In a world of robots, be a human.
For rising seniors, it’s time to start thinking about writing your college essay. Tempting as it may be to turn to the robots for help, it would be a mistake. And not because I am an adult and adults are boring buzzkills. It would be a mistake because AI sounds like a robot. It produces a word salad that is undigestible. Or it produces an essay that sounds like your mom wrote it, using words and turns of phrases that you would never say. Or, it hallucinates.
For the most part, humans are still reading your applications. Some colleges are using AI to summarize an application, but most likely, a human will read your essay. So, think about what you like to read: something funny? Something that feels relatable? Something you learn a little tidbit from that you didn’t know before? What you enjoy reading, others will too. Keep that in mind.
Another thing to bear in mind about your audience: they have about 7 minutes to read your essay. So, while we will sweat every comma splice and word choice, they won’t have time to. Does that mean you can have an essay full of grammatical errors? Absolutely not, proofread a million times. Those errors, especially when repeated throughout an essay, are distracting and make you look sloppy.
I like to read a student’s essay and then write down a few sentences/phrases as a summary, just like an admissions officer would for your file. Something like this:
“Student writes about how relationship with grandmother taught him resilience and made him more thoughtful. Well-written with a beautiful opening about them playing rummy together. He has taken small moments to illustrate these lessons in his day-to-day life. (4/5)”
If you’re happy with what’s been summarized, then you’ve got it– your essay is complete (proofread it one more time!).
Notice that (4/5) I’ve put at the end of the summary? I’ve given this student a 4 out of 5 on my college’s rubric. A lot of colleges will use some sort of rubric to score various elements of an application. Maybe the entire score is out of 20 and the essay is only worth 5 of that 20 points. Every college is different, so this is just an example to illustrate how one such college may operate.
In any case, that robot will not be scoring and assigning the value for the essay. That will be a human. Be a human and write something you’d want to read.
