application essays from the inside out

My best 3 tips for writing application essays (college, fellowship, scholarship, etc.) with snippets of mine sprinkled throughout:

1. The point of the application is not to answer the questions well. It's to communicate the essence of you in a few snapshots, so the application reader might actually know some bits of you (like your sister does, or your best friend).

   1. Ignore the prompts!! [1] Go on a walk and brainstorm the moments of your life (conversations, struggles, convictions) that make you distinctly you. If you died today, and a movie played back with only scenes (even private/silent ones) representing you, what what be included?
   2. Write those down. Even if you do not use them, it’s useful to get you into the right state of mind. The raw glimpses into your psyche and life is exactly what you want.

   Common App (opening)

   When I was very young, I remember drawing a rocketship early in the morning. By my side was my grandma, who cooked at the warm stove which lit the dark morning with a soft orange light. I remember this as a time of peace and belonging. Floating up from the paper and spinning squiggles in the air, the rocketship soars through space to an unknown destination. My grandma is at the center: she is co-captain, Spock, and co-president. We’ll be able to get anywhere, so long as she keeps making Chinese steamed eggs, placed atop a bowl of porridge.

   …

2. Your job is to communicate, not to write grammatically, concisely, correctly, whatever. It is closer to a speech than it is an essay. Use a run on sentence or bullet points when it feels right. Write how you talk. 

   1. I struggled to write one of my application essays and I left my editor a comment rambling about what I was trying to convey. He ended up copying and pasting my comment into the draft, almost verbatim, and that became my essay. This stuck with me.
   2. Your application reader only has a handful of seconds to spend on your writing (and so mistakes you realize only after studying your draft will never actually matter).

   1. What is the most significant challenge that society faces today?

   My parents don’t communicate about:

   • Why my dad needs to take so many trips to China
   • Whatever’s hurting my sister (“She just needs to cheer up”)
   • and more!

   Confucius says that micro-actions have macro-effects. Society faces a macro-listening deficit. Listening has to begin at home, then nationwide.

3. You lose. There is always someone in the world better than you at any given dimension you might want to put a spin on. Think you’re a really good at X? Sorry, someone is a standard deviation better. But in 3rd grade we learned “No one can be better at being you than you,” and, cheesy as it may be, we really need to internalize this. Concretely:

   1. Don’t bother showing off, just show. The way to write an interesting essay is to be an interesting person (which you already are!!) and then just write. (“You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.”) State your story as is.

      Tell us your computer science origin story.

      Technically it was when my dad shut down my NBA dreams and made me learn to code (I was 12). But truthfully it wasn’t until a year later, at a weekly Unity Meetup, that I realized CS ≠ those godforsaken Java classes. I spent a week building a platformer game, where WASD controlled a cute black cube with two white lines for eyes, and ↑←↓→ controlled its inverted twin. In those long nights of designing sprites and maps, I fell in love. My sister and I played for an hour straight, and I got to wow my middle school friends.

      I’ve been drawing since I was 3, and now my art could come to life.

   2. If something matters to you, forget about how insignificant/weird/foolish it may sound to someone else. What makes you odd indeed makes you interesting.

As hard as it will inevitably be, redirect your focus onto yourself and the snapshots that make you who you are; focus on doing justice to that story, your story [2]. In some sense, you are the most fascinating person in the world. Try to do that some justice.

Common App (closing)

…

Though I don’t know what my exact place in this universe is, these experiences define me. I have filled up my rocketship with friends made in the common pursuit of discovering who we are. I like most to go with them into some quiet place and to look at the stars, wondering where we’ll end up next. There, under that huge sky, it feels like home is already here, not just in the interconnection between us, but the lines between the stars, the constellations.

Thank you to Gino Chiaranaipanich  for thoughtful feedback on this post and Samuel Liu  for teaching me most of the above.