Many of you guys know Devi Vishwakumar from the Netflix series, "Never Have I Ever." Devi is an overachiever. She's very high strung, and since she was a little kid, it was her dream to go to Princeton. So today we're gonna talk about her college admissions journey.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Season 4 of "Never Have I Ever"!
The show follows Devi and her friends through four years of high school. So this fourth season is their senior year, and of course, that means college admissions. A major plot point of season four is that Devi only applies to the Ivy League colleges. Obviously, not a good idea. And this bites her in the butt because she gets rejected from every single school and gets waitlisted by her dream school, Princeton.
But regardless of the outcome, whether it's good, or in her case, bad, I want to tell you as your friendly neighborhood college essay coach, DO NOT DO THIS. Applying only to the Ivy Leagues is a terrible, terrible idea. Even only applying to schools that are your reach schools is also a bad idea because even if you were the most awesome student at your school, even if you're number one, even if you think you're basically a shoe-in because your dad went there, even if you were 10 years old and you made it to Forbes 10 under 10 list—it doesn't matter how awesome and excellent you are because there is no guarantee that you'll get in.
Devi's school counselor says to her in the series, "You are an excellent student, but those schools have tens of thousands of applications from excellent students." At this point, it's a numbers game. Devi's counselor is correct. Luck and timing also factor into your admissions. Who's to explain why you got into one school over another? We will never truly know.
Maybe, for example, you are a dancer, and this year they had enough dancers and they were actually looking for a microbiologist to fill your spot. Or maybe your admissions officer had a terrible, terrible day while reading your application. Obviously we hope that the process is more holistic than that, but you really never know. So it's just extremely risky to apply only to your reach schools, especially if your reach schools are the Ivy Leagues, no matter how cool you are. They're called reach schools for a reason.
Okay, so back to Devi. She gets waitlisted at Princeton. She is having a meltdown. She calls up her rep at Princeton, the one that she's been in touch with, and asks, is there anything that I can do? And her rep tells her that her best shot is to fill out a supplemental essay.
Chances are very slim of getting off the wait list indeed. If you look at the numbers for these kind of schools, they're crazy small. But you still have a shot. Here is the essay that Devi ended up writing for this supplement essay. Breakdown will follow:
"A long time ago, someone told me to write my college essay about my father, but I didn't want to because it felt exploitative and wrong. However, I don't think there's a way to really know me without knowing him. I should back up and tell you that my father died my freshman year of high school. He died right in front of me at an orchestra concert.
I was 15 years old and I watched a person I loved most in the world disappear right before my eyes, but I don't wanna focus on his death. It was how he lived that really shaped me. He was a person who had unending joy and optimism about the world. Princeton was actually a dream he and I came up with together.
I think I've so fiercely held onto Princeton, so I could keep holding onto him, but if you don't accept me, I'll be okay because I can't lose him. He's always with me. But if you do happen to find a spot for me, I promise I won't take it a second of it for granted because I'd be living that dream, not just for me alone."
So spoiler alert: in the show, she ends up getting off the waitlist and into Princeton. Now, is it because of this essay? It might not just be because of this essay. As we all know, Devi is an excellent student. It could be that plus her demonstrating her continued interest in the school, her grades, her extracurriculars, etc... but certainly this essay played a part in it.
Now some schools do offer this chance to write supplemental essays or letters of interests if you are waitlisted. And it varies case by case in terms of how you're supposed to format these. I would look into that schools, what they usually require, what are they looking for, because some schools might want more achievement based, like scholarly/academic updates. Other schools might want more of like a story driven answer to the question, why are you still interested in our school? It varies case by case. I have a friend whose sister got waitlisted and she wrote her letter of interest actually expressing her desire to be with her sister at that same school. So really, it can be many different things, but today, I want to approach Devi's supplemental essay as if it was the original common app essay that she wrote.
Her Princeton rep tells her that her comp app essay was very well written, very academic, had multiple uses of the word dichotomy, but didn't show who she was. And she tells Devi, I want to know why you are who you are. And she pushes Devi to like dig a little bit deeper.
