You see yourself seated amidst a lush green campus, textbook in hand, contemplating T.S. Eliot and Newton’s laws of motion. You stay up late at night, sharing your hopes and dreams for the future with your roommates. You meet your friends for lunch in the dining hall and engage in a healthy debate over the pros and cons of a vegetarian diet. You’re attending one of the most exclusive boarding schools in the country, where everything is an opportunity to expand your intellectual horizon. What got you here? Stellar admissions essays. Writing admissions essays for boarding schools can be challenging. As you review the essay prompts for your top choice schools, you may not know where to begin or what to write about to ensure that your application stands out. You might feel like you have to cram every one of your accomplishments into your essay or even embellish your resume to impress the admissions officers at your dream school. This is where you’re wrong. Here are three simple ways to make sure that your boarding school admissions essays are exceptional: Be yourself. It might sound obvious, but this tried-and-tested strategy is the most important when it comes to writing admissions essays. Remember that boarding school essays are personal essays, which means that if you reveal your hidden quirks, nerdy passions, and deepest fears, your essays will be yours and yours alone. If you were an admissions officer, which would you rather encounter: the same, tired, old essay or something completely different? The choice is obvious. And if you can reflect on who you are and wow your readers with impressive insights, bonus points! Stick to one idea. The worst thing you can do when writing your admissions essays is pack a million ideas into one essay. Now, schools may ask you to do things like, “Describe a challenge that had a meaningful impact on you.” Rather than writing about three different experiences and summarizing the overall lesson you learned, it would be more effective to draw your readers into one meaningful experience with vivid imagery, delve deeply into your thoughts and feelings, identify one overarching challenge you encountered, explain how you overcame it, and then end with an important realization. If your narrow down on one key idea or topic, you’d be surprised how much detail you can write! And at the end of the day, a more detailed essay reveals more about who you are. Think outside the box. Standing out comes from being creative. So you have 500 words to discuss a topic that you recently changed your mind about. Rather than writing a traditional five-paragraph essay, maybe you can try writing a “list” essay, organized much like this blog post. Maybe you can write about something that seems insignificant—like raisin bran cereal—and come up with a powerful essay that dissects the philosophical importance of maintaining a healthy mind and body. When you think about what you want to write about, try to brainstorm for about thirty minutes and come up with several possible topics to write about. The best option might be the most surprising one. Attending your dream school isn’t just a dream—with the right essay, it’s a highly likely possibility. Just remember, as Oscar Wilde would say, “Be yourself. Everyone else is taken.”
