oh my god hello class my name is dr k what the hell why are there so many of you how many of them are you oh my god 5164 review have you all been skipping my lectures for the past two weeks i must funk you all now but you know i'm feeling so benevolent right now that i will let that slide because you just boosted my ego just that little bit more today i'm gonna need a bigger lecture hall the school's gonna have to pay me more oh well now after seeing how popular my last
lecture on this topic was i decided to make a part 2 2.0 4.0 like my gpa i'm going to be lecturing you today on six more common app mistakes to avoid because if you make these mistakes your essays suck i'm sorry i shouldn't say that that's against school policy but i'm keeping it 100 away with you guys okay let's get into it [Music] hey guys so i know i'm wearing something a little different my hair is a little different from my intro but that's because it's so hot here right now and i was sweating so
much in that last outfit like all this shiny stuff right now it's all sweat sorry but anyways you're not here for my outfit or anything you're here for my insightful advice on your comment up essay but i'm gonna try to get right into it but before i do i just want to give a little disclaimer telling you guys that everything i say in this video and i mean every single thing is all my opinion because like most of you guys know i'm only a recent high school graduate i'm not even a college student right now
that's why i edited some essays for free but also keep in mind i'm not taking any more submissions right now i've had a lot of people ask me in the comments and in my instagram dms for me to look at their essay but i'm not doing that anymore i already have like 50 more to get through from my past thousand subscribers special i'm trying to get through those i'm editing 10 a day right now so please be patient with you guys anyways because i've edited over 100 essays so far i feel like i have a
little more general insight and general view of what a lot of people write their common app about so i thought i would just share that with you guys and just tell you guys what i personally don't like seeing in a common app essay that doesn't necessarily mean that the app reader is not going to like the stuff but this is just all personal me okay so i'm just gonna get straight into it but stay till the end of the video if you want a little life update channel update on where this channel is going to
go in the future so the first comment mistake i see a lot of people making in their essays in my opinion is that they add way too many rhetorical questions to be completely honest with you guys in my ideal world no one would use rhetorical questions in their college essays i feel like the majority of people just throw in some rhetorical questions to add style to their essay but honestly i just think it's a waste of words and i think it retracts from the core narrative and core story that you're trying to portray in your
essay even if it's rhetorical when i read these questions it feels like you're deflecting the focus of the essay onto the reader and that should never happen in an essay and also just in general rhetorical questions tell me nothing more about you it doesn't give me any more insight into what kind of person you are so at the very least it's just a waste of words personally when i'm reading an essay about you i want to know about you i want to know about your memories your special experiences your feelings and those moments not anyone
else's and when you deflect by throwing these rhetorical questions at the reader it feels like you're just skirting around the subject a little bit and i just want you to hit it dead on okay moving on and the next common mistake i see is quotes quotations whatever you want to call them i don't care if they're from you your parents your friends a celebrity i don't really like any of them i swear to god some of the essays that i read there was so much dialogue within that essay that it almost felt like i was
reading a script for a movie of their own life or something and that's not what a common up essay should be like it shouldn't feel like a script for me personally when i read these essays with a lot of dialogue in it i felt like with every single quote that they added in it almost disrupted the flow of their essay and like the flow of their narrative in general because including me i find it really hard to integrate these quotes into the essay naturally and a lot of the times it ends up sounding really choppy
to me for example i feel like a lot of quotes that are in essays follow the structure of this is just an example but if in the essay they say when i sat in the classroom my teacher exclaimed take out your pens and paper pop quiz i was shocked as i turned to my friend and said i didn't do the reading that doesn't really sound like a cohesive essay that you should be submitting to college it sounds like a storybook from middle school or something oops i'm sorry but what i mean by that is a
lot of the times it's hard to integrate quotes without saying he said dot dot dot i was shocked so i exclaimed dot dot dot so i feel like when you use that kind of simple structure it just doesn't sound as professional and put together in a college essay also this might be the biggest reason i don't like dialogue in an essay is because the majority of the time the dialogue ends up sounding like it was written for a low budget sitcom show that plays at 3 am in the morning because no one wants to watch
it now you might feel personally offended like i'm taking a personal dig at you but that's really not what i'm trying to do here like to be totally honest with you if i include a dialogue in my essay it would also probably sound like a bad sitcom show but the reason for this is because none of us are screenwriters or at least the majority of us aren't screenwriters so when we try to write dialogue that sounds natural and real we probably will fail at it because when we try to use dialogue to fit into our
essay we usually warp it and make it really fake sounding and unnatural to most readers where you just can't possibly imagine that conversation actually happening in real life and it almost sounds like you just made that conversation up purposely to just put it into your essay which is not a good look you should not do anything not make anything up for your college application so yeah that might be the biggest reason why i don't like quotations and dialogue and essays keep that in mind but dialogue isn't the only kind of quotations that i don't like
