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Are you a junior? Are you feeling overwhelmed and barely holding your head above water as you balance your most intensive year of academics and extracurriculars yet? And teachers/parents/counselors are now saying you have to start thinking about college applications, but senior year seems decades away? What they’re saying is… true. Second semester of junior year is the ideal time to start thinking about—and even writing—some of your college essays. But don’t fret, I want to give you some pointers along the way: 1. It’s never too early to start Chances are, you’ve already lived the big “life events” that you’re likely to talk about in your college application essay, so why not start now? Time can be a friend of yours if you make it. If you start brainstorming ideas and even drafting your common app in the spring of junior year, you’ll have the luxury of filtering through ideas that may not be the best fit, and eventually get to the one that’ll make your application sing. Lin-Manuel Miranda once told me: “Keep writing. Don’t stop writing. … When you start writing, you’re turning on a faucet and when you turn on a faucet, the water’s brown and it’s full of whatever’s just been in there, clogged up and waiting to come out. Then you just keep writing and writing until the water’s clear and that’s when you find your own voice.” So if you start early, you’ll get the clogged up writing out of the way. 2. Don’t get so tied up with the questions Instead of obsessing over question specifics, I would recommend starting off more broadly and looking at your life more holistically. What are the aspects of your life that you feel are critical to getting to know you? Some of these aspects will be academically driven or extracurricular-related; other aspects might be life challenges, family situations, or even different sides of your personality. Think bigger-picture: name the five most important aspects of your life. What are they? And after you brainstorm specific anecdotes that relate to those aspects, free-write. Let the words flow on the page. Don’t let the editor/perfectionist in you stop yourself, even if the whole time you’re thinking, this is trash. It may not be usable, but it will help you get to the next draft that is. Everything is a building block. 3. Figure out your values I love doing this exercise with my students. What values or characteristics are important to you? If I had to name five, I would say mine are: creativity, justice, faith, optimism, and adventure. Having a hard time thinking of core values? Use the internet—there are tons of lists that compile characteristics/values that you might not have thought about before, but truly resonate with you. Because you’re starting this essay-writing process so early, you have the luxury of thinking through the big picture of who you are. Why do these values matter to you? How did they come to matter to you? What was the inception story there? These questions will hopefully lead to specific anecdotes that you can use in your essays. Plus, you’ll emerge with a truer sense of who you really are, and that’s the greatest gift of this college application process. 4. Talk to your loved ones Who in your life knows you really well? Is it a parent? A relative? A teacher? A childhood friend? Sometimes, when we’re stumped, it can be extremely helpful to ask those who know us for their perspective. It’ll help get ourselves out of our own heads. They might be able to inspire you with an anecdote they think defines you. It’s likely they’ll be able to see qualities and traits in you that you’ve never realized. Step out of your own perspective and see yourself in the third person through the eyes of people you know, love, and trust. This can be instrumental to your writing journey. The bottom line is, junior year is the perfect time to start incubating ideas for your essays. External help can be extremely valuable as well—if you are a high school junior, I’d love to meet with you and coach you through the beginning processes of brainstorming your essays. Fill out the form here for more information and I’ll get in touch with you shortly! By the time senior year peeks its head around the corner, you’ll be well-equipped to take on the process while managing a balanced, healthy life.

