The secret to writing a great college admissions essay
By age 7, I was coding. By 10, I was giving lessons for $30/hour. By 12, I published my first app on the App Store. By 14, my online gaming website was earning $60,000 annually. And by 16, I had a six-figure exit. YouTube was my personal tutor, teaching me everything from programming to filing my LLC's.
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Commenters were quick to disparage Yadegari's writing, sparking a national conversation about the purpose of the college essay and the absurdity of an exercise that asks students to 'disguise [their accomplishments] as modesty,' as Rob Henderson
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Writing on his
But because we have created a system that values doing over thinking, many students struggle with the reflective aspect of the essay, becoming so hyper-focused on touting their accomplishments that they forget to consider the things that make them fundamentally human. And that is, presumably, why the college essay has recently come under fire: We are all thinking about it — and, indeed, about the entire application process — incorrectly.
Neither a resume nor a telenovela
Mounk's position, for instance, is the same as that of many of the X commenters, decrying the college essay system as unfair and claiming that the admissions process 'encourages the whole elite stratum of society … to conceive of themselves in terms of the hardships they have supposedly suffered.' Given this thesis, it makes sense that Mounk would come to Yadegari's defense — the student wrote an essay about his accomplishments rather than about the obstacles he had to overcome. But Mounk misidentifies the point of the college essay — it has never been about writing a so-called sob story, nor should it be. In fact, I agree with Mounk's assessment of the absurdity of asking students to produce melodramatic slop. I urge my own students
never
to tell a sob story if they can help it, for such essays always backfire.
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It is unlikely that Yadegari was rejected from the most prestigious schools because he leaned into his accomplishments instead of painting himself as a victim — or failed to learn the language of the elites for that matter. Rather, Yadegari was probably rejected because, in his essay at least, his personality does not come across very favorably. At one point he even rips into the sort of institution he is attempting to appeal to:
'So you're not going, right?' VCs, founders, mentors—nearly everyone reinforced the same narrative: I didn't need college.
These are the musings of an 18-year-old who comes off as arrogant and pretentious, bragging about earnings and connections without giving colleges the least bit of an idea about
who he is —
or, at least, about the hard work he put into his achievements.
I am not sure how we arrived at the notion that a college essay needs to present either a resume of accomplishments or the outline of a bad telenovela, but neither of these is desirable. The Common App
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There are, after all, only a finite number of prestigious extracurricular activities that students can pursue at age 17 — from research with an MIT professor to an internship at KPMG — but no one student will have the same lived experience as another.
In fact, when I work with students, I don't start by launching into what makes a good college essay. I start by presenting them with the personal essay as an
art form
— I might have them read David Sedaris or George Orwell — and then zero in on the college essay once they understand how to put together a successful piece of writing. For many students, these exercises might be the first time in their lives that they interact with the concept of the personal essay, a form of writing that has fallen by the wayside in a society that increasingly devalues personal inquiry. So it is no wonder that students like Yadegari approach the essay as a resume rather than as a moment of introspection. I hope to at least move students away from thinking in terms of 'what a college is looking for' and toward tapping into their authentic stories as they demonstrate their readiness for higher-level thinking.
Some of my most talented students have taken time to reflect on the mundane — such as a student who gained admission to Cornell by writing about her pet turtle — or tap into the fantastical, such as a student who ended up at Penn after telling admissions officers about her desire to become a Disney princess. These students, of course, also boast stellar accomplishments and strong academic credentials, but what helped them secure admission was the imagination, creativity, and authenticity displayed in their essays.
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In a sea of rigged activities, grade inflation, and near-perfect SAT scores, the college essay is the only component of the college application process that cannot be gamed or bought. It's true that students can resort to AI tools or hire a college counselor to help them polish their essays, but no amount of heavy edits can bring out a student's authentic voice — and no counselor or ChatGPT model will ever be able to identify the facets of the student's experience that have led them to become the individual they are today.
In a society that continually
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