Essay Masterclass / Module One
You are writing for somebody at a desk with a screen, and you should know what is on that screen.
Your application is not a document to them. It is a set of tabs. One for the Common Application, one for transcripts, one for recommendations, one for the essays. The page they land on first is a summary of your numbers, and Jeffrey Selingo, who sat in these offices for a year, describes it as looking like the back of a baseball card.1
How long do they spend? At the University of Washington, readers are expected to get through seven applications an hour and a thousand across a two and a half month reading period. That works out at roughly eight minutes each. At Emory, two officers read together and move through files in under ten minutes once they find their rhythm.
Be careful with that number, because it became a headline and headlines distort. A front-page piece in the Wall Street Journal in 2018 announced that some elite colleges review an application in eight minutes or less, and Selingo's own caveat is worth more than the figure: eight minutes is a rough back-of-the-envelope calculation, and there is no official average.2 Treat the real range as somewhere between eight and twelve minutes for a first read, longer if you are interesting and longer again if you apply early.
What is actually happening in those minutes is more useful to know than the number. At Emory the pair read in silence first. Two minutes of silence, then they start talking to each other about you. So your essay is being read by somebody who is about to have to say something out loud about you to a colleague, and that is the fact this entire module turns on.
They do not call it an application. They call it a file. They pull applicants up and they shape them down. They rate you on scales of one to five, or one to nine, or one to ten, depending on the school, with a precision that looks mathematical and is mostly amorphous. They have acronyms for the things they are looking for, including one for intellectual curiosity and one for likelihood to enroll.3
That last one should adjust your thinking about the why-school essays in Module 6, but the first one matters here. Intellectual curiosity is a thing they score. It is not a thing you claim.
Here is a real moment from an Emory reading room. A file comes up with an eclectic mix of science and art, and the reader says he is reading the applicant as undecided, ignoring the major on the form. Why does that help? Because Emory is about to plough through an enormous stack of prospective physics majors who list pre-med second. If that combination is a dime a dozen this year, then physics and art is a different perspective, and different is what gets you looked at twice.4
Your essay does not have a fixed value. It has a value relative to the pile it lands in, and the pile changes by school and by year. You cannot control that and you should stop trying. What you can control is whether your essay says something that only you could have said, because scarcity is the one property that survives every context.
Selingo's summary of what these readers face is the most useful sentence in the book for our purposes. Everyone wants to major in biology, psychology or business. They all have a 3.7 and a 1390. So the readers look for something that is different.
Now the part almost nobody teaches, and the reason the last section ended where it did.
At some schools your file reaches a room. At Davidson sixteen admissions officers sit around a long table with the blinds shut, and one of them presents you. That officer has read your file and now has to make your case out loud, from memory, at speed, to fifteen colleagues who have not read it. The average discussion runs a few minutes. In three hours they get through more than fifty applicants.5
So your entire application, everything you have done since you were fourteen, arrives in that room compressed into a handful of sentences spoken by a tired person.
Here are two real ones.
She has significant family responsibility.
He needs to raise his game.
6
The first was an officer explaining a spiky grade record, noting that the applicant was the oldest of five siblings and worked part-time. The second came directly out of an applicant's essay. He had taken summer classes on that campus and written that the experience made him realise he needed to raise his game, and the officer used his phrase, in the room, on his behalf. He was admitted.
That is what your essay is for. It hands your advocate a sentence.
Which reframes the whole task. Stop asking whether your essay is good and start asking what line somebody could pull out of it and say about you in a room where nobody else has read it. If the answer is nothing, or the answer is a phrase that would fit three hundred other applicants, the essay has not done its job however well written it is.
Test it out loud. Read your draft, close it, wait a minute, and say one sentence about the writer as though you were defending them. Most students discover their sentence is a description of an event rather than a claim about a person, and that gap is the most useful thing they learn in this module.
