One of the most memorable essays college admissions counselor Alexis White worked on with a student wasn’t about a harrowing personal challenge or a rewarding volunteering experience. “It started with the sentence ‘My hair arrives in a room before I do,’” says White, the founder and director of the consultancy firm Alexis College Expert. “It just was the best. And everybody who reads it loves it.” College application essays have an infamous reputation for being one of the most difficult aspects of the application process. But it remains a crucial way to share details about your life and interests — a way to distinguish yourself beyond your grades, test scores, and extracurricular activities, even in the era of ChatGPT (more on that later). --- Vox’s guide to college application season You got into college. How will you pay for it? Applying to college? Seven current students on how to stand out and stay sane. --- Admissions officers are looking to be entertained when reading application essays, White says. Of course, students should use their essay to showcase their curiosities, character, and point of view, but contrary to popular belief, these personal statements don’t need to recount devastating moments of painful growth. “You can be fun,” White says. “You don’t have to have trauma.” There are a number of essays students will need to write as a part of their college application. Over 1 million students apply to college through the Common App, a streamlined platform that allows students to apply to multiple schools at once. There, students write a personal statement, usually between 500 and 650 words, centered on a student’s identity, beliefs, accomplishments, and interests, and can choose from among seven prompts for the 2024–25 application season. One prompt even allows the applicant to write about a topic of their choice. “Write the essay that your heart wants to write,” says college essay coach Cassandra Hsiao. Individual colleges also ask for additional shorter pieces (around 250 words), also known as supplemental essays, which may ask applicants to explain why they’re applying to this specific school, and about their academic interests and extracurricular activities. With so much to write, students need to dedicate serious time and effort — White suggests at least eight weeks — into crafting compelling and effective essays. Here’s what college essay pros want applicants to know. Make sure your essays are unique to you Students often put pressure on themselves to have a one-of-a-kind essay topic, White says. There are very few unique concepts, she continues, but what will set you apart is your way into the essay. Start strong with an attention-grabbing first sentence, experts say, that immediately hooks the reader. --- Can’t decide what to write? Try these exercises. Look around your house or room and pick 10 items that spark a memory — like a soccer trophy or a painting you made — and write them down. Or recount a typical day in your life in detail, from the music you listen to in the shower to the snack you grab before bed. The point, Brook says, is to home in on things that you may think of as humdrum, but that you can use to tell a story about yourself. Don’t discount minor details when thinking about extracurriculars and accomplishments. “When my kids are stuck, it’s a lot of chatting about things that they think don’t matter and then we typically come to something really great,” says Tyler. Another tactic is picking five adjectives would you use to describe yourself, suggests White. Expand on each with an experience or memory. --- Focus on developing a unique lens through which to see an event in your life, with an original point of view. These can be small moments, says Stacey Brook, the founder and chief adviser at College Essay Advisors. For example, one student she worked with wrote an essay about bonding with her mother during drives to gymnastics practice. After the student got her license and no longer had these moments with her mother, she wrote, she felt a sense of loss. “She was reflecting on what those drives meant to her and what it means to grow up and to gain things and lose them at the same time,” Brook says. “That’s the tiniest moment, the smallest slice of life out of which you can make an incredible essay.” Even if you’re writing about a common topic, like school sports or lessons learned from an adult in your life, one way to differentiate your essay is to add dialogue, Hsiao says. “It’s in the specificity that only you can write because you went through that,” she says. Avoid regurgitating your resume, Hsaio continues. Instead, lead the reader through a narrative arc showing your growth. You don’t need to explicitly state what you learned from the experience. Instead, use descriptive, scene-setting language — about how tense you were during that big game or your excitement when you stepped onto