With schools across the United States making test scores optional, or even tossing them out entirely, the common app essay is increasingly key to making your college application pop. You might feel lost or overwhelmed, with good reason too: what life-changing anecdote should I write about that will blow admissions officers away? Which of the 7 questions should I choose? How can I present a full picture of I am in a mere 650 words? Well, fret not. Let’s get a better understanding of what the purpose of this essay is: imagine the different parts of your application as different parts of the outer circle of a spiderweb. In the center of the web is the common app essay. This essay serves to ground the rest of your application; it provides a foundation for your admissions officers to start to understand who you are. Your essay should answer the key question of why you do what you do. What makes you tick? Why are you driven to pursue the things that you do? Now, the common app essay is not a reiteration of your resume coded in pretty words and mini anecdotes. The topic does not have to be a life-altering event or inherently profound; meaning can be found in even the smallest things. So now the question is: where do I start? Start by thinking of your strengths and your values. What are your key characteristics that make you, you? This doesn’t have to be a long list—5 is a good number to aim for. If I wrote them down, would your friends and family be able to figure out that these characteristics describe you? For example: some of my strengths include storytelling, creativity, leadership, hopefulness, and an incessant calling to speak up for those who historically don’t have a voice. After you identify your characteristics, dig a little deeper on each one. Try freewriting any anecdotes—big or small—that come to mind when you think about your particular value. Where did that characteristic emerge? Did someone inspire that in you? Did you experience something that made you value that specifically? Again, remember that no story is too “small” for your common app. It’s only mundane if you present it as mundane. Open yourself to stories that are not necessarily directly related to your resume. You’ll hopefully have a collection of little stories now, and each one has the possibility to be a part of not only your common app essay, but your supplement essays as well. Now you can take a look at the common app essays and see which one of those questions might be suitable for some of your story ideas. I prefer this method of brainstorming first and looking at questions later because I don’t want students to get boxed in by the question itself! Your next step is to start writing. Word vomit. Don’t worry about word count. Make it a habit of writing a little every day, exploring your topic, discovering more about yourself. Before you know it, you’ll have a first draft of your common app essay. That’s a huge start! Word to the wise: the whole point of the college application process is to get you to reflect deeply on yourself. When I was deep in apps, I reflected a lot on where I’ve been, and more importantly, where I want to go. This whole experience, especially writing and rewriting the common app essay, gave me a chance to evaluate who I was and what I wanted to be. So, if you’re learning new things about yourself through this process, you’re definitely on the right track. I learned so much about myself through writing my common app essay.

High school seniors! As you dive into your college applications, I wanted to share with you some pitfalls to avoid before you commit time editing and re-editing your all-important Common App essay. As you’re brainstorming topics and drafting your essay, look out for these red flags: When your essay becomes more about your grandma than you. It’s totally okay to write your common app essay about someone who looms large in your life. Perhaps it’s your free-spirited aunt who inspired you to dive into visual arts; perhaps it’s your 3-year-old nephew whose inherent curiosity reflects your academic hunger to study early childhood development. However, you need to remember this: schools are not admitting that person—they’re admitting you! So if you find your essay is 90% about Grandma’s experience in the Cultural Revolution and only 10% about you, revisit how you’re telling your story. It’s your story, not hers; your common app essay should be about you and why you do the things that you do. It should answer the big Why? that explains the rest of your supplements, honors and awards, and activities sections. I would also add another mini-pitfall related to this one: if you’re part of a historically marginalized community, one pitfall to avoid is writing too generally about the experiences of your community. Your group may have faced injustices big and small, historically and in the present; while that is certainly important and impacts your story and coming-of-age, remember that specificity is key. What makes these Big Issue Topics relevant and important to you? How do your community’s experiences affect you? Beware of generalizations; focus on telling your story. When your essay starts reading like a resume. Of course we want to put our best foot forward and present the shiniest parts of ourselves to our admissions officer! However, there is an honors and awards section of the application for a reason. If you’re just using the common app essay space to reiterate your many accomplishments, your admissions officer might as well skip to the next section! Instead of name-dropping exclusive programs that you got into or competitions you won, focus on the big Why. What is behind your go-getter attitude to land competitive STEM internships, for example? Why do you spend all your free time composing on the piano, or graphic designing for small businesses, or playing chess with senior citizens? What inspired that in the first place? These questions will get you thinking about the bigger picture. Your essay will be deeper and more mature than just a list of flexes. When your essay ends with “And that’s what I learned!” Those are probably not the exact words you might find yourself using, but I encourage you to be on the lookout for any phrase that summarizes your essay. This is probably drilled into you by the many essays you had to write in high school (the conclusion paragraph restating your central arguments). Beware of that when writing your common app essay. In creative nonfiction, this urge to summarize comes across as redundant and trite; it might almost cheapen the depth of your essay because you’re breaking one of the cardinal rules of good storytelling: show, not tell. Trust your reader to emerge with their own set of takeaways about who you are. If you’re afraid that they’ll miss the main point if you don’t summarize, that’s a pretty good indication that your essay needs more revision: honing in on the central idea, showing, not telling.

