay attention to grammar, syntax, and spelling.

10. Don’t force the ending. Remember when I said you want to find the intersection of your conscious and subconscious mind? That’s where your best conclusions come from, so if you don’t know how to end your story, turn off your brain for a while and let things percolate. Come back to the essay a day or two later and read it through. Sometimes the perfect ending will pop into your head and you’ll know you’ve nailed it.

11. Sculpt your essay. Now that you’ve got it in final format and you think it’s ready to submit, stop. This is when it’s time to see yourself as Michelangelo with the statue of David before you.

Chisel away. Scrutinize every sentence. Are there extra words that can be eliminated without changing the meaning of the sentence? Are you using precise language? Have you chosen the best words? Are there redundancies?

12. Envision your story as a circle. Envision your essay as a story that ends where it starts and travels around the page as it unfolds. A story with a powerful conclusion often refers back to the beginning but shows resolution and growth.

*********************************************

Joyce Pellino Crane is the College Essay Confidantè. She is the multimedia news director at Westford Community Access Television and the former editor of the Westford Eagle and Littleton Independent, two community newspapers in Massachusetts. Crane was a Boston Globe correspondent for 10 years and her commentaries have appeared on the Pulitzer Prize-winning paper’s opinion page. She is the recipient of numerous journalism awards including recognition for editorial writing.

Make Your College Essay Sparkle!

HIGH SCHOOL SENIORS:

Have you gotten your parking pass at Westford Academy, yet? If not, I might be able to help.

Come to my FREE College Essay presentation at the J.V. Fletcher Library in Westford on Thursday, Oct. 10 at 7 p.m. I may have a surprise guest or two and I can get you started with a topic and opening sentence.

Guest speaker will be Jack Wang, College financial aid strategist, Longhorn Financial.

Don’t leave your essay to the last minute. (This event is for high school seniors only.)

REGISTER HERE: https://www.collegeessayconfidante.com/…/make-your-college…/

2019 COLLEGE STUDENT FINANCIAL SURVEY

Content provided by WalletHub.

A lot of people probably assume that giving credit cards to college kids is a recipe for trouble, and many students are no doubt among them. But if you ask a diverse sample of college students about their understanding and usage of credit cards, as WalletHub did, the results may just surprise you – in a good, reassuring way.

WalletHub conducted a nationally representative survey of college students, asking about everything from how they’d grade their financial know-how to which spending categories they most want bonus credit card rewards for. You can check out the results in the following infographic.

 

Stagnating foreign-student enrollment in U.S. colleges and universities threatens key higher-education revenue stream

4th Annual Student Debt by School by State Report

Content provided by LendEDU.

For the fourth consecutive year, LendEDU is pleased to once again publish our annual Student Loan Debt by School by State Report, an in-depth analysis of student loan debt figures at nearly 1,000 four-year private and public higher education institutions across the United States.

While the figures change each year, the narrative certainly does not; student loan debt continues to be a growing issue in the U.S. and at nearly all schools in the country as the cost of college continues to rise.

Nationally, outstanding student loan debt sits at $1.52 trillion, making it the second largest form of consumer debt trailing only mortgages.

On an individual scale, the average borrower from the Class of 2018 received their diploma and left campus with $28,565 in student loan debt, up from $28,288 that was owed by the average Class of 2017 borrower.

Because of these eye-popping numbers that have now elevated the issue of student loan debt to the national scale as evident by the recent 2020 Democratic debates, LendEDU places tremendous value on the annual Student Loan Debt by School by State Report.

Through licensing data from the annual Peterson’s financial aid survey, we can keep both current and future college students up-to-date on which institutions tend to lead to high levels of student loan debt, and which bring on the opposite, but more welcomed, outcome .

Further, as Congress continues to discuss the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act that could potentially hold certain schools more accountable for egregious student debt levels, this school-specific report could be extremely valuable for lawmakers and administrators alike.

Peterson’s voluntary financial aid survey collects responses from nearly 1,000 four-year public and private institutions of higher education. The subsequent data allows us to provide the following valuable information on each of those schools for our readers:

  • Average student loan debt per borrower per college
  • Percentage of graduates with student debt per college
  • Average student loan debt per borrower per state
  • Percentage of graduates with student debt per state
  • Average private student loan debt per borrower
  • Percentage of graduates with private student debt
  • Overall average debt rank in the United States (from lowest to highest debt per borrower)
  • Overall average debt rank in each state (from lowest to highest debt per borrower)
  • Private institutions with the lowest & highest average debt
  • Public institutions with the lowest & highest debt
  • Percent change in average student debt per borrower vs. last year’s data for each school and state

The LendEDU team has worked diligently to compile this data and organize it in a user-friendly manner. If you have questions about this report, please email brown@lendedu.com.

It is our hope that by reading LendEDU’s fourth annual Student Loan Debt by School by State Report, you are inspired to have productive conversations about student loan debt and the cost of college in the U.S.

Table of Contents