the stage — that shows how you’re different on the other side. Again, you don’t need to share the worst thing that’s ever happened to you — or try to dramatize your life to make it seem more challenging than it is — but help the reader understand the effort you put in to get a new club off the ground, for example. “What you went through objectively might be really small on a global scale,” Hsiao says, “but because it felt big to you and I care about you as the writer, it will feel big to me.” Don’t even think about copying from ChatGPT (or other generative AI) While Brook understands the appeal of ChatGPT, experts say don’t use it to write your essay. College application reviewers will be able to tell. The purpose of these pieces is to display your personality and writing ability and bots will never produce a unique, personalized essay. These chatbots use a style and tone that is immediately identifiable to readers, one that is rife with cliches and an awkward cadence, experts say. Appropriate uses of generative AI include spell and grammar check or as a thesaurus. “Once you start pulling full paragraphs, you’re cheating,” White says. “It’s not your work.” Tailor supplemental essays to each school Depending on the school, you may be asked to write one or two shorter supplemental essays. These prompts may have similar themes, about your academic interests or how you relate to the people around you. For these essays, experts say you can reuse answers for multiple schools — but make sure you revise your answers to be specific to each school. To ensure you’re tackling supplemental essays efficiently, Brook says to collect all of the prompts for the schools you’re applying to and see where they overlap. Hsiao suggests brainstorming three or four activities, obsessions or aspects of your life you know you want to showcase and try to match these topics to essay prompts. This can be anything from an extracurricular to your favorite TV show. “We are prioritizing what is important in our lives and then showcasing that by mixing and matching per school for the supplemental essay questions,” she says. For example, if you plan on writing about your future major for one college, adapt that essay to each school. However, make sure you’re researching each university and adding details about their specific program to your piece, Brook says. For essays asking why you want to attend that specific college, ensure your answers are unmistakably catered to that school. “‘I love Delaware because I can’t wait to go to football games and pledge a sorority, and I’m excited about the business school.’ That is not going [cut it] because you could say that about Rutgers,” says Kyra Tyler, a senior director and college admissions consultant at Bright Horizons College Coach. Instead, pepper your answer with details about school traditions, an honors program you hope to join, interesting research opportunities or what you observed when you went on a tour (whether in person or virtual), Tyler says. Tell a vivid story — and showcase your writing ability Not only do your essays need to be of substance, but they should showcase style, too. Tyler suggests students avoid metaphor: Don’t talk about caring for your younger sibling in the context of a Bluey episode — be straightforward. (“Kids can’t get away from [metaphors],” Tyler says, “and what happens is they get stuck under them, and they can’t write.”) You’ll want to write vividly using concrete examples instead of plainly spelling everything out, White says. For instance, if you were a camp counselor who helped a nervous child come out of their shell, write a scene showing the camper interacting with other kids rather than simply saying the camper was less reserved. Write as if you were talking to your best friend, Tyler says. Avoid slang terms, but let your personality come through your writing. Try reading your essay aloud to see if it sounds like you. Don’t forget about the basics, like good grammar, proper spelling, and word choice (make sure you’re not repeating similar words and phrases). You don’t need to focus on the five-paragraph structure, Hsiao says. Just make sure you’re telling a compelling story. Have a trusted adult, like a teacher or parent, read your essay to help point out style and structural issues you may have missed. After you’ve completed a draft, set it aside for a few days, come back to it with fresh eyes for revisions, Tyler says. College application essays are your chance to share who you were, who you are, and how this university will shape who you hope to be, Hsaio says. Focus on topics you want admissions officers to know and let your voice and passion carry the essay. Correction, September 19, 11 am ET: A previous version of this story conflated the number of applicants with the number of applications sent through the Common App. Over 1 million students apply using the Common App.

