The Admissions Essay is a bubble bump in what amounts to a triage system. (I had to read thousands of them - a few hundred every year for ten years - of which maybe a couple dozen were memorable.
*) You have 3 groups of students, those that get in no matter what (top of class, valedictorian, National Merit Scholar, highest SATs ever recorded - those people), those that are never going to get in unless you have buildings on campus with their family name on them (Think G.W. Bush at Yale), and those that fall somewhere in between, (low grades but high SAT, low SAT but good grades, mediocre grades and mediocre SAT scores). For that last group the essay can help give them a little boost, particularly if it can explain/mitigate some of those negatives).
So, if you are on that bubble, and need that essay, what do you write?
1. The old college joke is that an undergrad can explain the entire universe in less than five pages and a graduate student can't fully explain a blade of grass in fifty pages. With that in mind, don't try to cover something much bigger than the space you have to fill it.
2. Remember the purpose, this is an exercise designed so the college can take 'intangibles like life experience into account in the admissions process' (that's a direct quote from my old school). Most people are using these things to mitigate bad grades/bad test scores and are trying to say that even though those things are not up to par (which I'm sure at UNCCH is a very high standard) they still have skills and abilities that will allow them to do college level work at the standards that UNCCH expects and demands - that despite the tests/grades
they deserve a chance. 3. Really (and truly) no one reading these things really cares what you say. A bunch of PhDs sitting around reading these things in their 'free time' are not going to care what some 18-20 year old has to say about the world.
** They don't care about what at 17 or 18 you think your life's path is going to be - most of the people reading those things know all too well that
Mann traoch, Gott Lauch ("Man plans, God laughs"). They are not going to really care about what you have overcome. They do care how well they are written. Grammar, spelling, knowing the difference between 'there', 'their', and 'they're' are far more important than your insight, observations, or accomplishments. I really don't care if you're Mother Theresa if you can not write correctly because the basis of success at the university level has a lot more to do with writing then it does with being any sort of humanitarian. The most important thing anyone reading these essays can determine about you is how objective you are about what you are writing about. Are you realistic about what the situation was and how you handled it? How do you describe it? How do you deal with the other people in the essay? If you're looking at it and see "I" "I" "I" everywhere it's pretty much a fail. So is using contractions, considered poor form in college/formal writing, so don't even use 'they're' use 'they are'.
4. Avoid the epic voice. Don't write about finally getting your parents to buy you some boxers or shopping for panties at VS like it was Xenophon marching to the sea, because I can pretty much garuntee you that right ahead of you, or behind you in that pile is an essay from some 25 year old person who is just getting out from spending 6 years in Iraq/Afghanistan who promised his commander or best buddy - as he lay dying in his arms - that if he/she ever got out of there they would get out, go to college and make something of him or herself. Your story of the bathroom dilemma or organizing the senior prom kinda pales.
This goes double, triple, quadruple for writing about how hard your live has been. Remember, you are
writing to an audience that is pretty much, if nothing else, the best read group of people in the world. Most, if not all, are well-versed in the most horrific stuff that has ever been written. First person accounts of slavery and the Holocaust, of the grinding poverty of the Southern US, and all that other terrible stuff like war, pestilence, plague and all. It's way to easy to fall into the pitiful me writing on that edge, and it never works.
5.
Try to talk about how you use the qualities of patience, tenacity, and the ability to change your mind to help you go about solving problems and dealing with frustration in your life. 6. For the love of god, don't use humor unless your fricking Robin Williams or something. Same thing goes for anything that might be maudlin, touching, moving, or any of those deeper emotions. The reason why is that in that pile of essays are a few from people who have a real gift for writing, who want to come here to study writing, who already can write like barbed wire around the heart, and if that's not you, then don't touch those kind of topics.
7. Do not write in a passive voice, everybody - and I mean
EVERYBODY - in college hates it. This not only works for the admissions essay, but for every other paper you're going to write there. NO unquantifiable superlatives (most, all, none), no 'weasel-words'. Be strong, forceful, (without pushing) clear, and to the point. Pray over Strunk & White bell, book, and candle until you know it, and then write something like that.
That would be my professional advice. On a personal level, as someone who had to plow through these things (and note: even in awesome jobs, there are parts that just suck ass) they tend to read like what they are, which is self-centered high-school level drivel. Every so often one was rewarded with one that like the old Monty Python deal was
like a stream of bat's piss, standing out like a shaft of gold where all around is darkness. I did my best to read them to the best of my ability to critically read, I'm pretty sure all the professors who had that task assigned to them because we all knew how important it was going to be for the few that really needed it. And, from time to time we could find something special in that essay, and give that person a chance. But understand, it's also something none of us ever wanted to read. We taught college because we'd rather read college essays than HS essays. And the worst of it was the ones that were some sort of pro-forma, mechanical direction about being
on track, focused for what 'course' you want to take, study and follow.... so if its Biotechs write about that.... and about how/why your life is best suited to that. I mean really, if you already know all that, what are you going to get out of college? Tell me about why you find biotech so interesting that you would spend the rest of your life studying it, and money is
not a winning answer. Tell me about the beauty of biotech, about the morals and ethics of biotech, about how a sick relative or friend made you think about using science to improve lives. But really I'm looking more for what I said in #5. Because I know that despite how strong you know your life course is in biotech the overwhelming odds are you are going to change your major at some point. So tell me how you deal with change.
That being said, what exactly are you going to write about being trans?
P.S. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is one of the most liberal campuses in The South. Awesome school, great fine arts department, mind-blowingly beautiful campus - great choice. Good luck getting in.
* - in the two places I did this I'd get somewhere from 40-70 of the things every semester and I would read them. I would not grade them, mark them, or correct them - I'd just read them and if I liked it, if I thought there was a reason in there to give it a boost (and
if it was free of major grammatical mistakes) I'd put a post-it on that essay with the name of the writer and my initials that signified that I thought it stood out. I doubt that there were EVER more than 10% of them that did.
**- Indeed the only ones that really impressed me were done by much older students returning - or going to college for the first time - trying to explain why their life has led them to this point.
*** -
http://www.bartleby.com/141/and as long as you're praying over books, memorize this one too.
Kate L. Turabian's
A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, that book is the foundation for getting 'A's on term papers.
