on a casual summer afternoon day a high school senior named Aaron decided to write one of the greatest college essays I have ever read describing this essay as even a work of art is an understatement I absolutely love the way that this student wrote their college essay now contrary to some of the other essays that I talk about on this channel this is not some random essay I pulled off the internet this actually comes from a book on college essays the book is written by the Harvard independent and it's called 100 successful college essays basically
it's just a compilation of a bunch of really really great essays on a variety of topics I ain't sponsored or anything but this essay is one of the highlights from the book and in the book what happens is a bunch of the top admissions officers from schools like Harvard and other IG League schools comment on these essays this particular student was really interested in like liberal arts and you'll see that in the essay and they applied to Haverford College obviously they got in and I think that there is a pun that we can learn from
just casually breaking down the essay let's not waste any more time I have the essay pulled up here let's get right into it we're going to first do a quick read through of the entire essay and then we'll talk about what's good what are maybe some things that you can learn from it and then what are some improvements that even autoencrup had in this essay mental block is a nasty old hermit who lives in the gullies and Ravines of my mind he makes a living by slinging Nets across my Nero canals and catches my thoughts
as they swim toward the great spawning grounds where writing is born MB always waits until his Nets are full to the point of bursting before he drags them up like any experienced fisherman he saves only the big healthy and mature thoughts and throws juvenile or disease thoughts back into the canals to mature or die those thoughts he saves he either eats immediately or freezes and sets aside for use when my stream of creativity slows up until three weeks ago I had always ignored MB his paltry catch consisted of only a small fraction of my thoughts
lately however with college essays to write MB has become an increasingly irritating problem many of my best thoughts began their journey through my mind only to be poached and eaten before they can breed and create others like them so with college deadlines looming I set off in search of the old hermit determined to somehow halt his activities if only temporarily finding him was no problem the recent flood of thoughts accompanying my latest attempts at creativity had so fattened him that he was uninclined to move about instead he sat in the center of my mind at
the junction of a number of important canals wielding his Nets with practiced expertise MB pulled in one load after another emptying them from his Nets in a flopping jumbled tangle he frowned when he saw me approaching and shifted to face me his motion scattering the skeletons of countless thoughts I picked my way toward him through heaps of such skeletons stopping at the base of a particularly large one upon which Envy was seated what you want he snapped peering down on me over his massive bloated waistline before I could reply he angrily muttered come on you
gotta want something you ain't want to come visiting for no reason I want to make a deal I replied a deal with me how nice of you now what kind of deal were you thinking of making my boy he said his lips curling into a sneer I want you to stop stealing my thoughts until after college deadlines and if I should do this he interjected I'll do whatever you want well my boy let me tell you he paused shifting into a more comfortable posture I'll make this deal with you if you'll do me two things
what two things I asked dreading his answer and be picked up a bone and began to wave it at me in a school teacher fashion you know my boy I've been doing this job for some time now 17 years at last count and over this time your thoughts have been getting progressively better over these last four years boy not only has the fission improved but your thoughts have been bigger healthier and more mature so what are the two things I questioned irritated he ignored me especially when you tried to write poetry last year my that
was some good fishing and that term paper Richard III and the prince the villain and the pragmatist woo we that was some good eating no wonder I could never write poetry or organize that stupid paper I muttered under my breath well getting back to my point I'll stop my fishing for the time being if you'll apply to Haverford and take liberal arts if you get in what see my boy the thing is if you get into Haverford I figure you'll have so many term papers and stuff to write that I'll be feasting regular for more
than four years but what about the liberal arts well boy in my many years at this Vision I've caught your liberal arts thoughts and I've caught your science and math thoughts and when you get right down to it your liberal arts thoughts are just much tastier they're so much more natural and healthy than science and math thoughts just tastes so processed and mechanical it's like the difference between filet mignon and spam see yeah I do I replied you got a deal MB held out his great pudgy hand which I grabbed and shook you'll know when
I'm back in business he said giving me a wink and by the way he shouted as I walked away you better get into Haverford I ain't starving for nothing the essay tell me that doesn't bad foreign [Applause] so as we give this essay a minute to just digest with us we can do a quick recap of what we just read the essay is the story about the main character Aaron and a journey he undergoes in his mind where he's talking to this old hermit who's fishing up his thoughts and in the end he comes to
