Right around now, if your high school senior is staring at a stubbornly blank computer screen trying to will their college essays into being, you may be asking yourself: Should I be helping them? How? How much? Or should I stay out of the process entirely?
I’ve been a professional writer since summer 1996. I’ve turned politicians’ terse replies (they’re not always answers) into 500-word pieces. I’ve written about what happens when the president hosts a summit or stays at a hotel or makes a telephone call.
So when it came time for my son to write his college essays – both the main Common App piece and the supplementals required by his top choice school – he felt pressure as an applicant. And I felt pressure as someone who could almost certainly improve what he wrote.
Here’s what worked for us and where we drew the line. Your mileage may vary.
Short answer: Getting some help from parents, friends, teachers, guidance counselors or a paid counselor (if that’s how you roll) is fine. Parental micromanagement is not. This has to be their essay. I suspect that college admissions staff can sniff out when a mom or dad has meddled overmuch. (Like if your teen uses the word “overmuch.”)
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Longer answer: My wife and I had been casually brainstorming with our son about a topic for his Common App personal statement since fall of his junior year, so he came to the process knowing generally what he wanted to talk about. That may have been the most helpful thing we did as parents.
We also signed him up for a week-long essay clinic. That was $$$ well spent. He got a lot of individualized attention and advice. He came home on the last day with his essay “done.” And I did not have to play the heavy. Critiques and deadline enforcement? Outsourced!
He was so happy that he handed me the supposedly finished product and, for what may have been a first in his high school career, invited me to read it. I did so and told him that it was excellent – but that he should read it out loud.
“Because you’ll catch two of the three mistakes that I caught.”
Note: I did not fix the errors. I merely flagged that they existed and let him do the repair work.
When it came time to do the supplemental essays for his top school, he again asked me to help him. We talked through the general idea of what he wanted to say. I gave him some of the advice I gave in my previous essay column: Mention specific places and experiences from the tour that stayed with you.
To do so, I helped him remember specific things that he had raved about as we’d crossed that particular campus, and again when we took stock of our visit. He turned those into a couple of memorable phrases.
I still remember one of them today, two years later. And I remember how proud he was of how he worded it. As for me, I had helped get him there but without meddling. Or at least not overmuch.
Olivier Knox is the son of college professors and worked in admissions as a student at his dream school. He has a 100% success rate guiding the next generation of applicants into their first-choice colleges (sample size: one son). Reach Olivier at oknox@usnews.com.
