Brainstorming

The good news: absolutely anything can be a topic for a brilliant essay.

Go on, try me.  Finding a nickel on a sidewalk when you were five years old?  That could be the opening to an insightful essay about your history of collecting and how you eventually came to see that your collections needed to be balanced by an appreciation for the things themselves.

Forgot to lock the door this morning?  That could be an entertaining essay on how you’ve let fear drive you too often in the past and the way you’ve taught yourself to focus on your successes rather than your failures.

The bad news: absolutely anything, from receiving an Academy Award to saving lives as a firefighter, can end up a tedious essay that the reader doesn’t bother to finish.

An effective personal essay uses literary techniques like tension, imagery and hyperbole to show how your experiences and emotional growth have developed you into a student who will thrive in college.  This is the one part of the application where the admissions committee can look beyond the numbers – the grades, the test scores, the hours you’ve spent on extracurriculars, etc. – and see you as an individual.

I promise you, you already have all the material you need for this essay – you are a person with experiences and emotional growth, and if you are bothering to read this, you are almost certainly ready for college.  However, it can be difficult to identify your personal and emotional development from your position stuck inside your own head.  A session with a qualified brainstormer – Does that sound like someone is going to storm into your brain?  Probably not too many people will sign up for that!  Let’s rewrite… 

Students may find it difficult to identify the ways that they’ve grown and changed over their high school years, and how their personal experiences and choices contributed to those changes.  An initial session with an experienced essay coach can help students determine the underlying theme they want to write about, as well as a topic that showcases it and events, encounters and experiences that support the topic.

Tl,dr: Hire me!  I can help you come up with an interesting topic that will illuminate your true self to the admissions committee.

Still too long?  Hire me!