in essays i also really really dislike celebrity quotes 99 of the time and i'll explain that later let me just say quoting gandhi or martin luther king in your conclusion paragraph does not automatically make your essay deep or more insightful i do not understand why people would choose to spend any words out of their 650 word limit on other people's words your whole essay should be your words and talking about your experiences make it as personal as you can so when you throw in quotes from gandhi or martin luther king in the conclusion sentence i'm
like this doesn't tell me anything about you it tells me something about them and like there's no like crossover there i read so many essays where in the conclusion paragraph people chose to use a celebrity quote of some sorts to end their essay but to be honest it just ends up sounding like a cop-out to me and like you couldn't think of your own words and form your own words to end your essay well exception though this is the one percent i was talking about when i said 99 earlier if the quote that you want
to put into your essay isn't that widely used and it means something personal to you and it meant something personal to you before you even thought of writing this common app essay and you actually make sure to integrate it into your entire essay and make sure it's not just something that you can take out the essay and it wouldn't make a difference then i think you should put it into your essay even if i made this video a week ago i would have probably told you guys to avoid quotes at all costs but since then
i edited this one guys comment up essay and he integrated a bunch of yoda quotes into his entire essay and i thought it was so cool unique and it was really engaging like when i read it so i actually really liked it which is why i say that one percent of the essays that use quotes is really good moving on and the next comment mistake you should avoid when writing your essay is mentioning thanksgiving topics what i mean by thanksgiving topics is anything like religion politics anything you wouldn't talk about with your family during thanksgiving
which is kind of contradictory since i'm talking about stuff you shouldn't talk about during thanksgiving but it's thanksgiving topics whatever and before i get into it i just want to provide a little disclaimer here because i'm scared of getting a lot of backlash for this part i have nothing against religion what religion you practice you do you i'm so happy for you if you find joy from your religion this is just my personal opinion and so take this with a big chunky grain of salt okay some examples that kind of show what i'm talking about
is sentences like god opened my eyes to the reality of how i was acting so i realized i had to make a change or stuff like god granted me these opportunities i'm not in any shape or form trying to discredit those experiences but i just personally don't think it's the best direction to take when writing your common app essay because i just don't think that those feelings and those sentiments are going to be that accessible to a lot of app readers especially if they're not religious but with that said i'm not saying that you have
to discard religion totally from your essay like if you talk about how your church helped you form a sense of community in your life i think that's a great thing to talk about since the sense of community and belonging is a sentiment that the majority of people in the world can relate to including app readers who might not be religious yeah moving on and then the next comment mistake that i really don't like seeing in your guys's essays is talking about the pandemic now i have a lot of thoughts on this one i know i've
been saying this a lot in this video but again i cannot count the number of times that i've read essays that had to do with a pandemic in some shape or form i read so many sentences that follow the same line of the pain then it gave me time to reflect on my wrongdoings i discovered my true self during this time of solitude i started a non-profit to help those affected by the pandemic to be honest one of the biggest reasons why i really dislike it when people talk about the pandemic in their essay is
because i have a very very strong gut feeling or maybe it's just the sheer amount of pandemic essays that i've already read that this is going to be one of the most widely used topics in this year's whole college application round if you're thinking about writing your essay on the pandemic let me just tell you one thing realize that every single person in the world is dealing with this pandemic in some shape or form and if you're in the united states more specifically realize that the majority of people have had to deal with being at
home alone for a few months on end so your essay is not going to be unique at all if you choose to write about that and also realize that there's probably thousands maybe hundreds of thousands of people in the world in the united states alone who has it worse than you than just being alone at home for a while but on the other hand if the pandemic has impacted you in a life-changing or significant way then totally feel free to write about it in your essay i'm not stopping you this is all my opinion i'm
just talking about the people who talk about using the pandemic as a time to reflect on their life and feeling lonely during this time because the majority of essays that i've read and edited that focus on the pandemic was very geared to that self-reflection kind of direction also another reason why i didn't really like it when people talked about the pandemic in their essay was because of the time period when this pandemic is happening realize that this is happening right before college apps and to be completely honest with you guys when i'm reading these pandemic
essays i'm just thinking in my head like are you telling me that in the past 16 17 years of your life you've had no experiences or accomplishments that are more meaningful than just sitting at home reflecting on your life like i find it very hard to believe and that's part of the reason why this irks me so much is because i feel like there's so many better topics that you can talk about but you choose to talk about the pandemic because you think it's quirky it's special it's something different not a lot of people are
