I love stories. I always have. From Make
Way for Ducklings to Blueberries for
Sal to The Trolley Car Family, I
have always been enthralled with books. I dreamt about life in colonial Boston with Johnny Tremain, and I’ve walked the moors with Jane Eyre. I
almost majored in political science because of Advise and Consent, the first of Allen Drury’s political thrillers,
and I loved the real-life drama found in biographies of Kit Carson and Catherine Graham. Stories,
both real and fictional, make people come to life and help me see them in
ways that often exceed my imagination (both good and bad).
A college application is itself a story, only it is the
story of you. Though some applications
don’t require much more than name, address, and school name, many of them offer
students a chance to connect with a reader on a different level. At their best, college applications provide insight
into who you are, what you value, what you might imagine your future to look
like. It lets you color in the blank spaces that your transcript and test
scores cannot communicate. Yet telling your story,
especially to total strangers (like an admissions rep), is difficult, because a
good story also asks you to open up, to be vulnerable.
Now, I’m not suggesting you tell colleges your deepest,
darkest secrets, but there are several ways you can convey your story in an
application.
Many colleges ask “why do you want to attend this college?”
or something similar. A well-crafted answer can illustrate how much you know
about the school, but it also allows you the opportunity to show the wide
variety of your academic interests, or it lets you connect your quirkier side
to a student group on campus. You can describe
how excited you were to sit in on a Politics of Global Immigration class during
your visit junior year, or you can discuss how you would take advantage of
their entrepreneurship program. You can
mention your immediate connection to your tour guide, or you can talk about
people watching at the popular coffee shop just off campus. Perhaps you have
already heard about the music professor that you must have before you graduate, or you can describe how overwhelmed
you were the first time you attended Lessons and Carols in the college chapel.
Tell a story about your visit, make it personal, make it authentic. One word of
caution: if you can substitute any college name in your answer, then you’re not
trying very hard, and this is not the place to tell them how good you look in
their school colors.
“Describe one of your activities” is another common
application question, and again, it is a chance to reveal something about
yourself. Yes, you take AP art, but do
colleges know that about your passion for Tromp Loy, a style of pottery that
means to fool the eye in French, and that this art form is what helped you learn
to do everything with purpose? Do they
know how your afternoons at the local recreation center have taught you more
about the value of community and shared space than any classroom lesson ever
could?
Of course, your college essay is perhaps the ultimate
opportunity to tell your story - the exact moment when you understood why you
have been called to be a nurse, the conversation that showed you why your
stubbornness wasn’t the positive attribute you thought it was, the relationship
that taught you what it really meant to be lonely or afraid. The college essay requires you to dig deep,
to look past the obvious, to take risks, to examine what happened and why. Too many students lament that nothing has
ever happened to them, but I’ve read moving essays on what it’s like to be the
last one picked for a softball team or how it felt to realize for the first
time that you did not share your parent’s political convictions. I’ve read beautiful essays on the mystical
connection between a student and a violin, the joys of backbreaking work in a
garden, and a girl’s obsession with pajamas.
These were not life-altering events, but they were moments in time that
had meaning.
We all have a story to tell, and more often than not, it is
the little things, the everyday moments, that yield the best results. That’s the
part of life we all recognize, and those are the stories that can make our
hearts laugh or cry. And at the end of a good story, we’ve learned something
about the writer and even perhaps ourselves.
So, what is your story? Whatever it is, don’t be afraid to
tell it. If it’s real, it will be good
enough.