Photo Credit: Soorim Lee Your common app is ready to go. Your honors and awards are meticulously listed out. Your rec letters are in. All that’s left is the “Why This College” Essay, staring you down. Suddenly you draw a blank. You’ve dreamed about attending this college since 7th grade… but now it seems like you can’t even summon a single concrete reason why you want to go. You’re at your wits’ end. Sound familiar? Fear not, Cassandra’s here with the goods. Here are some starting points of how to approach that “Why Us” essay: What’s the vibe? Do your research Every school has its own unique flavor or personality. You can discover this by digging into the general perceptions of the school (after all, stereotypes are often grounded in truth). You can talk to current students and alumni about their experiences, or research the school’s famous alums and start to get a sense of that school’s personality, the type of students they like to recruit, that they see as fits for their campus. Better yet, if you have the chance to visit the school, you can see for yourself the various quirks and personality traits that school has overall. Now that you have a general vibe, investigate how and why that came to be. What are some institutional structures that produce that environment? For example, when I researched Yale, I felt an artsy vibe. I first noticed this when many of my slightly older peers—playwrights that I had admired through seeing their works at student festivals—chose to pursue theater at Yale. Why Yale? I found out that Yale’s artsy vibe is institutionally supported by the many different types of grants the university offers to students to put on original shows or publish lit mags or record albums. Another thing I sensed was an emphasis on celebrating diversity—Yale has numerous different cultural houses that are home to a wide assortment of student-led clubs. And finally, I found Yale students to be genuinely kind, welcoming, and caring. I could tell Yale cares about the mental health of its student body from things like establishing a student wellness institution called The Good Life Center to having FroCos (First-Year Counselors) rather than RAs, who serve to guide students rather than discipline them. You can think about specific academic programs, extracurriculars, university organizations, residential living arrangements, volunteer opportunities, and even geographical location and weather. All of these areas are possibilities to bring up and strengthen your essay. Establish what exactly it is about the school you’re attracted to, and what the school does to institutionally lay that foundation. Be specific–this essay should be unique to you The next key step is to make it specific to you. Remember, your dream college knows its own programs, appeal, prestige. If your essay reads like a pamphlet that can be handed out to any prospective student, that’s not particularly effective as part of your application because admissions officers want to get to know YOU. They are evaluating whether or not you are a good fit for the campus. What is it about you and your passions that would allow you to thrive at their college? Think about your values, priorities, and your career goals. What do you hope your college experience will look like, and how do you think it will launch you into your future? Of course, you don’t need to know all the answers right now, but at the very least, you know what’s important to you right now. When I was applying, all I knew was that I wanted to be surrounded by equally passionate artists that would inspire me to create and collaborate. I highlighted the most artistic aspects of each school I applied to and how I saw myself contributing to that culture in ways that are specific and unique to me. Ultimately, your research about this school should continuously fuel your passion, which will shine through your essay. If you find your passion for this school decreasing instead of increasing as you research the opportunities available to students, it might be a sign that the school is not a fit for you—and that’s okay. Use this insight to curate your college application list and spend your time primarily applying for schools you can see yourself thriving at.

