Guiding Your Teen to Write a Winning College Admissions Essay: A Parent’s Guide
Unlock the secrets to a successful college admissions essay with this comprehensive guide for parents. Learn how to support your teen in crafting a standout essay that captures their unique strengths and experiences.
Support your teen for a standout essay.
In this post, we’ll explore how to organize your student’s time and brain power as they face the behemoth of the often-feared college admissions essay. Make sure to refer to The North Avenue Guide to College Essays for further writing tips and exercises to help along the way.
1. Understanding the College Admission Essay
Nearly every undergraduate institution requires some form of a written statement during the application process. Typically, schools will ask for a long-form personal essay—which can be submitted to multiple schools—as well as shorter, institution-specific supplemental responses unique to each application. In addition to offering highly valuable personal insight into each applicant’s character, goals, and perspectives, these essays also serve as a metric of their writing abilities. It’s vital for students to bring their very best effort while keeping in mind that readers want to see a writer’s most authentic, personal voice possible.
By now, you may be familiar with some of the various applications your child will be using, including The Common App, The Coalition App, and Personal Insight Questions (PIQs) specific to the UC system. Personal statements have a 650- to 700-word limit for the most part, though supplemental essays and PIQs are shorter (~350 words). Today, we’ll focus primarily on The Common App personal statement, as those prompts are widely applicable for structuring any undergraduate personal statement and a great way for your student to start thinking critically about the experiences that shaped them.
The Personal Statement
Examples of prompts from The Common App include: “Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful to them that they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, please share your story,” or “Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others.”
These prompts are specific enough to provide some kind of narrative arc but broad enough to encapsulate a range of experiences. And while there is an open-ended option (prompt #7) for The Common App, it’s my belief that any successful college admission essay can fall under one of the first six prompts. Having read thousands of these submissions over the years, I can attest to the fact that responding to a particular prompt is more likely to yield the full spectrum of information that admissions readers are seeking out.
For the personal statement, it’s important to tell a story that is unique, insightful, and demonstrative of an essential aspect of your child’s character that both sets them apart in the college admissions pool and cannot be meaningfully conveyed elsewhere in their application (more on that in Section #3: Tips for Brainstorming and Finding the Right Essay Topic). Beginning to generate ideas can feel overwhelming at times, but every student has a story to tell.
2. Creating a Supportive Environment
For the vast majority of undergraduate applicants, the admissions process is the very first time they have had to convincingly and meaningfully write about themselves rather than an academic topic. It’s normal to feel intimidated! Having open communication about the writing process with parents, teachers, tutors, and peers helps students to verbalize and organize their ideas. At the end of the day, however, this statement needs to come from the applicant and not from anyone else, including ChatGPT. Admissions readers are seasoned professionals, and they know an authentic, vulnerable, human (and teenage!) voice when they see it.
With that in mind, your family should go into this process knowing that your student will have to devote ample time to brainstorming, outlining, writing, and revising throughout the application season. Every free write and draft, no matter how rough, will be valuable in developing a polished essay, and applicants typically require at least 2 to 5 hours each week, likely from August to November, to focus on their writing.
Your student should also budget time to step away from their writing sporadically, as they are more likely to become overly focused on unnecessary changes and details if they don’t give their writing time to settle. A lot of applicants can become perfectionistic throughout this process, so it’s important to remind them that an errant comma or a skipped description is not going to determine their fate.
3. Tips for Brainstorming and Finding the Right Essay Topic
Okay, now the fun part: the personal statement topic! Whether applicants begin this process with an idea of what they want to write about or they’re starting from scratch, it’s imperative to choose a story that can be told from start to finish and convey something crucial about an applicant’s unique abilities, values, goals, and perspectives. There are some obvious milestones that may immediately come to mind, but remember this is the first—and, in most cases, only—impression students have the chance to make on their readers.
For this reason, here are a few topics I discourage students from using:
Getting cut from the roster/getting injured/losing the big game. No matter how epic or monumental a sports story is, I can promise your reader has read it thousands of times already! These essays can certainly be done well, and team experiences are often pivotal moments for students, but applicants are far less likely to stand out in the crowd if they choose an exhausted topic. This also applies to theater productions, robotics competitions, etc.