this conclusion with the hermit that if he's you know willing to go to Haverford University and study liberal arts The Hermit will leave him alone and I allow him to have the idea to write the college essay which inevitably is what gets produced here starting from the top the essay is so beautiful that I almost wish it had a title just because I'm curious to see what the author would have named it but the truth is there's a beauty in the fact that there's no title at all because when there's no title to an essay
it almost feels like the entire essay is just the organic voice of a student and if you have a voice like this where you're speaking with this level of clarity and interest you have a reader hooked on what school wouldn't love to listen to you talk in person the reason why I'm just generally against having a title is because I think it makes the essay read really rehearsed it feels like you're forcing the content and it almost feels like this essay gets kind of dissociated from the authenticity of the writer when you add something like
that on so I think by not adding a title anywhere in the essay it always just gives it that organic voice and I really like that about this essay the way the writer is able to come through one of this writer's strongest characteristics when he's writing is the way he's able to just paint a picture in your mind when I was reading through this essay and I'm sure you as you were listening along had the same feeling it's like you can literally visualize every scene he's talking about and it's not that he's adding too many
excessive details either he's pretty mindful of the fact that there is a word limit on this essay it's that he just adds enough detail to where you can paint the picture set that stage to understand everything that's going on but he has enough space to continue pushing the story forward but by far by far my favorite part about this essay is the idea itself I mean it's brilliant right being able to talk with the character in your mind the essay itself is fictional right it's not like this is a real thing that happened and yet
it's so beautifully written the storyline the story telling it's super clever now one thing that always stands out to me when I read these Super Creative essays is if we take a step back for a second and we think about how the idea generation process happens if I were to try to summarize this entire essay within one sentence if I just told you that I had written an essay about a fisherman in my mind who was stealing my ideas the essay just sounds kind of corny kind of silly you don't see the beauty in it
right that's the thing when you summarize essays like this all the way down to one sentence it's always extremely difficult to see how creative and beautiful it is when it finally turns out so let's take a moment to flip the script imagine that you're a student which a lot of you probably are coming up with an essay idea you probably have a document where you're just brainstorming ideas you're writing down oh maybe I could write about this and you write one sentence done when you look at those sentences and then you look at an essay
like this it's so easy to compare the two and be like oh well my idea doesn't stand out like that my idea is not that brilliant but the truth is no matter what the essay is if you try to summarize it in just one sentence it's not going to feel like the greatest essay ever a lot of you guys have fantastic ideas you just need to have the confidence to try to follow through with one that's truly authentic to you and put your all into writing it even if the one sentence you have written down
doesn't blow you away the final product is what the beauty is in have some trust in yourself that you'll be able to bring that out another part of the essay that we have to talk about is the way that the author brings out his talent and interest for the liberal arts if we take a look at this section down here where he talks about the Poetry Rowan class and then like the the paper that he wrote as well it's so clean in the way that he's able to slide this into the essay it's not forced
he's not trying to talk about some award that he won in a poetry competition three months ago and then just taking a full detour in the essay spending a whole paragraph talking about how passionate he was no no no no he just slips in one two 's talking about it he brings up the fact that his ideas have been getting better over the years almost alluding to the fact that he's been kind of working on these things his creativity everything is just subtly placed in there enough to where an admissions officer is easily able to
process that information but not too much to where it's overbearing or he's trying to slip in extra Awards and bragging into his essay in this essay there's also something that a lot of people don't really talk about but I feel like it's one of the things that truly inspired and motivated me the most let's take a look at this one sentence here right well boy in my many years of this fishing I've caught your liberal arts thoughts and I've caught your science and math thoughts and when you get right down to it your liberal arts