Imagine your life and your personhood as a spiderweb. At the center of this beautiful intricate web—the strongest part of the web, the part that is the most interconnected to the outside layers—is who you are. What makes you tick? What fuels you to get out of bed in the morning? What are the values you hold near and dear to your heart? That’s at the heart of the spiderweb of you. And in the world of college applications, the center and foundation of your spiderweb is the common app essay. The common app isn’t a place to tell your officer what you do or your many achievements in high school (that’s what your resume and supplements are for). It also isn’t a place to tell the officer how others see you (that’s what your teacher recs are for). Rather, it’s an opportunity for you to present what you believe lies at your core. It’s not about what you do, but about why you do it. In fact, it doesn’t even have to address what you do in any explicit way; the goal is for your reader to understand your driving forces and how those fuel the rest of your application (the many things on your extracurriculars list). So now that you have established the heart of your spiderweb, imagine the rest of you encapsulated in the outer circles of the web. All that you do is thematically connected by your common app. The rest of your spiderweb reflects the various activities that you consider important in your life. For me, there were a few different categories: volunteering (door-to-door food drives and Sunday school teaching), writing (playwriting and poetry events), and journalism. So, I made sure that for every college I applied to, I managed to hit all of these aspects of myself, no matter how many or how few supplement questions there were—I’d manage to fit it in somehow. Each college app ended up looking like a slightly different spiderweb of Cassandra, with my topics broken up in different ways based on the questions. I’d find creative ways to tackle the same topic but from different lenses so I could best adapt the same essay to different schools and their needs. In addition to the activities I did outside of school, I wanted to highlight various sides of my personality. Tenacity, compassion, creativity, and courage are all naturally displayed through my essays about my extracurriculars, but I also wanted to show that I have a sense of humor and am a very passionate fangirl. Those sides of me emerged in the way I approached some of my extracurricular-centered essays, like when I described myself as a secret spy (journalism) or wrote about couch potatoes (my first ever play). I also demonstrated those aspects of myself through less formal essay questions like Stanford’s roommate essay (I talked about my love for Marvel) and Yale’s “What course would you teach?” essay(you guessed it—a class about how the MCU reflects the post 9/11-world). Oftentimes, students get too caught up in the nitty gritty of formulating their essays in response to the question. Of course it is important to answer the question, but what’s more important is that you capture the most important parts of yourself throughout your common app primarily, and then the myriad of supplemental questions. Don’t let the question grip you so tightly that your answer is manufactured; rather, bring your passions to the page and see how you can answer the question through the lens of your passion.

Presenting... the essay that got me into every single school I applied to including all 8 Ivy League universities! This essay went viral in the spring of 2017. It reached millions from across the world as I was interviewed on platforms such as the BBC, the World Journal, NBC and ABC. I was moved by the overwhelmingly positive response to my essay—how it seemed to touch people's hearts from around the globe, from different age ranges and life experiences. Here it is below: In our house, English is not English. Not in the phonetic sense, like short a is for apple, but rather in the pronunciation—in our house, snake is snack. Words do not roll off our tongues correctly—yet I, who was pulled out of class to meet with language specialists, and my mother from Malaysia, who pronounces film as flim, understand each other perfectly. In our house, there is no difference between cast and cash, which was why at a church retreat, people made fun of me for “cashing out demons.” I did not realize the glaring difference between the two Englishes until my teacher corrected my pronunciations of hammock, ladle, and siphon. Classmates laughed because I pronounce accept as except, success as sussess. I was in the Creative Writing conservatory, and yet words failed me when I needed them most. Suddenly, understanding flower is flour wasn’t enough. I rejected the English that had never seemed broken before, a language that had raised me and taught me everything I knew. Everybody else’s parents spoke with accents smarting of Ph.D.s and university teaching positions. So why couldn’t mine? My mother spread her sunbaked hands and said, “This is where I came from,” spinning a tale with the English she had taught herself. When my mother moved from her village to a town in Malaysia, she had to learn a brand new language in middle school: English. In a time when humiliation was encouraged, my mother was defenseless against the cruel words spewing from the teacher, who criticized her paper in front of the class. When she began to cry, the class president stood up and said, “That’s enough.” “Be like that class president,” my mother said with tears in her eyes. The class president took her under her wing and patiently mended my mother’s strands of language. “She stood up for the weak and used her words to fight back.” We were both crying now. My mother asked me to teach her proper English so old white ladies at Target wouldn’t laugh at her pronunciation. It has not been easy. There is a measure of guilt when I sew her letters together. Long vowels, double consonants—I am still learning myself. Sometimes I let the brokenness slide to spare her pride but perhaps I have hurt her more to spare mine. As my mother’s vocabulary began to grow, I mended my own English. Through performing poetry in front of 3000 at my school’s Season Finale event, interviewing people from all walks of life, and writing stories for the stage, I stand against ignorance and become a voice for the homeless, the refugees, the ignored. With my words I fight against jeers pelted at an old Asian street performer on a New York subway. My mother’s eyes are reflected in underprivileged ESL children who have so many stories to tell but do not know how. I fill them with words as they take needle and thread to make a tapestry. In our house, there is beauty in the way we speak to each other. In our house, language is not broken but rather bursting with emotion. We have built a house out of words. There are friendly snakes in the cupboard and snacks in the tank. It is a crooked house. It is a little messy. But this is where we have made our home.

