i remember how stressful it was trying to write the perfect college essay for context my name is gohar i'm an mit senior and i was applying to college back in 2016-2017 i remember staying up so late on countless nights trying to perfect my essay and honestly it wasn't really towards the end of admission season when i had a piece that i was proud of and also this past admission season i went through hundreds of college essays and i found these same mistakes over and over and over again i am not an admissions officer but once you begin to read hundreds and hundreds of essays you do get a sense of which ones are more memorable and which ones kind of faded away so number one my best tip would be to show and not tell you have probably heard this piece of advice hundreds of times already but it's so important to engage the reader and to paint a picture in your essay if you're just stating facts like i like biology i like to work hard you're not providing evidence or a compelling story to back up what you say on the other hand if you tell a story about you in the lab working on a biology experiment your essay is going to be 10 times more interesting now of course you don't want to overdo it with adverbs and adjectives and descriptions and you do want a little bit of telling towards the middle and end of the essay but the point is to tell a story to include imagery and to create a very vivid memorable essay my second piece of advice is to run the pickup test on your essay now imagine your essay was in a pile of essays on the ground and also imagine that none of these essays have any names on them if your friend were to pick your essay up would they be able to tell that you wrote it if your answer to this question is no you have to go back to your essay omit the more generic details and make sure the details that you include are so specific that they could only be attributed to you and think about it if your essay is filled with generic details your piece will blend in with everyone else's and admissions officers might forget about your application for example instead of saying i walked to the store tell us which store you went to where you were why were you walking to the store something as little as using proper nouns instead of just staying store can help make your essay more personal and unique to you number three avoid generic or grandiose truisms in your essay for example statements like you should live life to the fullest you only live once maybe using these sorts of statements once or twice is fine but if your essay is filled with a bunch of generic sweeping statements like this it weakens your writing and it almost comes across as if you're trying too hard to impress the reader and this leads me to my fourth point make sure to use your real voice in your college essay don't pull out the thesaurus and try to replace every word with the fancier word don't try to flex how complex and windy and long your sentences can be and there's also no need to fill your essay with a bunch of old irrelevant quotes your essay should be conversational and it should sound as if you are actually talking to the admissions officer your essays are the one place of your application where your real voice can shine through and all the admissions officers want is the glimpse of who you are if you mask their perception with a bunch of fancy words they'll feel like they haven't gotten to know you and therefore probably forget about your application and yes you can use contractions you can't have paragraphs that are only one sentence long make sure that the structure of your writing and the style of your writing reflects how you speak this is not your typical five paragraph english essay so feel free to be a little bit creative also be sure to avoid cliche topics like sports injury death and divorce mission trips and so on while it is possible to pull off these essays in a unique way a lot of the time most of the statements that students make in these sorts of essays are very similar across the board so when a college admissions officer reads 20 essays about sports injury working hard recovering all of the students really begin to blend together and it becomes hard to pick out the one that stands out the most and in my opinion the craziest part about college essays is that even the craziest topics can work for example when i was applying to stanford i was super short on time and i had heard this piece of advice which was that any topic can make for a good college essay all that matters is how you write about it so i took that challenge literally and i ended up writing one of my college essays about volcanoes i took volcanoes i connected it to ap environmental science and i feel like i created a compelling narrative that showcased my love for nature and so on just make sure the topic you choose you can actually relate to and connect to your personality in some way don't just try to choose a random object and craft an essay around it there has to be some sort of personal meaning or connection to the metaphor itself next up watch out for common grammar mistakes here's a list of the most common ones that i noticed and surprisingly dangling modifiers came up very often next up make sure to have a friend a family member or a teacher review your essay and ask them if it actually sounds like you and if you'd like me or another harvard or mit student to review your essay head over to nextadmit.com link in my bio and we have already looked at over 1 000 essays best of luck writing yours comment if you want a part 2 to this video and i'll see you again next time