With less than two days left, it's scramble time for students still working on their University of California applications. The essay questions have remained the same for the past few years, and students have had access to them even before the application went live on November 1. Yet an unimaginable number of students are still at their computers trying to think of "the community I come from and how it's shaped my dreams and aspirations" and "an experience, talent, or achievement and how that relates to the person you are."
Writers can think about "community" in the most general sense, or in a very specific sense. A community can be an extended family, a church or religious organization, a dance company, the cast of the school play, the temple youth group, or the city you live in. Your community doesn't need to be idealic or perfect. It's fine to show its imperfections. The essays easiest to write aren't fabricated. Write about what you know and chances are you'll write it well.
Don't re-write your resume in response to the second prompt about talents and achievements. Those events will be listed on the UC application in another section. Not everyone is a star athlete or student body president, or the winner of a national contest. But if you are, be humble. Essays that sound like you have achieved the pinnacle of your career at age 17, and have nothing left to learn, can come off as arrogant.
The best essays are those that tell a story rather than a chronology of life events. Picking a specifc day or event to exemplify that community can make for a creative and unique essay. Try to avoid cliches at all costs and no quotes from famous people! Don't be so vague that any one in your school could write the same essay. Just like a diary entry or an email to a best friend, the college essay should be extremely personal. Students often get flustered when they try to write as if the essay was going to be graded by their English teacher, and use vocabulary outside of ordinary speech or with flowery descriptions and lots of metaphors.
All students have lots of experience writing long emails to friends. My guess is they are pretty funny or intimate. A great technique is to sit down at the computer, address an email to a friend, and tell him or her about a meaningful event. Then, go back and cut and paste it into a document. Admissions officers, who read thousands of essays during application season, want to get to know you. Allow yourself to be revealed. If staring at a computer has you stuck, "tell" your story into a recorder or to a friend who can quickly type everything you say. You'll be surprised when you review that story, that it makes for a great essay! With clean-up work for grammar and punctuation, the essay should demonstrate your natural style and language.
Finally, read the essay to a friend or family member. You'll stumble over sentences that aren't clear and you can go back and fix them. We often don't see grammatical mistakes when we read them, but when we hear them, the mistakes become very obvious.
Inspiration sometimes comes best under pressure. So maybe the rush to meet the deadline could be the best technique of all.
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