It’s that time of year again: Summer is over, class is in session, and high school seniors are filled with dread. Yes, it’s college application season. The formula required to get into many colleges these days involves striking a delicate balance between highlighting personal and academic accomplishments, outlining future interests and aspirations, and painting a picture of who you are versus who you want to be. The prospect of documenting an entire high school career while also selling your personality can be daunting. It’s normal for aspiring undergrads — and their parents — to feel overwhelmed. But you can manage it, whether you’re applying to five schools or 15. --- Vox’s guide to college application season This is what admissions officers really want to read in college essays You got into college. How will you pay for it? --- I talked to the people who are most familiar with how high-stakes it can all feel: seven current college students who successfully navigated the process for themselves. Here, they offer their best advice on staying organized, quelling anxiety, and the mistakes they wish they’d avoided. Responses have been edited and condensed for clarity. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket “At first, I only applied to one school, and then got wait-listed. I ended up applying to more after that. I wasn’t really thinking about college as much as I should have, and I was dead set on this one school. I just assumed the application process and acceptance was going to be a lot easier than it was. I put all my eggs in one basket. I was so overwhelmed and I wanted to get the application out of the way. I wish I would have applied to more schools from the start. I wish I would have relied more on support and help from other people, like my school counselors and friends who had already applied to colleges and got accepted.” —Alani Sage, 19. Applied to five schools, accepted to four, wait-listed at one. Now attends the University of Alabama. Trust that you can turn heartbreak around “I was one of those students who didn’t get accepted into a dream school, and you feel like it’s the end of the world, like you have no other hope. But now that I look back, I honestly think every single thing that happens, it’s for a reason. If you adapt and accept things head-on, you’ll thank yourself. I’m really happy now. I think that this experience was better for me, better for becoming more mature, more independent.” —Amna Ahmed, 19. Applied to 22 schools, accepted to 10, wait-listed at six. Now attends Wake Forest University. Use social media (but don’t let it discourage you) “Reddit is a great resource. Subreddits r/CollegeResults and r/ChanceMe are great resources because people post their admitted profiles and you can see what their extracurriculars were and you know what they did to get into X school. r/ChanceMe, you post your own application and people say if they think you’re going to get in or not. Take what people say about your application with a grain of salt, because at the end of the day, they’re not the admissions officer. It’s okay to compare yourself and your application to other people, but it’s not the be-all, end-all. Use it as inspiration but don’t think, ‘This person’s just better than me. I’m never going to have a chance.’” —Dylan Ott, 18. Applied to 15 schools, accepted via early decision to the University of Pennsylvania. Focus on authenticity “College apps are very tricky if you haven’t previously heard advice or if you don’t have other family members that have gone through them. I struggled a lot, because my family is from India, and they weren’t accustomed to the American college admission process. For example, a lot of my peers could afford college counselors when my family didn’t even know what those were. I struggled with selling myself and knowing how to tell my story in a way that was unique to me, because from a very young age, I felt pressure trying to be more like people around me. Whenever I was writing my essays, I would try to frame myself as someone that had this background that my peers did, even though I didn’t. Create a story for yourself that is so authentic and unique to you that anyone that reads it would be like, ‘That is so you.’ Pick one angle about yourself to go with. For me, I talked about my self-growth and development, from being pretty shy to being super confident, starting a TikTok, and being in debate.” —Tanu Tripathi, 20. Applied to 11 schools, accepted to six. Now attends the University of Texas. Just keep writing “I spent a lot of time finding my story and writing down my life, asking my parents about things through my childhood that I couldn’t remember that I could draw connections to right now. It was me dumping much of my life onto the page, and then rewriting it and rewriting it and rewriting it again for a long time. Those 250-word blurb answers were the hardest for me. I wrote about all my interests first and then saw what would match the essay questions for each school. Then you can edit them and change it to match, so you’re not really writing as many essays as you need to. In all, for every single school, there were over 50 essays. But I didn’t write 50 essays. A lot of these are reused, and a lot of them were also 150-word ones. For those questions, I always tried to answer them very creatively and in a way that most people wouldn’t just to show another side of myself.” —Jeremy Hsiao, 21. Applied to 11 schools, accepted to six, wait-listed at two. Now attends Stanford University. Stay organized and have an emotional outlet “I figured out a system of organization that worked for me. Making a drive on Google was huge. I called it ‘college.’ Within that drive I had different folders for scholarships, supplemental essays, and then my Common App. Once you have those folders, make a huge spreadsheet for all the colleges you’re going to apply to. Divide out your spreadsheet into three different sections: early action, a November 30 or December 1 deadline, and then your regular decision colleges. Having it all in one place helped a lot. Everyone’s going through this at the same time, and it’s really important to talk to your friends and family throughout the whole process for your mental health. Make sure you’re not keeping all the stress and all the overwhelming feelings inside of you. Make sure you’re ranting to your friends, ranting to your mom. Getting it all out is generally going to help you so much more in the long run.” —Chahat Kapoor, 20. Applied to 15 schools, accepted to nine, wait-listed at two. Now attends University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Highlight the commonality in all your activities “I talked to a lot of my admission officers and interviewers after I got into these schools and they told me what stood out about my profile was it was so clear what type of student I was going to be. All my activities, my awards, my essays, even my extracurriculars, touched on my leadership and value of community service, specifically in the health field. My junior year of high school when I started thinking about college, I sat down and I wrote out all my extracurriculars and all my awards, and I saw that so many things I did were involved in the health field, and I also had a lot of leadership positions, so that naturally became what I would present in my profile.” —Olivia Zhang, 19. Applied to 26 schools, accepted to 20, wait-listed at two. Now attends Harvard University.