As deadlines and deadlines creep up on us this year, you might be thinking to yourself: my biggest challenge is college application season. And you’re not wrong nor alone in that feeling; applying to universities is indeed a massive undertaking. When you’re confronted by a question like, “What is the biggest challenge that you’ve overcome?” it’s easy to start spiraling out—what if my biggest challenge isn’t significant enough? What if I haven’t overcome any challenges? No fear, Cassandra’s here with 4 tips on how to write this challenging essay. 1. Don’t Look for “Big,” Look for Authentic Some of the best “challenge” essays I’ve read are about the smaller moments in life, like not landing a dream role in a school musical or conquering stage fright. Your topic doesn’t have to be grandiose or somber or life-altering in order for this to be a good essay. In fact, if you try to force your essay into something that it’s not, your admissions officer will be able to see through that quickly; inauthenticity is the last thing you want in your essays. Your officers know that everyone’s lives are different; what might be a huge challenge for one person might not be challenging for another, and that’s okay. What’s important here is that you choose a topic or story that you genuinely felt like was challenging to you. Forget about the scope—let’s just make it authentic to you and your voice. Specificity is key. Even if you’re choosing a “cliche” topic, for example, challenges in the sports world, you can still make this essay sing by putting in details only you could’ve written. Everybody’s point of view is unique. Describe your situation/world in a way that has your fingerprints and lens on it. 2. Show the Struggle AND the Victory Remember that you are telling a story with a beginning, middle and end. I like to think of it as a classic plot structure for a movie or a book. Take a look at this chart above . See how much of the struggle or the rising action takes up? Ideally, your essay should aim for 70% struggle, 10% turning point, and 20% celebration/lessons learned. Paint us a picture of the blood, sweat and tears you went through. Let us feel the difficulty of this challenge. You might think that these details are too insignificant but if you spend time showing and not telling us the story, we’re right there in the trenches with you. We’ll empathize with you every step of the way. A turning point in the essay is important. Often, I find that it might be an epiphany, a realization that something’s not quite working in your initial approach to overcoming a challenge. Once you write that in, this will logically and naturally propel us to the last 20%, which is showcasing the New You: what do you look like after overcoming this challenge? Have you emerged from this difficulty stronger? Braver? More equipped? Don’t tell us that, SHOW us. If you had shaky hands at the beginning before taking your first hang gliding lesson, end on an image of steady hands guiding the glider through the skies. And don’t forget to give us a taste of that sweet victory celebration too. In the same way we feel your struggle, we also want to feel your euphoria and glee at overcoming the struggle. 3. Avoid Summary The biggest mistake I see students make is including a conclusion paragraph that neatly summarizes all the lessons learned from overcoming this challenge. Why is that a mistake? It’s a waste of real estate. If you did your job correctly, that is, SHOW and not TELL us a story of your struggle, we should implicitly understand the lessons that you’ve absorbed and how you’re a better, different person now. It’s good that you wrote the summary/conclusion paragraph—now copy and paste it into a new document as a lamppost for your next draft. Make sure your essay reflects it; if you’re struggling to meet a word count, hold up every sentence to this lamppost and ask yourself, “does this help achieve what I want my readers to implicitly take away?” 4. Don’t Forget to Answer The Question Some essay questions ask for more than just telling us a time where you overcame a challenge. It might ask you to make a connection to your academics and what you hope to study in the future; it might ask you to draw a line between what you overcame and how you plan to contribute to student life on their campus. Whatever it may be, make sure you answer ALL parts of the question!