I would say this is really good advice if your essay does include the word dichotomy or plethora or juxtapose or multifaceted or myriad. Almost like immediate red flag and, and let me explain why. It's not to say that you can't use these words, but unless they're in your normal vocabulary, I would probably advise you to avoid these words because they're often overused, especially in the college essay context. It may signal to the admissions officers that you're trying to make yourself sound really smart and impress them with big words. It might also make the essay come across as more formal and not personal enough. And because of its formality, it doesn't feel alive, it doesn't feel specific to you. Your story just might not jump off the page because it doesn't have the X factor, which is you.
So Devi's rep also mentions that her essay is too academic. Now there is a space for academic language in essays, but probably not your common app essay. It's better suited for the supplement essay, maybe where a school asks you to elaborate on something you're curious in academically. They want to test your intellectual curiosity. Now, that's a place where you can get really academic, especially as you dive deeper into the jargon of whatever area you're interested in pursuing.
Your comm app is really to show who you are. Maybe you are, at your core, an extremely academic person, and you use these big words all the time, but if that's not you, I would avoid them.
So why is Devi's additional supplement essay effective?
It gets to the heart of who she is. She writes about her dad and displays honesty and vulnerability about like why she actually didn't want to write about him in the first place. This is a pretty good place to begin. You could maybe bait the reader into thinking, oh, this is another sob story essay about a family tragedy, but then actually surprise your reader with this reluctance to write this exact story. I think that's there's some element of surprise in the way you could open up this essay.
Then Devi gives us some context about how her dad died, which was right in front of her eyes at an orchestra concert. I would want her to add that this is an orchestra concert that she was performing at. I think that's a really key detail because it just underscores how much this affected her life, her playing abilities, her performance in school, her social performance at school as it does in the series. It affects everything she does.
I think her instinct to not dwell too much on this moment is correct, because at the end of the day, her dad's death is not the focus of the essay. It's actually more about how he lived that shaped her. She writes that he was a person who had unending joy and optimism about the world. So if this were her common app essay, I would ask her to write that in action. Like, I want to see him be this person full of joy and optimism. I wanna get anecdotes, personal stories that I can immerse myself in. And I can see how was he this incredibly optimistic person. For example, maybe she tells the story of how he bought the motorcycle, which, you know, played a big part in the series. Maybe she tells us about his tennis obsession and why John McEnroe is the person who is narrating Devi's life in her head. Like, that would be a fun anecdote. At the end of the day, I want her to show and not tell about her dad.
We also need to understand why she's telling us these stories about her dad. How do her dad's anecdotes and stories relate to her? How have they shaped her into the person who she is today? Basically, why do we need to hear these stories to understand Devi as a person? It's really important to not get lost in describing another person because at the end of the day, colleges are admitting you and not, in this case, her dad.
Devi explains that Princeton is a dream that they came up with together. This part obviously wouldn't belong in a common app essay. This part would belong in like a Why Us, why Princeton essay. Let's say she does talk about this in that essay. I would actually love for her to include the story of how they came up with this dream together.
On the show, there's a flashback. They show young Devi asking her father, Dad, is there a school for princesses? And he laughs and says, no, but there is a school called Princeton, and that's how they came up with the dream together. And I think that's a lovely, sweet anecdote that she can put into her essay.
However, I do wonder, and this is a genuine question, if that's a popular thing to write about. Princeton doesn't have a Why Us essay. But if there was a question like that, I wonder if writing about the misconception that Princeton is a college for princes would be popular, because that's what I genuinely thought when I was a kid.
I actually took a similar approach in an essay that I ended up not submitting for Rice University, here it is:
"As a girl who thought the carpool lane was meant only for cars with pools in the back. When I first heard of Rice University from my friend's older sister, I immediately pictured a school composed of rice fields and students analyzing rice.
As I did more and more research, I realized my vision wasn't far from the truth. Granted, while there aren't rice factories at Rice, The spirit remains the same. Collaboration, research, advance
d technology innovation to determine the best way of growing a plant and beyond telling stories, discovering a diverse America, learning a new language, studying quirks..."
And that's as far as I got. Not the greatest, but there is something here. I wonder how original or unoriginal opening that essay like that would be, especially in Rice's case and in Princeton's case and maybe in Brown's case.
So to celebrate Devi getting into Princeton I will be releasing a video where I reveal my own essays that got me into Princeton. So hit subscribe on my YouTube channel!
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