Accepted! 50 successful college admission essays - Gen Tanabe, Tanabe Kelly 2008

You can write a breathtaking essay
Parting words

In this chapter you will learn:

● Why you can write a breathtaking essay

● How fi nal admission decisions are made

You can write a breathtaking essay

After we fi nished writing our last two books, Get Into Any College and Get Free Cash For College, we thought long and hard about what our next book should be. We asked ourselves, “When we were applying to colleges, what was the most diffi cult part?” While we agreed that the interviews were nerve-wracking and fi lling out the application forms took more bottles of white-out than necessary, the biggest challenge was clearly the essay.

When we were writing our essays we agonized for weeks over what to write about and had many false starts. It was the fi rst time that we had to refl ect on the 17 years of our lives and capsulize a single memorable moment into one page of text. And it was the fi rst time that an essay would play such an important role in shaping the rest of our lives.

It became pretty clear that this should be our next book.

In writing this book we met many wonderful students and admission offi cers who shared their experiences and essays. The students we interviewed have written at least six essays. Each admission offi cer that we spoke with has read thousands, if not tens of thousands, of essays in his or her career. There was certainly no shortage of expertise.

To take a big step back and look at the process from a distance, we see that there is no single, correct way to write a successful essay. This is because the best essays are a refl ection of their writers. Just as no two people are the same, no two great essays are the same either.

There are similar qualities (i.e., originality, passion, refl ection, good writing) common to all successful essays, of course, and we have done our best to highlight these throughout the book. But when it comes time for you to write your essay, it will be an original. In some respects it will share the qualities of all of the essays featured in this book, but in many ways it will be totally different.

While we believe that sharing the 57 successful essays in this book is a vital part of learning what makes a great essay, we want to under-score the fact that these are not the only ways to write a great essay.

Incorporate the lessons that you learn from these essays.