One consequence. The sentence your essay hands over has to be consistent with the rest of the file, because the room can see the rest of the file.
An essay about your love of research contradicts an activity list with no research on it, and a reader notices immediately. An essay about how you found your voice through debate is redundant if the activity list already says four years of debate and captain in senior year. Redundancy is the quieter problem of the two and it is more common. Every sentence you spend restating something the file already proves is a sentence not spent on something only the essay can carry.7
Read your activity list, your transcript and your intended major as a set. Then ask what a reader would still not know about you after reading all three. That is your essay's territory, and it is usually smaller and stranger than students expect.
Now the distinction that decides what you write about.
Students believe the essay is evidence of experience. It is not. It is evidence of thinking. Nobody is scoring your life, partly because they cannot, and partly because they have read enough files to know that most of what happens to a seventeen-year-old is a matter of circumstance.
What they can assess is the quality of your attention. What you notice. What you find interesting. Whether you can hold two contradictory things at once. Whether you go past the first idea about your own life or stop there.
This is not a consoling fiction for students without dramatic material. It is the operating logic of the thing, and you can see it in what readers actually praise. When the Johns Hopkins committee writes about the essays they publish, they consistently describe a way of thinking rather than an event.
Through the metaphor of cooking empanadas as a novice, his essay effectively conveys the message that collaboration demands an open mind, and that by being receptive to other opinions, tackling any kind of puzzle becomes more doable.8
Empanadas. The event is that a boy cooked badly with other people. What earned the comment is the reasoning he built on top of it.
Two consequences follow, and both are liberating once you accept them.
Your material can be small. A browser game. A bathroom. A dumpling. Somebody in this bank wrote about the leftmost bookmark on his Chrome favourites bar, which was Tetris, and went to Penn. Somebody wrote about reading Harry Potter on the lavatory and went to Princeton, Columbia and Duke. Somebody wrote about the varieties of dumpling in her culture and went to Chicago.9
Your material cannot be borrowed. The corollary of judging thinking rather than events is that an event you did not think about is worthless to you, however impressive. This is why the research internship essay so often fails while the dumpling essay works. One is a credential restated. The other is a mind at work.
Now the generating. Two words first, because using them interchangeably is what makes students pick badly.
Your subject is the large thing: family, identity, a sport, an illness, immigration. Your topic is the small specific thing you actually write about: a vacuum cleaner, one hike, a poster on a bedroom wall, four minutes of a piano lesson.
Students choose subjects and then wonder why the essay feels generic. Of course it does. A subject is shared by thousands of applicants and a topic is not. Small topics beat large ones every time, and the reason is mechanical rather than aesthetic: a small topic can be described precisely in six hundred and fifty words, and a large one can only be summarised.
You want thirty candidate moments by the end of this module, not three. Thirty is deliberately more than you need, because the fourth or fifth idea is where the rehearsed answers run out and the real ones start. Here is how to excavate rather than remember.10
Twenty minutes, silent. List objects, physical things, that have been in your life and mattered. Not symbols, objects. A cracked phone screen, a rice cooker, a pair of boots, a key you still have for a house you no longer live in. Then take the five oddest and write two sentences on each about when it entered your life and what was happening around it. Objects are the fastest route to specificity because they are already concrete, and half the strongest essays in the bank are built on one.
Draw your life as a line, age zero to now. Mark every point where something changed, not every point where something happened. A change is a place where you started or stopped believing something, or where a relationship altered. Most students mark six to ten and are surprised how few are the things they would have listed as achievements.
Pick any single scene from the timeline and write twenty-one physical details from it. Not descriptions, details. The number is high on purpose. The first seven are generic, the next seven are yours, and the last seven are where you find the thing you had forgotten you remembered. That last third is the point of the exercise and you cannot get to it by writing ten.
