Summer Essay Work: Get a Head Start

With Memorial Day behind us, summer is almost here!  While it’s important that students take time off to recharge, the summer can be a great time to get a jump on application essays - for high school, college and grad school.  Broken down into manageable steps, the process can be productive and measured, rather than overwhelming.  

Here are our suggestions on how to make this work:

Start by looking at your summer calendar - what is a realistic window to do this work?  If your student is going off to camp, let them have that time for themselves; the same is true for any significant travel.  If you’re worried about too much time passing, you can suggest that they at least bring a journal along, so they can document their experiences - which might make good subject matter for their essays. 

Next, look over the requirements - how much work actually is required?  It’s one thing to have a single 250-400 word essay; it’s another thing to have a dozen of them.  Gather the entirety of the assignments and put them in a spreadsheet; see what the overlaps are and what essays stand alone.  We recommend that your student do the easy questions first to gain momentum.  

When it comes to the actual writing process, start with a brainstorm or freewrite.  We’ve found that answering more open-ended questions like “what do you really care about, and why?” and “describe your place in the world” give students opportunities to generate thoughts without fear of answering something the wrong way.  Your student can brainstorm on their own, dictating their thoughts in a voice note or writing it down in a notepad, or they can talk it out with a friend, parent or sibling.  Brainstorming helps avoid the fear of the blank page and does the preliminary work of developing content.  We strongly advise against using ChatGPT and similar tools for the moment as we do not know how colleges will evaluate AI-influenced submissions.

We wrote an earlier post about choosing a winning essay topic - you can review it here.   

It's important to bring each essay through the writing process, from drafting to multiple rounds of edits.  We really see the difference in effectiveness between an essay that has a good central idea but is otherwise disorganized or rushed, and one that has been polished, so that the central idea can shine.  

The overall timeline will depend both on the requirements and the independence of the student: we typically see that an 8th grader needs 2-3 weeks to complete a personal statement; a twelfth grader might need 3-4 weeks, which is about the same time for a grad school applicant.  For supplemental essays, the first batch tends to take 2-4 weeks; subsequent supplementals can be done in a week to 10 days.    

You want to make sure that the essays are well-written in general, in terms of grammar and word choice.  (We do recommend using Grammarly or a similar software product.)  It does help if someone who knows the field looks at it to make sure it’s answering what colleges actually want.  You can always start with your college counselor, and we’d be happy to help.    

When do you know you’re done?  Our not-scientific answer is that we want to feel something when we read these - to get a sense that a student has genuinely shared something about themselves; something that they had to think about to realize.  When that happens, it’s a winning essay.