COMMON APP ESSAY: FINDING YOUR VOICE AND AUTHENTICITY Sarah ONeill
(with Sample and Analysis)
By Sarah ONeill Coatesville, Supreme Editing
Finding Your Voice
College essays are about being authentic. College admissions officers care about WHO the students are. The essays should reveal their personalities, passions, dreams, weird talents, favorite foods, coolest playlists, inexplicable loved ones, and undeniable quirks.
As essay specialists, we are constantly reminding applicants that their essays need to be authentically YOU as possible. What you choose to write about and how you choose to write it is as individual to you as your fingerprints.
You need to hold on to the authenticity and honesty that you uncovered in your essays. Your personality must shine through! The Personal Essay is not about your accomplishments or a restatement of your recommendations and application. The prompt you choose isn’t as important because the topic is YOU.
Rules for Presenting Authenticity
Embrace your Authentic Self
Don’t try to be someone else that you “think” admissions will accept. Be sincere, playful, fun, and show earnest feelings. Trust your voice and have faith in your ability to express them. Don’t overthink, just let it flow.
Tell Your Own Story
Each student has a unique voice and story to tell. No one can tell your story for you- the essay needs to be your own and to sound like you. It only matters if what is special or meaningful about you demonstrates that you have more to offer. Your authenticity, your specific difference, must lift you above the other candidates.
Focus on Showcasing You
It is important to know your audience. The admissions committee might have hundreds of essays to read and only spend a few minutes on each. The secret is to sound like your best self. To convey this impression, the writing should feel relaxed and unpretentious. It should come from the heart and be relatable and realistic in conveying genuine emotion and excitement.
Avoid Cliches
Avoid cliches, surprise the reader and be interesting, entertaining, and memorable. Don’t be afraid to show vulnerability.
Use Specific Examples
Keep your focus narrow and then use strong examples to illustrate your points. Tell the reader how you felt and the impact.
Express Your Qualities
Students should seek to come across as humble, accessible, likable, and mature. They should demonstrate those traits that translate into college success, such as leadership, initiative, grit, creativity, and perseverance. What do these qualities suggest about a future potential?
Be Vulnerable
Don’t be afraid to open up and use genuine emotion. You don’t need to have experienced personal tragedy to have material for a memorable college essay. Acknowledging a mistake, you made and reflecting on it honestly and with maturity can display emotional depth and vulnerability.
Draw Connections
Bring your essay to the next level by connecting it to the world at large. Place your own story and insights in a larger historical, cultural, philosophical, or intellectual context. Ask the question: What is an important and authentic context for my story? Whether it is an idea that frames the entire essay or just finds its way in through telling details.
SAMPLE ESSAY: Read for the Voice and Authenticity (Common Harvard Essay)
Clear, hopeful melodies break the silence of the night.
Playing a crudely fashioned bamboo pipe, in the midst of sullen
inmates-this is how I envision my grandfather. Never giving up hope, he
played every evening to replace images of bloodshed with memories of
loved ones at home. While my grandfather described the horrors of his
experience in a forced labor camp during the Cultural Revolution, I could
only grasp at fragments to comprehend the story of his struggle.
I floundered in this gulf of cultural disparity.
As a child, visiting China each summer was a time of happiness, but it
was also a time of frustration and alienation. Running up to my grandpa, I
racked my brain to recall phrases supposedly ingrained from Saturday
morning Chinese classes. Other than my initial greeting of "Ni hao, ye ye!"
("Hello, grandpa"), however, I struggled to form coherent sentences.
Unsatisfied, I would scamper away to find his battered bamboo flute, and
this time, with my eyes, silently beg him to play.
Although I struggled to communicate clearly through Chinese, in
these moments, no words were necessary. I cherished this connection,
a relationship built upon flowing melodies rather than broken phrases. After
each impromptu concert, he carefully guided my fingers along the smooth,
worn body of the flute, clapping after I successfully played my first tentative
note. At the time, however, I was unaware that through sharing music, we
created a language of emotion, a language that spanned the gulf of cultural
differences. Through these lessons, I discovered an inherent inclination
toward music and a drive to understand this universal language of
Expression.