Get somebody to ask you questions for thirty minutes and take notes on your own answers. The questions that work are not the ones you expect. What do you do when nobody has given you instructions. What is something you changed your mind about. What did you get wrong about somebody. What would your sister say you are like. This is the single highest-yield protocol in the set and it is the one students skip, because it requires another human being for half an hour.
Two more worth knowing if the four above run dry. A values sort, where you rank what you care about and then find the moment where two of your top five conflicted. And the essence object, where you name the one object that would tell a stranger the most about you and then defend the choice in writing.
The commonest failure in this module is producing thirty achievements and no moments. If your list reads like a résumé, you have run the protocols as a memory exercise rather than an excavation, and you should go back to twenty-one details on one small scene rather than adding more entries.
The second commonest is choosing the topic you arrived with. It is usually the rehearsed one, and the rehearsed one has been told too many times to be told well. Notice if your chosen topic at the end of this module is the topic you arrived with. It is not automatically wrong. It is automatically suspicious.
A small task with a disproportionate payoff, and this is the module for it because your recommenders need lead time.
Your teachers are about to write about you without knowing what your essay says. If nobody tells them, they will write about the thing you are most visibly good at, which is very likely the thing your essay is also about, and your file will make the same point three times while leaving two other points unmade.
So brief them. One page, and it is not a request for anything in particular. It contains what you are writing your personal statement about, in one line. Two or three specific moments from their class that they might not remember and you do. What you think you were like to teach, honestly, including the difficult part. And what you are applying to study.
The specific moments are what make this work. A teacher with forty letters to write is grateful for a concrete incident, and a letter that contains an actual scene from a Tuesday in March reads completely differently from one that says you were a pleasure to teach.11
Two rules. Do not tell them what to say, for exactly the reason from Module 0: a letter written to your instruction reads as one. And give them their deadline a fortnight before your real one, because recommenders who confirmed early and submitted at the last minute are a category that exists in every cycle.
You will finish this module having chosen one topic, and then in Module 2 you write four hundred words about it badly. That is the plan, and I want to say why now rather than when you are staring at it.
Writers do not know what they think until they have written it. This is not a motivational claim, it is the reason first drafts exist at all. If you could know your essay in advance you would not need to draft it, you would transcribe it. So a first draft is not a bad version of a finished thing. It is the instrument you use to find out what the finished thing is about.12
Which means the version of you that stops after every sentence to improve it is not being careful, they are being slow, and slow is the thing that kills essays in this cycle. Write badly and fast, on purpose, with the fixing deliberately deferred. You have five more modules of fixing and only one module of finding out.
You are also about to read other students' work, and how you do that matters more than you think, because the habit you build reading theirs is the habit you will apply to your own.
One rule for this module only. Read as a critic, never as a writer looking for something to borrow. You do not have a draft yet, and reading finished work before you write pulls your voice toward it, invisibly and reliably. From Module 3 the purpose changes and the rule changes with it, because by then you have your own draft to protect you.
The most useful thing you can do with somebody else's essay is answer two questions in writing. What argument does this make about the writer? And what does the reader know at the end that no other part of the file would have told them?
Read a pair rather than a single essay, one strong and one weak, and do not be told in advance which is which. A single strong model teaches imitation. A pair teaches judgment, which is the thing you actually need, because in deadline season you will be your own only reader at two in the morning.13
Done when you have one sentence stating what your file claims, written from the reader's side rather than yours.
Done when your sentence is a claim, it is scarce, and it names something the rest of your file cannot prove on its own.
Done when you have written both and can say which one shows more of your mind at work.
Done when thirty moments exist, three pitches are written with all three tests applied on the page, and one topic is chosen.
Done when every recommender has the page and an early deadline, in writing.
Done when both essays are answered in writing and you have committed on paper to drafting badly in the next module.
If you keep one sentence: find the smallest true thing only you could have noticed, because the whole file arrives in that room as one sentence and yours has to be a sentence nobody else could be handed.
Every student essay quoted on this page is reproduced in full, with its source, in References.