It’s spring in New England, and if you were going outside—which you probably aren’t, this year, but if you were—you’d want layers. You know, a winter coat for the 24° morning, a sweater for the school day, and a T-shirt for the way home when the sun is finally strong and you’re thinking about a Frappuccino and summer.
Your college essay needs a similar strategy. A story about how we wear coats to stay warm in cold weather is a children’s story. But a story about how even warm and necessary coats sometimes need to be shed … that’s a story with some depth.
The essay cannot convey everything about your life, and it shouldn’t try. Still, you will find your story thin if you rely on one aspect of your life. A one-dimensional story leads to a one-dimensional conclusion and doesn’t make you sound very thoughtful.
So what if, instead of writing about how important your cheerleading team was to your high-school years and how you built amazing friendships, you write about how important your cheerleading team was—and how you learned it the one time you had to break with them in an important decision? The pivot from the expected end, the stripping of the outer layer of simple message, is what will catch and interest your reader. Or, rather than writing about how amazing your summer internship was and how it cemented your commitment to a future in biomedical engineering, you write about your summer internship and your summer job at the theater camp you’ve gone to since you were 9 and how each challenged you in ways that helped you grow? The lab coat may be a favorite piece of your wardrobe, but it’s not the only piece.
If you attempt to tell a straightforward story, you’re going to find yourself bored and running out of things to say. Your rough draft should easily run you 1000-plus words. (My students average about 1300 words for a rough draft, though we’ve gone to 1800 and beyond!) More importantly, a shallow essay is going to fail in its most important mission: to show the admissions committee who you are, and that you are interesting and thoughtful.
Layering is about considering how many pieces you can bring together to make your story unique and interesting. Other people may have experienced a mission trip, and other people may have a twin, and other people may want to pursue medicine—but each layer you add makes it more specific to you. So don’t try to write three essays in one, but ask yourself in what ways the lens of your competitiveness with your twin informs the story about your medical mission. In what ways does your family’s immigrant background impact your experience on the track team? What pieces of yourself does each facet show, and how do they relate?
Let’s say you really are a child of immigrants, and let’s say that you run track. And let’s say that your parents, like many immigrant parents I have ‘met’ through their students’ writing, value hard work, but also prioritize academic success above any other pursuit. They allow you to do sports because they want you to have the full American teenage experience, but they don’t truly value it as you do. Still, you learned your work ethic from them, and that’s why when your team won the championship and your parents were truly proud, it meant so much more than a simple trophy. Do you see? By taking three stories that I have heard other coaches say, “Don’t write it, too cliche,” you can create a story that’s truly yours. (If you’re losing count there, that’s the “child of immigrants” story, the “hard work in sports” story AND the “winning the Big Game” story.)
From an English-teacher or literature perspective, we’d call this Inside Story versus Outside Story. Too many college essays are all Outside Story: I won the big game, I accomplished X. These feel shallow not because the accomplishments weren’t meaningful to you, but because you failed to convey it. What was going on INSIDE during those events? What aspect of your sports competitions is the most meaningful to you? You forget that people make the same choices for many different reasons. Some students love the sport itself, some the competition and the winning, some the teamwork and feeling of being a part of a team, and some the challenge of accomplishing something new or difficult.
In contrast, my beloved Prompt 2 (“Lessons from Failure”) essays fail when the ending (What I Learned) is all Inside Story: “I was disappointed. But after days of moping, I turned it around. I felt different.” Does that feel believable? It shouldn’t; I was literally writing it about nothing. I didn’t even have a pretend example in my head. That’s how meaningless those words are without more description of what it looked like. “I didn’t get out of bed until 2 the next day. My phone had 14 texts waiting, but I ignored them all.”
One of the best parts of this approach is how it allows you to write about more than one of the topics you were considering. You can’t decide between two different topics, and both on their own are a bit thin—but layered, you have a much stronger essay. So clean out that idea closet, lay your favorite pieces across your desk, and see what might match.
(Photo by Fikayo Aderoju on Unsplash)
