How Do I End My College Application Essay? If the beginning is the most important part of the essay—you must grab their attention!—the ending is a close second. What impression do you want to leave with your readers? Whenever student writers hit a block, they’re tempted to search for examples or options as though on a menu: “What are good ways to end a college essay?” But you shouldn’t think of it like combing through a hat rack for the right topper to your outfit. The right way to end your essay grows organically out of what you’ve written. Still, there are several things you should consider as you get to the end.
End College Application Essay
When Does It End?
The first thing to ask yourself is when your story ends. Don’t go with a conclusion that happened years, or even months ago. If you had a really important story in your sophomore year that feels like the right one to tell, then go ahead and tell it. But whatever you do, don’t end your essay when you (the main character) are still a sophomore. This suggests to your reader that you have not continued to grow and change since then. If your topic is important enough to still be written about two years later, then there are ways that this story is still resonating in your life. Include them.
Is It Funny?
Ending with a chuckle is a nice way to leave your reader smiling and feeling good about you as they finish your essay. But being funny on demand is very difficult, and it is very easy to sound like you’re trying too hard. If your opening had a bit of humor, if your voice throughout the piece was relatively light, and if it comes out naturally, go ahead and be funny. If the rest of the piece didn’t have any similar jokes, it will likely feel out of place.
Don’t Tell Your Readers What They Can See For Themselves
Sometimes students worry that if they aren’t explicit, the reader won’t know that they learned from their experience. But readers don’t like being patronized. So don’t end your essay by pointing out things your reader has long since figured out: “My mother’s experience with cancer really made me remember the value of good health and how lucky I am to have her in my life.” Anything you can write that might follow a transition like “Needless to say” … doesn’t need to be said!
What Surprised You?
Your experiences are unlikely to be unique. I don’t say this to make you worry about your story or feel bad about your story—I tell you this to give you the freedom to stop worrying about it. It’s not going to be unique, and that’s OK. That said, you need to ask yourself, What can I say about my experience that is unique to me? What surprised you about your reactions to your first car accident? What was unexpected about the experience of your dad’s heart attack? These are the kind of conclusions that your reader would actually be curious to read. Did it feel like you might have imagined, had you not experienced it yourself?
What Has Changed?
In 1998 I read an article in the Utne Reader that I’ve never forgotten. Author William Upski Wimsatt wrote, “If you don’t change your life in some way every time you learn something, then what did you really learn?” It’s an important question to ask about anything you study … but it’s especially important when it comes to the kind of “life lessons” you’re likely writing about in your essay. So you had a major failure, and you learned humility.
That’s nice. What changed? In what ways did you change right away, and in what ways have you continued to change and grow? Or perhaps you traveled and learned for the first time about people who were very different from you, in culture or in life experience. Did you learn that you had more in common than you thought? Did you learn that you have more privilege than you realized? That’s nice … and now what? What has changed?
So How Do I End My Essay?
Start by writing the essay. Too many student writers worry about their conclusion before they start their piece. The fear is, “What if I write the essay, and it turns out there was no point to my story? What if I can’t make a clever conclusion about what I learned, because I didn’t learn anything from the experience?!” This fear is natural, super-common … and probably unfounded. A major life experience that you can write 500 or more words on (that would be your warm-up write) is not going to leave you unchanged. The process of writing the essay is going to teach you what you learned, if you let it. So let it. (Photo by Lubo Minar on Unsplash)