going to write about it well it's like a lot of people are going to write about it so try to avoid it moving on and then the second to last comment mistake i have for you guys is talking about stuff that you're going to do in the future when i was editing essays i was surprised at the number of essays that i read that focused on the negative aspects of that person like they were talking about their lack of motivation the lack of happiness how they flunked their math class literally just all their mistakes they're
throwing it all on to me and i was like why are you doing this i have a sneaking suspicion that people did this because they think it makes them look more honest and like they're putting all their cards on the table for the app reader and it definitely does that but not in a good way so many people didn't give any redeeming qualities in the essay and they just talked about how they've changed nothing concrete though they've changed inside though and they're going to improve their grades they're going to join new clubs they're going to
step out of their comfort zone but they never actually give any instances where they did any of that saying this stuff doesn't do anything good for you because when you say that all i'm thinking in my head is why didn't you make these changes earlier why aren't you already improving your grades and stuff you know i believe and i'm pretty sure the majority of app readers also agree that your past is the best indicator of what kind of student you're going to be in the future that's why they ask for your statistics your grades your
extracurriculars because they see those things and kind of guess what kind of student you're going to be at their college in the future so that's the same thing with the essay when i read your essay i'm seeing what kind of person you are and i'm using that to gauge what kind of student what kind of person you're going to be on campus if you come to my school but when you just talk about all these negative attributes about yourself but don't actually show anything concrete about you that changed i'm still stuck thinking you're the same
sucky person that you described in the essay and i'm like why would i want a sucky person at my school long story short if you just focus on how stucky of a person you were without actually showing any concrete positive change you're just going to be stuck in that negative light moving on and the last common app mistake that you guys should avoid in your common lab essays is using false misconceptions i read a lot of essays that included phrases like contrary to belief dot dot dot although you might think dot dot oh so another
problem with that phrase don't refer to the reader as you and your essays i just don't think that sounds as put together and professional and like college essay like in my opinion and it just kind of throws me off when i read you in the essay because i'm like oh my god why are you calling me out like that but that's a totally different point but anyways they say all these things like contrary to popular belief which i think i use that in my essay too but the difference is that after that phrase they talk
about stuff that no one in their life thinks in their mind and probably explaining this really bad right now so here's an example although most people see books as many paper pages bound together by glue it is so much more to me it is a mode of storytelling that transcends words now who the hell thinks paper pages bound by glue when they think of a book i sure how don't do you if you do you might have a problem i'm sorry just kidding you don't have a problem i love you guys but that's what i
mean i've seen so many essays where people assume that the reader has a certain perception of something or some idea but i don't think that so it just kind of ends up making you look like a fool from my point of view it just kind of comes off as tryhard and like you're trying to sound inquisitive and deep when it actually doesn't and it just kind of makes you look dumb to me sorry i'm calling you guys out oh bottom line is if it's not actually a common opinion that's shared by the majority of the
people who might be reading your essay don't use this structure just don't do it it just sounds dumb i'm sorry i'm saying dumb too much but it just sounds dumb sorry i'm becoming too opinionated now i've been filming for way too long that was the end of this video i hope you guys enjoyed all the tips and common mistakes i told you guys about in this video and if you like this video please like comment and subscribe i read every single comment and also i know i said that i would give you guys a life
slash channel update at the end of this video here it is last tuesday penn announced that they were shutting down the campus completely i'm not going to be able to move into the dorms this fall which is really sad and that also had to do with why i didn't upload a video that thursday but because of that i'm ending up just staying in korea for the entire fall semester and part of the spring semester too which is unfortunate because i was really looking forward to making vlogs for you guys but that's probably not gonna happen
anymore and also regarding my channel i'm already running out of like college app advice to give to you guys and i don't want my channel to just be known for college advice so in the next few weeks or months i'm gonna try to shift this channel from just strictly college advice stuff to kind of college lifestyle and just making videos that make me happy and i enjoy so hopefully you guys stick along with me for that ride and don't unsubscribe which really scares me and is one of the biggest reasons why i've just been making
college advice videos but hopefully you guys will support me through this kind of little shift that i want to go through so yeah that was basically it so again if you haven't subscribed yet please subscribe and click the bell notification thing i still don't know what it's called and i will see you guys soon bye guys so destroy the evidence leave not a trace burn it and paper trash that way they can deny possessing the elite
