Strike the Write Note

Dear Sage,

Why can’t I write about sports for my common app essay?  I’ve seen ‘sports stories’ on almost every list of Topics to Avoid.  I’m a varsity athlete and my sport is a huge part of my life.  I feel like I don’t have anything else to write about!  What should I do?

Practice Doesn’t Make the Perfect Topic

Dear Practice,

You absolutely can write about sports.  In fact, anything can make a great essay topic – sock collecting, your love of spicy food, explaining tiktok to your grandfather – providing that you use it to a) show who you are as an individual and b) highlight personal qualities that will enable you to thrive in college.  

Remember, there’s only one unbreakable rule for college app essays: Don’t Be Boring.

From that perspective, writing about sports can be a bad idea.  In our society at least, sports lend themselves to Lesson Learning – “Just Do It,” “No Guts, No Glory,” “I am what I am” – which seems like a natural fit for college applications.  “How I learned to work hard/embrace my fears/become a team player, by playing sports.”  Because it’s easy and straightforward, many, many – did I mention many? – students do it.  College admissions officers read thousands of essays centered on sports’ experiences every year.

Trust me on this.  After reading 100 essays about how playing basketball proved that practice makes perfect, I’m going to be way more excited by an essay about knitting needles than one about jump shots, no matter how beautifully the latter is written.  

That said – even the most familiar topic can be fascinating if the author brings something fresh to it.  If you want to write about sports, here’s my sage advice:

• Make sure that you, and not the sport, are the focus of the essay
• Ask yourself: Why do I play this sport?  What do I really love about it? Passion is a great place to start any common app essay!  
• Go beyond the obvious, and think of concrete details that, even if small, can be expanded to say something larger about you.  

For example of the last, maybe you love getting new sneakers at the start of every season – you could open the essay with a brief scene where you’re shopping for sneakers, and then you could talk about how you love beginnings in general, the feeling of excitement at something new, the idea of a new day/semester/year with infinite possibilities.

If you indicate early on that that your essay isn’t going to be ‘just another sports essay’ but something interesting, surprising and revelatory, you can catch and hold the reader’s attention.  (The ‘interesting, surprising and revelatory’ part goes for any topic, not just sports!)

Sage

This week, both Yale and Brown have decided to return to pre-pandemic policies requiring all applicants to submit standardized test scores.

Lots of experts (and quite a few non-experts as well) have strong opinions about standardized test scores in relation to issues of race and class, and whether standardized tests help or hurt low income students in college admissions.  Over the last few years, however, I’ve been thinking about this from a slightly different point of view.

In my opinion, even relatively high-scoring kids from middle class backgrounds have been poorly served by ‘test optional’ policies.  

Consider this: if you score 1400 on the SATs, you are in the top 5% of all test-takers.  This is a score that identifies a student as capable of college work and someone who could thrive at any school in the US.  Yet in the last few years I’ve known three different students who refused to submit SAT scores that were considerably higher than 1400.

Why?  Because colleges report their average test scores, and the average test score has soared in the last five years, thanks specifically to test-optional policies.  In 2018, the overall average SAT score of Harvard freshmen, for example, was 1450.  By 2023, it was 100 points higher.

It’s easy to trace what happened.  No one wants to be ‘below average’ – even if your ‘below average’ score is higher than 95% of test takers.  As soon as Harvard made standardized tests optional, most students who had less than that 1450 average chose not to submit their scores at all.  What do you think happened to the test scores?  Obviously, they spiked upward.  The next year, if Harvard reports its average score is now 1490, no one with scores below 1490 is going to submit, not even the person with the 1480 who would have been perfectly happy to submit just the year before.  

The score itself and its meaning hadn’t changed.  A score of 1400 still placed a student in the top 5-7% of everyone who took the SATs.  Colleges continued to know that a score of 1400 was a damn good score.  But if you don’t submit it, they don’t know that you earned that score.  A valuable piece of information that could have helped you was missing from your application.  

Many schools are still test-optional.  My advice is this: before deciding not to submit your test scores, research the average test scores for the incoming class in 2018 or 2019, before the pandemic.  If your scores are in-line with that, then submit them.  

There are nearly 4000 colleges and universities in the US; the state of California alone has more than 600 while 20 other states have over 100 each.  If you’re like the typical high school senior, on some days it will seem like nearly everyone of them has tried to contact you!

Most students end up applying to eight or more schools, with a mix of ‘safety’ schools, ‘match’ schools and ‘reach’ schools.  But how do you go from 4000 down to 8?   Many students end up primarily applying to schools they know: schools that are local, the flagship school of their state university, and famous (but extremely selective) schools like Harvard and Stanford.  There’s nothing wrong with a list that centers on these schools!  However, you might be leaving out schools that would be a great fit, or offer you more scholarship or financial aid money, or an opportunity to experience life in another part of the country or all kinds of other things.

Obviously, unless you are a Professional College Applicant (and as far as I know, there’s no one out there hiring kids to be Professional College Applicants – if anyone has this job, please let me know!), you don’t have time to examine 4000 college websites.  One suggestion: Try to identify the most important thing you want in a school – or at least one of the most important things you want.  Is it a great biology program?  A city campus?  A school without a football team?  Google search the top ten schools with that quality.  And then pick the second most important thing for you, google search that and cross-reference which schools, if any, have both.  You can do this with multiple different items, helping you to identify schools that you might not have heard of that would nonetheless be a great place to get your education.

Granted, it’s not as romantic as falling in love with a beautiful campus, or applying to the school whose name you wore on your onesies as an infant, but it might be a more effective approach.

Warning: Note that many ‘Top Ten Lists’ especially if you’re looking for a good academic department, simply go down US News’ list of top universities and check whether or not they have that department, rather than whether or not the department itself is actually excellent.  It may take a bit of fiddling with search terms to find lists that really examine which universities are good at a particular thing, rather than just lazily adapting US News’ ratings.  But they are out there!  

I designed this website months ago, but I am finally ready to settle down and commit to writing this blog – just as many of you may be settling down to commit to writing their college admissions essays. We probably share that same sinking feeling oh, no, it’s too late, I should have started doing this months ago, what’s wrong with me, why didn’t I –

It’s not too late. In fact, you have loads of time. The first thing you need to do is the hardest: figure out what you’re going to write about. (I don’t even know you, but may I suggest some topics: Perhaps Procrastination and How I’ve Learned to Overcome It? Or I Learned Everything I Need to Know for College in One All-Night Study Session?) For first time readers – and yes, I know, that’s basically everyone – that was totally a joke.

This, however, is not: Anything can be a topic for a college essay. It’s what you do with the material, how you make it your own, how you use it to showcase that you’re a person who will contribute to this college community – that’s what counts.

So your homework for tonight: figure out what you’re passionate about. The beauty of this homework is that you can do it anywhere – in the car, in the lunchline, while your Mom badgers you about why haven’t you started your college essay yet? And then you can look at her with total honesty and say, “But Mom, I have!”

Welcome to WordPress! This is your first post. Edit or delete it to take the first step in your blogging journey.