The essay is the main life-support system of the application. Let’s face it, most of a college application is a matter of filling in the blank spaces, listing things. Listing your accomplishments and interests, neatly listing them, sometimes even imaginatively listing them, but listing them nevertheless. Takes about a half hour at the outside. The essay is the applicant’s opportunity to breathe some life into the folder, to remind the reader that all of those numbers and letter grades and adjectives and test scores and lists of activities represent, for better or for worse, yet another and different person out there.

When I was an admissions dean and faced the task early each January of reading through some fifteen thousand or so applications, I must confess that I was not thrilled at the prospect of seeing just how many different ways in which the number of varsity letters, or the number of years in the orchestra, or the number of offices held could be expressed. Even the recommendations from teachers and counselors, which, when well done, can bring a candidate to life, frequently fall short of doing so, resorting as they almost invariably must to a rather limited set of adjectives (even the superlatives become routine) to limn the students about whom they are writing. It was the essays I looked forward to, not to give a thumbs up or thumbs down to an applicant, but rather simply to help give a particular shape or outline to the person who garnered the grades and test scores and awards and superlative adjectives I read about in the rest of the folder.

In an age of McRankings and media hype about “hot colleges,” there is unfortunately a lemming-like tendency of students with similar abilities and accomplishments to cluster their applications at an unreasonably (or so it seems to me) limited number of particular colleges and universities. The result, alas, is that the range among applicants along any one of these numerical/adjectival dimensions above is, at many colleges, often very narrow. A reader of applications at such colleges can become positively glassy-eyed after the first five hundred or so. More often than not, it is the more personal nature of the essays that breaks the monotony and engages the reader.

Keep in mind that a college application is a set of six or seven hooks, on four or five of which most candidates for admissions are going to hang their hats. The essay is only one such hook. Save for those few instances in which candidates wrote essays so completely lacking in taste as to make us marvel at the fact that they even had bothered to apply, in my experience no one was ever admitted solely on the basis of a great essay and no one was ever denied admission solely on the basis of a poor essay. (See below on “fit.”)

Also keep in mind that good essay topics or questions are often as difficult for the colleges to think up as they are for the applicants to respond to. (Not much solace there, I admit.) Unlike “test” questions, they’re not set to elicit (or even to imply) right or wrong answers. Ideally, they simply provide some fertile ground to be plowed by applicants from all sorts of backgrounds and with quite different interests and experiences, while at the same time keeping the area sufficiently fenced in so as to allow for comparability. In some instances, essay topics simply reflect the preferences of those who have to read them. My own preference, for instance, was for questions that I hoped would be fun to answer and that I also hoped would elicit answers fun to read. These are some of the reasons why essay topics not only vary enormously from college to college, but even year to year at the same college. The essay is the one part of the application that allows a student to think out loud. Indeed, when you stop to think about it, it’s the only part of the application that usually requires any thinking at all!

Since most readers of application essays (myself included) are not by any stretch of the imagination experts in that particular art form, and indeed frequently disagree among themselves over the merits of one or another essay, my first piece of advice is to write your essays, not for some imaginary admissions officer or faculty member at the other end, but for yourselves, or for a favorite avuncular relative, or roommate. Write it for anyone other than that admissions person whom you’ve come to convince yourself holds your life in his or her hands. (I read somewhere that the term “short shrift” originally referred to a brief respite for confession before execution. Don’t consider your essay “short shrift.” Relax.)

That brings me to my second piece of advice. When you write your essay, consider simply telling a story. I can think of few college application essay topics, including the weightiest, that don’t provide the student with an opportunity to tell a story. I’m convinced that storytelling comes more naturally to most of us, and also more accurately expresses our nature, than does essay writing. Ask me to tell a story, no problem. Ask me to write an essay and I break out in a sweat. But I long ago figured out that some of the best essays I’ve ever read are simply stories well told.

Besides, stories need not be long to be effective, a not inconsequential virtue, given that colleges frequently require that an essay be no longer than a single page. Don’t consider brevity a limitation. You should be able to tell a story in just one page. It has always struck me that a poem is a really short “short story.” The art of poetry is in knowing what to leave out. What is left out is often precisely what draws the reader in. That’s as true for storytellers as for poets. And what you want to do is draw in the reader of your application. Don’t hesitate to risk leaving something to the reader’s imagination. (Here I must confess that no matter what kind of writing I’m doing, I try to discipline myself to go back over it and remove the unnecessary baggage that always creeps in, an exercise delightfully taught in William Zinsser’s On Writing Well .)

