Personal essays are the only piece of your college application completely under your control. You can show who you are not only as a student but as a person. Your essays demonstrate your values and your character beyond impersonal pieces of paper listing your grades and test scores.
Your personal essay ranks as one of the Top 5 elements for admissions officers. In fact, essays outranked teacher recommendations, extracurricular activities, class ranking and even admission test scores, such as the SAT and ACT. More than 56% of admissions officers said they considered application essays to be “important” or “considerably important.”
Your personal essay takes on even greater value and impact when you consider that admissions officers rank “positive character attributes” as No. 4 in the Top 10 most important admissions factors. They rank “student’s interest in attending” as No. 6.
- High school grades in college prep courses
- Total high school grades (all courses)
- Strength of high school curriculum
- Positive character attributes
- Essay or writing sample
- Student’s interest in attending
- Counselor recommendation
- Teacher recommendation
- Extracurricular activities
- High school class rank
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What reveals your character? Your essay — if you do it the right way. How do you show an admissions officers that you’re serious about wanting to attend the college? Also through your essay. In fact, many schools request or even require you to write a supplemental essay — called the “why us?” essay — to explain why you’re choosing that particular college or university.
Besides being three of the top factors in admissions decisions, those three elements have two important more things in common: they are the three primary factors that show colleges your “positive character attributes” — and they are the three factors that are most under your control when you write your college essays.