Sometimes, panics are overblown. Sometimes, older generations are just freaking out about the youngs, as they have since time immemorial. That’s not the case, unfortunately, with kids’ learning right now, more than four years after the pandemic shuttered classrooms and disrupted the lives of millions of children. The effects were seen almost immediately, as students’ performance in reading and math began to dip far below pre-pandemic norms, worrying educators and families around the country. Even now, according to a new report released this week by the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), a research group at Arizona State University that has studied the impact of Covid on education since 2020, the average American student is “less than halfway to a full academic recovery” from the effects of the pandemic. The report — the group’s third annual analysis of the “state of the American student” — combines test scores and academic research with parent interviews to paint a picture of the challenges facing public schools and the families they serve. That picture is sobering: In spring 2023, just 56 percent of American fourth-graders were performing on grade level in math, down from 69 percent in 2019, according to just one example of test score data cited in the report. Declines in reading were less stark but still concerning, and concentrated in earlier grades, with 65 percent of third-graders performing on grade level, compared with 72 percent in 2019. Recovery in reading has also been slower, with some researchers finding essentially no rebound since students returned to the classroom. The report mirrors what many teachers say they are seeing in their classrooms, as some sound the alarm publicly about kids who they say can’t write a sentence or pay attention to a three-minute video. “Focus and endurance for any sort of task, especially reading, has been really hard for a lot of teenagers” since coming back from pandemic closures, Sarah Mulhern Gross, who teaches honors English at High Technology High School in Lincroft, New Jersey, told Vox. Meanwhile, even the youngest children, who were not yet in school when lockdowns began, are showing troubling signs of academic and behavioral delays. “We are talking 4- and 5-year-olds who are throwing chairs, biting, hitting,” Tommy Sheridan, deputy director of the National Head Start Association, told the New York Times earlier this year. If schools and districts can’t reverse these trends, Covid could leave “an indelible mark” on a generation of kids, CRPE director Robin Lake said this week. The effects are greatest for low-income students, students with disabilities, and children learning English as a second language, who faced educational inequities prior to the pandemic that have only worsened today. Covid “shined a light on the resource inequities and opportunity gaps that existed in this country, and then it exacerbated them,” said Allison Socol, vice president for P-12 policy, research, and practice at EdTrust, a nonprofit devoted to educational equity. The report is the latest effort to catalog what many educators, parents, and kids see as the deep scars — academic, but also social and emotional — left behind by the pandemic. Earlier this year, the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA), a nationwide testing company, reported that rather than making up ground since the pandemic, students were falling further behind. In 2023-24, the gap between pre- and post-Covid test score averages widened by an average of 36 percent in reading and 18 percent in math, according to the NWEA report. When it comes to education, the effect of the pandemic “is not over,” Lake said. “It’s not a thing of the past.” Kids are behind in reading and math, and they’re not catching up Nearly all public schools in America closed by the end of March 2020, and while some reopened that fall, others did not fully resume in-person learning until fall 2021. The switch to remote school, along with the trauma and upheaval of living through a global health emergency in which more than a million Americans died, dealt a major blow to students’ learning. Scores on one set of national tests, released in September 2022, dropped to historic lows, reversing two decades of progress in reading and math, the New York Times reported. Still, experts were optimistic that students could make up the ground they’d lost. NWEA’s MAP tests, which measure academic growth, showed a strong rebound in the 2021-22 school year, said Karyn Lewis, director of the Center for School and Student Progress at NWEA. But growth slowed the following year, and now lags behind pre-pandemic trends. Kids “are learning throughout the year, but they are doing so at a slightly sluggish pace,” Lewis said — not enough to make up for their Covid-era losses. A team of researchers using separate data from state