My third piece of advice is to invest some time in reading some good writing before sitting down to write your own essay. I find I have to do that. I think most of us have a passive vocabulary and even ways of expressing ourselves that are far more intricate and colorful and imaginative than that we’re normally required to draw upon to get through an average day. Reading a good book or a good essay can sometimes ignite the same skills in the reader. You probably have your own favorites. Mine include people like E. B. White, Robertson Davies, Stephen Jay Gould, Russell Baker, John McPhee, Joseph Epstein, Garrison Keillor, and Red Smith, to name a few. Good writing is contagious. It can also put you in an appropriate frame of mind for embarking on your essay. Observe how they tell a story. Observe how they tell a story in order to make a point. Observe how they draw the reader in, often from the first sentence. Keep in mind also that there’s nothing wrong with imitating a good writer. That is how many writers we now consider “good” started out.

My fourth piece of advice is to be sure that your essay reflects you, and not some idealized version of yourself that you have come to imagine is precisely the kind of person an admissions office will be most favorably disposed toward. In my most plaintive moments as an admissions dean, I could be heard stalking the office corridors shouting, “Where in the hell are the Huckleberry Finns?” Such explosions normally took place after I’d made my way through a long string of applications that left me convinced we had cornered the market on saints and scholars, none of whom had ever stumbled, faltered, or failed at anything, and few of whom seemed real. To a certain extent, the entire admissions process invites that. Applicants are constantly advised to “put their best foot forward.” But I must confess that I always liked the ones who put both feet forward. Whatever number of feet you plan to put forward or to stand on, make sure that your essay “fits” your application.

An application where the various pieces don’t appear to “fit” together stands out like a sore thumb. As with admissions officers, students come in all shapes and sizes, with different personalities and ways of approaching the world. Some are gregarious, some are shy. Some are athletically inclined, and some are more sedentary. Some are more mature in some aspects of their lives than in others. The freshman class at any college in the country will be made up of students who exhibit a mix of all of these traits and many more. What throws off a reader of an application is a sharp and inexplicable contrast between a student’s essay and everything that that reader has learned about the student throughout the rest of the application. For instance, an essay that is so highly polished that even a tenured professor would be proud to submit it for publication, from an applicant whom a reader otherwise finds attractive precisely because the evidence throughout the rest of the folder depicts a diamond in the rough, naturally raises questions in the reader’s mind about whether the essay is really the work of the student. How does one square this brilliantly put essay, not only with comments from the applicant’s teachers that poor writing skills constitute his only major weakness, but also with the student’s rather modest writing skills that are all too evident throughout the rest of the application?

This is not to say that, if you need to, you should not have someone else whose judgment you value take a look at your essay in order to point out typos, grammatical errors, or even, ahem, incomprehensibility. But I can’t emphasize enough (well, maybe I can) that the style, flavor, and substance of your essay needs to be your own and to look your own and to sound like you. In a word, your essay (in fact, your entire application) should smell authentic.

I guess what I am saying here is that essays that appear contrived, either in style or substance, often stand out and can end up working against an otherwise attractive applicant. My hunch is that many students tend to underestimate their attractiveness compared with other applicants, come to imagine (erroneously) that colleges have some single, ideal admissions candidate in mind, and in the course of trying to come off as this imagined “ideal” candidate actually do themselves a disservice in the process. (With only a slight amount of exaggeration involved, the applicant I remember most quickly putting in the “admit” pile was one who wrote: “As you will notice, my test scores are quite low. They are accurate.”)

My fifth piece of advice is not to ask of your essay that it carry too heavy a load. Don’t use the essay to drop names, or to remind the reader that your parents are alumni of the college, or to rationalize a low grade or a low test score or a lost election of yearbook editor. Essays that are used to tell a college everything you think they should know about you but didn’t ask elsewhere in the application come to resemble junk sculptures. Just give the essay question or topic itself your best shot. (If there is additional information or an explanation you think is useful for the college to have in considering your application, simply add an extra sheet and attach it to your application papers.)

Also, resist the temptation to write the all-purpose essay, to which you then make small adjustments in order to use it for all of your college applications no matter how different the essay questions or topics they set before you. Such essays are painfully obvious, and more often than not engender a negative reaction. Just as applicants want to be treated as individuals by each of the colleges to which they are applying, so, too, do the colleges desire that their applications be treated individually by the applicants. At least that’s the way we feel.

My last piece of advice is to tell you to sort and sift any advice you receive (including my own) and to settle only on that which intuitively makes sense to you. As crazy and as varied as the admissions process seems when you are going through it, it’s always struck me that one of the virtues of admission to American colleges and universities is precisely the lack of a consensus among even the most selective colleges on what the “perfect” application looks like or who the most desirable applicants are. The observations I’ve made here are based upon my particular experience in reading the applications at one college and one university over a twenty-year period. They’re not offered from on high, but rather simply on the off chance that one or another of them just might ring a bell with you. Whatever, good luck.