Writing the all-important admission essay

Despite rising tuition and residential accommodation fees in foreign countries — especially the US, UK, Canada and Europe — the annual outflow of students from India who venture abroad for quality higher education shows no sign of decreasing.  However, it’s a mistake to believe that colleges/universities abroad are accessible by all who can afford the tuition and other fees payable. Ill-equipped and under-prepared students tend to hold other students back and depress teaching-learning standards that foreign universities pride themselves on. Therefore, high tuition fees apart, they also rigorously test admission applicants. And one of the critical requirements of all undergrad colleges and universities is the admission essay which all applicants are required to write. Indeed, it wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that the essay is given greater weightage by admission officers than SAT/ACT scores and school-leaving records.  Therefore when students start working on their admission essays, one of the great challenges they face is to answer the question: how do I make my essay different and appreciated by over-worked admission officers?  Although deceptively simple, students tend to struggle with this conundrum. Partly because it is so open-ended, and partly because students from India — who are inclined to regard university education as an extension of school — have no idea of what higher ed institutions abroad are like. So when they choose the subject of their essays, they often write superficially about mascots, professors and clubs. They struggle to make their essays distinct, original and specific, and really aren’t sure how to convince the college that they really want to go there. This makes what should be a fairly simple essay far more difficult, and they end up frustrated and overwhelmed. This prompts some of them to plagiarise or cut and paste content from the Internet. This is absolutely inadvisable. There’s a good chance of your being discovered and blacklisted from ever applying again. So here are my top three suggestions for writing original and persuasive admission essays for higher education institutions abroad: Respect the college you would like to be admitted into as you would like to be respected by it. Too often, students prepare one admission essay and send it to several colleges/universities, changing only the name and address. Recently, I saw a student’s draft of an essay, which was for several undergrad colleges in the US. This is a terrible way to approach this task. You want the college to treat you like an individual, to learn about you and your hopes and interests. You wouldn’t want to be treated like an interchangeable unit, but as the unique person that you are. You should treat the college in exactly the same way. Therefore, before you write your admission essay, look at what makes the college/university of your choice different. So research as to what makes it distinctive. It’s not the clubs, or classes, because most of them will be similar in these aspects. What is it about each college/university that sets it apart? What aspects of its history and…