tests appeared to find more hopeful results earlier this year, documenting significant recovery in both reading and math between 2022 and 2023. But after reanalyzing their data, they found that the improvements in reading were probably produced by changes in state tests, not actual improvements in student achievement, said Thomas Kane, faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard and one of the leaders of the research team. In fact, though students did gain some ground in math, they showed little recovery in reading between 2022 and 2023. More recent data does not paint a rosier picture. About half of states have released test results for the 2023-24 school year, and “I don’t see a lot of states with substantial increases” in scores, Kane said. Many factors probably contribute to students’ slow recovery, experts say. Some may have missed “foundational pieces” of reading and math in 2020 and 2021, Lewis said. Learning loss can be like a “compounding debt,” she explained, with skills missed in early grades causing bigger and bigger problems as kids get older. Chronic absenteeism also remains a big obstacle to learning. Twenty-six percent of students were considered chronically absent in 2022-23, up from 13 percent in 2019-2020. Children who are in kindergarten and first grade today were too young to experience the shift to remote learning in 2020 and 2021. But they were more likely to be isolated from other children and adults, Lake said. And like their older counterparts, many also experienced the trauma of deaths in the family, poverty, and parents out of work, all of which could have affected their social and emotional development. Some have argued that pandemic learning loss shouldn’t be a concern because all students were affected — maybe, the argument goes, learning is just different now. But that’s not the case, experts say. Students from wealthier school districts are already well on their way to recovery, while students in lower-income areas continue to struggle. “Not everybody is in the same boat,” Kane said. It’s not too late to help kids recover Despite the dismal numbers, some teachers are seeing successes. When they came back to the classroom after the pandemic closure, Kareem Neal’s students at Maryvale High School in Phoenix, Arizona, were falling asleep in class, having trouble focusing, and struggling to put away their laptops when asked, Neal, who teaches special education science and social studies, told me. But starting last school year, “a lot of the behavioral challenges dissipated,” he said. “I remember telling so many people, ‘Whoa, the kids are so well-behaved.’” Gross, the New Jersey English teacher, said she has seen improvement since her students were required to leave their cell phones at her desk during class. “For the first time in years, I’m seeing them talk to each other,” she said. Some schools have had success reducing chronic absenteeism, including a middle school in Salem, Massachusetts, that aimed to make education more fun by introducing more field trips and hands-on learning, according to the CRPE report. “It’s just like a happier version of school,” said one student cited in the report. There’s still time to help kids who are struggling, experts say. Most of the strategies proven to work are simple and low-tech, like tutoring and summer school, according to the CRPE report. Staffing shortages and the sheer logistical difficulty of setting up large-scale tutoring programs, however, have made even these solutions a challenge for districts, Lewis said. The expiration of pandemic-era federal funding later this month will only make matters worse. “A system that actually needs more is about to have less,” EdTrust’s Socol said. And districts have to actually make recovery programs accessible to all, and convince families to participate. In Louisiana, for example, just 1 percent of students eligible for a post-pandemic literacy tutoring program actually participated, according to the report, and districts often struggle to get students to enroll in summer school. But if schools don’t act, kids could face deficits in basic skills that could haunt them into adulthood, leading to difficulty attaining higher levels of education, finishing college, and lost earnings in their working lives. Because of grade inflation, many parents are also unaware that their children are behind academically. “One of the most powerful things would be if teachers told parents when their child was below grade level,” Kane said. In practice, that often doesn’t happen. But more than that, schools need to rebuild the relationships among students, teachers, and families that frayed during the pandemic, experts and educators say. “People want to feel like a part of a bigger community again,” Neal said. “We need to figure out ways to make that happen so that students are not feeling left out.”