Best of Week: Writing College Essays

College essays. Two words that bring teenagers so much stress and are supposedly actually very simple. "Just be yourself", " talk about what is important to you", "they read thousands of these, so yours has to stand out". So much pressure! For some reason, at least for me, it is so much easier to just write what i think the admissions person wants to hear. But after all I've heard,I realize that if i do that then they really might admit me for the wrong reasons. So then i think to myself, "What is something in my life that made me who I am" and twenty different scenarios come to mind but none of them more defining than the last. This leads to confusion which in turn just leads to much, much more stress.

But you see, this is where Mr. Allen comes in to the rescue! This week in Humanities class the most important day was the day we finally learned how to write these stressful college essays. Although we did not learn literally step by step how the structure of the essay should be, we learned something that in my eyes was much more important. We learned how to focus our thinking and choose a subject to write about that is important to us and gives the admissions person the feeling that we are real people and not just another kid trying too get into college. I know that the information I learned that day will help me progress to my future. In twenty years I will remember that the reason I got into the college I wanted to get into was because of what I learned from Mr. Allen about writing essays.