Family history/autobiography. Many students are inclined to offer up ample cultural, religious, and/or historical context about their families, but 650 words is simply not enough to capture any one person’s experience—let alone a whole family’s. In writing about others, students often get lost in the narrative, ultimately neglecting the personal part of the personal statement. Writing about singular, individually transformative events or experiences is often the most effective approach.
Recognizing underserved/marginalized communities, including those who are neurodivergent. Understanding privilege is a worthwhile aspect of making the transition to college/adulthood, but like the biography option, these essays usually end up being about someone else. As an essay topic, this trope regularly becomes a cliche, often amounting to “So and so taught me more than I could ever teach them...” and it doesn’t read as all that genuine or unique.
The value of hard work is undeniable. A strong work ethic is certainly one of the criteria for admission to most colleges. However, as with many of the topics in this list, your reader has encountered this story many times before. Remember that work ethic is demonstrated in many areas throughout the application, including activity lists, résumés, transcripts, and coursework. This isn’t necessarily telling the reader something they don’t already know. Frankly, “hard work” essays are often boring and not particularly insightful.
There are additional pitfalls to be aware of when choosing an essay topic in your North Avenue Guide to College Essays (p.31-2), but these are the most common—and usually least effective—personal statement topics that I have come across in my decade of experience as an essay coach and reviewer. If your student is struggling to identify a topic, the “Mining Your Memories” and Free Writing exercises provided in your workbook (p. 18 - 26) are great catalysts for thinking about experiences that stimulated growth and development.
4. Drafting and Revising the College Essay
Our workbook states that the inherent argument of every personal statement is that “I should be accepted into your college,” but the nuance of that argument stems from how your child has evolved in ways that will benefit their future communities.
As they begin to outline and write drafts, it will be helpful for them (and their editors!) to make sure the following arc applies:
Who I was before - based on the main argument I am making, have I offered context for who I was before the moment of growth?
What changed - if I could point to one moment, event, or experience that triggered a shift in my abilities/values/worldview, what would it be?
Who I am now - now that I think/act differently, what has changed in my life? How have I demonstrated growth or new understanding? Where are other areas of my life where this lesson applies or could apply in the future? (This should be the bulk of the essay.)
Why it matters - of all the stories I could have told, why this one? What about this narrative displays a readiness for college and the future in general?
A lot of students make the mistake of getting so wrapped up in the aspects of what happened that they leave little to no room to explore how it impacted them—be mindful of this! Substance over style is key; all of the necessary elements should be present in the essay before adding elaborate description, dialogue, and exposition. Learning to “kill your darlings” is an essential aspect of any creative writing exercise, so students should be prepared to detach themselves from certain stories, metaphors, and phrases if they are not serving the purpose of the essay’s argument.
That said, readers want to see a story that means something to the person who wrote it. While input from you and other adults is beneficial for making edits, applicants should always feel empowered to submit the essay that they feel best demonstrates their personal qualities.
5. Hitting Submit
Once your teen is beginning the process of finalizing their college essay(s), it will be crucial to proofread, proofread, and then proofread again! I find that it’s incredibly helpful to read any written work aloud to check for awkwardness and repetition before submitting.
Essays that haven’t been checked for grammar and mechanical errors are a big red flag for readers, as are essays that don’t follow the prompt. Submitting a typo-free essay that’s written within the word limit and answers all questions present in the prompt demonstrates professionalism, an ability to follow directions, and an acknowledgment of your reader’s precious time and energy.
Whew! That was a lot of information, but our tutors and tailor made resources are available to you and your student throughout this journey. Ultimately, the process of writing a college admissions essay should be reflective, insightful, good for critical thinking skills, and dare I say… fun? Good luck :)
If you're interested in having an expert guide you through the ins and outs of the college admissions essay process, consider reaching out to schedule time with a college essay tutor. Our experienced tutors can provide personalized feedback, strategic advice, and the support your teen needs to craft a compelling and standout essay. Don't leave this critical aspect of the college application to chance—contact us today to set up a session and take the first step towards a successful college application journey.
Do you have any tips we didn't cover?! Send us an email at info@northaveeducation.com
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