Matias and Carmen - Siblings and Growth Wise Tutors - Reflect on What Makes a GREAT College Essay
This past week we interviewed Matias and Carmen Benitez, siblings from New York City who both tutor college essays for Growth Wise. Matias is a sophomore at Stanford and Carmen graduated from Harvey Mudd last Spring.
We’ll be featuring the best clips from the interview on our Instagram page (@growth_wise), meanwhile, here are key best insights from our discussion on writing the college essay.
Most Students Fear They Don’t Have Any Stories to Tell - Yes, You Do
Many kids feel that Covid lockdowns robbed them of the experiences they needed to have in order to write meaningful college essays. Or they imagine other kids having amazing stories or experiencing overwhelming traumas; they fear their own lives just won’t measure up. The good news is: you don’t have to. It’s not a measuring contest of each kid’s life experiences.
It’s the courage to be authentic, combined with mature self-awareness and self-reflection, that makes great essays. Just be you.
Matias’ go-to tool for finding meaningful stories to write about in your applications is to keep a journal. A 10th grade English assignment to journal each night before bed created a habit that he keeps up with to this day, and when he had to write his college essays, having his journals to look back on was extremely helpful for generating essay ideas.
Carmen, meanwhile, assigns her students to journal for 15 minutes each night from the first day they meet with her, all the way until the day they submit their applications.
When we look back through journals, we’re often surprised how relevant certain themes were in our lives and how ripe those themes are for college essays.
Start Early - A Personal Statement Can Take 10-20 Drafts, And Each Draft Needs Time to Breathe before You Edit It
One of the biggest weaknesses we all saw in students’ essays was that they were handing in, say, draft number six on an essay that needed twelve drafts.
“You need to write the essay over time,” Carmen said. “Like if you write 20 drafts in one week, you're probably not doing these great changes. You need time away from it. You want to almost forget about the essay for a week or two to come back and look at it with fresh eyes and be honest: "do I actually need that paragraph?"
Matias added, “when it comes to writing college essays, it’s the ability to just sit down and keep re-writing your work. In July and August before my senior year, I was already starting to think about the essay, and even had a first draft. But it wasn’t until October that I really changed my essay. You get to a point where you’re so bored with the piece, when you do not want to read it again - and that’s the mindset college application readers probably have. They feel like they cannot read another essay. And it’s in THAT moment that you have to read your piece out loud, and ask: "are these words what I truly want to say? Are they actually compelling to read?"
Authenticity Pays off in Multiple Ways
We noticed how the essays where we trying to be someone - instead of trying to find our own authentic voice - landed flat and awkwardly to the reader, lacked the uniqueness of our own voice that we wanted admissions committees to notice and be drawn to, and were entirely unmemorable.
By contrast, in the essays where we truly poured our authentic truth onto the page, we looked back on them fondly and remembered them even to this day.
In a similar vein, Carmen and Matias warned high school seniors that every person you show your essay to will, whether they mean to or not, put their own voice onto your essay - so be careful whom you invite into the writing and editing process, and make sure to keep the words in your own voice.
As Carmen put it, “you want to be able to show your essay, and let’s say three others, to a friend, and have them instantly know which one is yours purely by the sound of your voice in the essay.”