thoughts are generally just much tastier that's what he's trying to say the point is that he's better in the liberal arts than Math and Science now it's very clear from the name Arun ramanathan that this is like an Asian male notice how when he brings up the topic of Science and Math in Liberal Arts she doesn't try to suddenly shift the dynamic to trying to be this woke super cool Asian who's different from the rest of us because he's interested in Liberal Arts and all of us just do is Step he doesn't try to force
any stereotypes onto his reader he doesn't try to play his cards like that I can't tell you how many people in his shoes will build up this beautiful essay like this only to try to put those stereotypes in here now I'm not like this crazy racist who hates those ideas it's just the fact that these come up so so often I do one-on-one Consulting if you want me to review your essay send me an email here I now during those calls over all the essays that I've read this comes up on unbelievable amount of time
so the point where if someone tries to slip in like a detail about how like oh you know because I'm an Asian first generation immigrant I had this issue like my mind almost just tones out the reason I'm even bringing this up is because I edit essays and do this work on the side I do it for fun because I enjoy it imagine if you had to do this as your your job every single day as an admissions officer you have to wake up and read college essays for eight hours how do you think they
feel when they have one of these cliches show up in their essay something that you're aware of that you know when you write the essay is a cliche and yet you still turn it into them you think that they enjoy reading that or that that excites them at this point I think my point has been made just keep in mind that when you're writing your college essay your target audience is not your parents it's not your friends it's not people online that you might eventually share your essay to it's to a faceless admissions officer someone
who reads essays for a living cater your essay to that audience because that is the person that holds the fate of your admissions decision in your hands and you'd prefer if they enjoyed your essay over anyone else on the flip side when reading an essay there's almost always something that we can learn from it positively but also something that we can learn from it negatively maybe somewhere where the writer was lacking or just a general lesson that we can take away even for someone like Arun in this case who has written an absolutely beautiful essay
there's something that we can learn if we take a look at this kind of slangy dialect the way that the fishermen in this essay speaks you'd actually be surprised at how often dialogue like this in a slightly different tense and dialect actually shows up in college essays it's a little bit more common than you think the main thing to remember when you are writing this kind of dialogue is that your admissions officer does need to read it right no matter how authentic you're trying to be to someone's Voice or in this case to this particular
character you don't want to make the dialect so complicated that your admissions officer is actually getting fuse while they're reading I think Arun has done a fantastic job here of trying to balance it out and for an admissions officer who's you know probably majored in English this is not a big deal but I've seen people who have tried to be so real authentic to someone else's dialect that it's a lot more difficult to understand and that's where you're kind of just annoying your admissions officer at that point rather than in this case when it's done
well you're proving to them that you have this amazing control over the English language phenomenal writing dexterity but if you were to do it wrong there's also that flip side where it could just be a nuisance to read so when you do finally do something in relation to that kind of dialect that's what you have friends and family for right have them do a read through if you want me to read over your essays send it to my email and then I got you right I'll let you know if it's decent or not the only
other critique that I even had with this essay was actually bringing up the name of a specific College I think that according to my theory this is not actually Aaron's like personal statement he was very likely writing this as like a supplement so for Haverford College based on some essay but it easily could have been his personal statements the thing is you never want to actually include a specific College's name in your personal statement because colleges know that you're not just applying to them they're not going to magically think that because you brought up their
name that you know that college is special they know you're applying to other schools and it's just kind of corny also functionally speaking you have to remember to change the name like if you were to also want to apply to Harvard and Stanford MIT you have to change the name every single time you submit a new school if you accidentally mess up and miss the name even in one spot when your admissions officer reads it and they see that you forgot to change the name in one of the spots like you're applying to Stanford and
Harvard is somewhere in there dude they're going to be like annoyed and at that level of competition you do not want your admissions officer on the back like trying to justify whether they should even throw your application out or keep reading honestly I loved analyzing this Essay with you guys and I have so many more that inspired me when I was writing my personal statement so if you want more videos like these I got you all right I can show you all the essays that help me but anyways that's gonna be it for this video
thank you all so much for watching this has been pratik peace
