Stop writing what you think admissions officers want to hear. They can tell when you're performing, and essays full of buzzwords like resilience and leadership sound fake. Write like you're talking to a curious friend about what's actually true about you.
Write what you think the admissions officer wants to hear. This is the single most common way students torch their own essay, and they don't even realize they're doing it. They imagine some faceless committee member sitting behind a desk, and then they try to guess what that person wants. Resilience, leadership, global citizenship, whatever buzzword is trending. And they write towards that imagined checklist instead of writing towards the truth, of who they are. So here's the problem. Admissions officers read thousands of these essays a season. They can smell a performance from a mile away. The essay stops being about the student and starts being an audition for an audience that doesn't actually exist the way the student imagines. So here's the inverse. Write for yourself first, not for them. In my book, I talk about this constantly. The essay isn't a job interview where you're selling a product. It's closer to a conversation with a curious friend. The question isn't, what do they want to hear? The question is, what's true and what's mine? When a student writes from that place, the authenticity comes through on the page, whether or not they ever consciously try to create it. That's the whole trick. You cannot fake specificity. You can only find it. All right. Sabotage number 2: turn the essay into a resume in paragraph form.