Years later, staring at sheets of music in front of me at the end of a
long rehearsal, I saw a jumbled mess of black dots. After playing through
"An American Elegy" several times, unable to infuse emotion into its
reverent melodies that celebrated the lives lost at Columbine, we-the All-
State Band was stopped yet again by our conductor Dr. Nicholson. He
directed us to focus solely on the climax of the piece, the Columbine Alma
Mater. He urged us to think of home, to think of hope, to think of what it
meant to be American, and to fill the measures with these memories. When
we played the song again, this time imbued with recollections of times when
hope was necessary, "An American Elegy" became more than notes on a
page; it evolved into a tapestry woven from the threads of our life stories.
The night of the concert, in the lyrical harmonies of the climax, I
envisioned my grandfather, exhausted after a long day of labor, instilling
hope in the hearts of others through his bamboo flute. He played his own
"elegy" to celebrate the lives of those who had passed. At home that night,
no words were necessary when I played the alma mater for my grandfather
through video call. As I saw him wiping tears, I smiled in relief as I realized
through music I could finally express the previously inexpressible.
Reminded of warm summer nights, the roles now reversed, I understood the
lingual barrier as a blessing in disguise, allowing us to discover our own
Language.
Music became a bridge, spanning the gulf between my grandfather
and me, and it taught me that communication could extend beyond spoken
language. Through our relationship, I learned that to understand someone is
not only to hear the words that they say, but also to empathize and feel as
they do. With this realization, I search for methods of communication not
only through spoken interaction, but also through shared experiences,
whether they might involve the creation of music, the heat of competition, or
simply laughter and joy, to cultivate stronger, more fulfilling relationships.
Through this approach, I strive to become a more empathetic friend, student,
and granddaughter as finding a common language has become, for me, a
challenge-an invitation-to discover deeper connections.
ANALYSIS FROM COLLEGE COUNSELOR/READER:
The writer of the Harvard admission essay above clearly demonstrates
three strengths: engaging language, effective flow, and a well-rounded
personal story.
First, the writer’s use of engaging and descriptive language
immediately draws the reader into her story through an attention-grabbing
introduction. Just take a look at her use of adjectives such as “sullen” and
then other words such as “horrors” which establish the tone (writer’s
attitude) towards the subject. The writer succeeded in telling an anecdotal
the memory of her grandfather with bamboo pipes (introduction to music) and
then forces readers to immediately connect with her own feelings of
“cultural disparity” based on her grandfather’s former circumstances. In this
way, the readers can visualize the tumult of her grandfather’s
experience and are introduced to the aspect of “culture” which is a
the tremendous topic for admission essays.
Second, the events of the story flow very well through the proper use of
transitional phrases and chronological timelines. Although the story begins
in the distant past when the writer was not even alive, she has
heard stories about her grandfather during the Cultural Revolution so she can visualize his experience. Then, if the reader notices, the writer
switches to her childhood through the use of a very effective transitional
phrase of “As a child.” A transitional word or phrase is a word or group of
words used to take a reader from one idea to the next. In this way, the story
will flow and the reader can easily follow the timelines presented by the
writer and the different topics threaded throughout. This student writer uses
“Years later” as well as inside paragraph transitions to keep the stories
flowing well and separated from one another. The magic of transitions is to
keep the cohesiveness of the entire piece but to also be able to introduce new
ideas smoothly. This writer does this very well. The reader is aware of the
timelines from the distant past to childhood to young adulthood to present-day
messages.
Third, the essay itself is a well-developed and well-rounded personal
story of this author and her grandfather. It begins with a distant memory of
hard times, then it evolves into the writer’s childhood and trying to
understand her grandfather which she does eventually through music (a
common language) and eventually through her own musical experience.
The most integral message, though, comes at the end in which the writer asserts
all she had learned about cultural inclusion and intimate connections
garnered through the power of music. This is one way to organize an
admission essay. You might begin with a full story, perhaps some
flashbacks, and then at the end assert a blatant message as this writer does.
Or, you could assert this message in the form of a thesis statement situated in
the introductory paragraph---the choice is yours. In this essay, the
the organization works well for well-roundedness because the final message
brings the entire story full circle so the reader can see how every detail and
every event was interconnected for a greater purpose. This is a prominent
feature of writing that universities, and in this case Harvard, seek in their
applicants: writing a well-rounded piece with a forceful message about
topics that matter such as human connections.
Great article Sarah!!!
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