BEING a college student is indeed challenging. In fact, some of the homework that your instructor will tell you to do is more difficult than the ones you will encounter later on in your professional life. That’s because you will be tested to the limit of your skills while in college so that once you’re working already, you will know immediately what to do in case you’ll suddenly be given a specific task.
If you aspire to be a good writer, I’m pretty sure that you will write at your own pace once you’ll start a career in writing already. Nobody will ever pressure you to meet the deadline in writing your novel, not even the publisher except when you are legally bound by a package contract of say ten years. But college is different. In that part of your student life, you will be constantly pressured by your English instructors in honing your writing skills.
A college admissions essay is hard in the sense that it does not have a definite structure. If you are writing a college admissions essay, act as if you are a member of the Toastmasters mastering his extemporaneous speech. A college admissions essay is just like an extemporaneous speech although in written form. Just write spontaneously on what you like to write but don’t get off-topic. If you have remembered something that ought to be written in the middle of your essay while you are already writing at the end part, don’t hesitate to insert those words in the middle of the essay. We are not using typewriters these days anyway where you need to encode the whole thing from top to bottom of the page. These days, we use computers so it’s easy to insert a few words at the middle of the page.
There are a few guide questions in writing a college admissions essay. First, you need to convince your admissions evaluator why you need to go to college. Parallel to that, he or she likewise needs to know your background – whether you are a spoiled kid who is forced by the parents to get a degree; or someone in the slums who needs to get away from a hard knock life.
Once you’ve written a rough draft of your essay, pass it around to a few people. Start with your high school chum. Your childhood friend serves as your simplest critique from a peer’s point of view. If your topic is about your ambition to become a doctor and if you have a physician friend, then don’t hesitate or be shy to let him read your paper. He or she can surely improve your topic. Of course, you don’t have to insert other medical jargon in your essay. Fit it as really something that was written by a potential college student. After all, it is not called college essay because it is a professional research paper. Then lastly, you can also have your essay proofread by an English major student or even by a newspaper editor. He or she makes sure that your essay doesn’t have any English flaws and constructed very smoothly.