Tell me a story - through your college application

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.