What Are Your Small Moments?

"Behind every big moment, there are lots of small ones."

In case you missed it, that's the theme of this ad. It's why every time I now see the TDAmeritrade logo, my eyes brim with sentimental tears. It also happens to be a great framework for thinking about how to approach the application essay.

The "big moment" trap.

For many students, the first instinct is to write about a big moment. You won something, like a game or an award. You overcame some challenge, at last. Big moments are impressive, right? Maybe.

The problem is that many big moments are similar. Whatever big moment you have, other applicants have had it, too. I'm not taking anything away from the effort it took you to get your big moment. I'm observing that while big moments are impressive, they are rarely unique.

The "small moment" solution.

Though they might not be unique, big moments can be great starting points as we think through possible topics. Think about how this ad worked. It started on the podium, the biggest moment of all, and then it went backward through many small moments.

If you have a big moment you want to write about, a reasonable next step is to identify a few small moments that contributed to that big moment.

Forget about what sounds impressive. If it's random, or even if it's ordinary to everyone except you, that's fine. In fact, it's good, since that's what makes it unique. As you think about your essay, remember the small moments!

Good luck writing!

Jon

Jon Perkins holds a B.A. in English from Stanford University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He helps students with their college, law school, and medical school applications.

How Do I Find a Good Topic?

5 Guidelines for Finding a Good Essay Topic

In this post, I will share 5 application essay tips that my past students have found useful. Again, these are "guidelines," not "laws" or "rules" or "secrets." Use them if they make sense; otherwise, move on!

Guideline #1: A good essay topic says something new.

The application gives you space to list your activities and awards, so that is where you explain your achievements. The essay less about achievement and more about character. Specifically, a good essay topic shares an experience that reveals something new - something the reader would never know otherwise - about your character.

Guideline #2: A good essay topic has conflict.

Any movie, book, video game, or TV show you enjoy has conflict. Usually this conflict is between people. As Phil often reminds me, "The better the conflict, the better the story." Nothing draws a crowd faster than a fight, and that same idea applies to your writing. Who is your opponent? Consider where your conflict is.

Guideline #3: A good essay topic has desire.

This is an extension of the conflict idea. Desire spawns conflict. You and I want the same thing, or you and I want different things. My desire leads to conflict. If you're just writing down a bunch of facts about your life but can't identify any desire, that might be why your essay is boring.

Guideline #4: A good topic has sights and sounds.

Imagine someone following you around recording video and audio of everything you do. When you write about your topic, you're writing descriptions of that video and audio. The clips you select reveal your inner feelings. A good topic lives in the outside world where others can observe it, not in the inside world of your thoughts that no one else can see.

The biggest obstacle to students writing about sights and sounds is this: not writing about a specific moment in time. Say you love going to the beach. Most students would write, "I love going to the beach." The problem is that the reader doesn't know what sights and sounds "going to the beach" entails for you. By omitting a description of a specific moment at the beach, you lose control of your reader. The simple solution is to describe the sights and sounds of one particular outing to the beach. Talk about the cries of the sea gulls or the sea lions on the red buoy, or whatever. By talking about sights and sounds in a particular moment - and not just general sights and sounds - you give the reader the raw information that allows her see life from your perspective.

Guideline #5: A good topic explores doubt.

Students have spent years getting ready for college, so it's natural to feel a little anxiety. "Will the colleges appreciate everything I've done?" is a common feeling. And a common response is to say, "I'm awesome, and here's why."

You are, with 85% probability (based on my experience working with students), awesome. But a more convincing way to make this argument is often to say, "Here's what happened. I didn't know what to do or think at first. Then I figured it out, and I'm a better person now." In other words, you start by writing about your doubts. As Phil puts it, "Write about something you don't already know the answer to." This approach isn't, however, for the lazy or "I just want good enough" student, as self-reflection, it turns out, takes energy and time. But if you're in the other half of students, probing uncertainty should get you a better essay.

Good luck writing!

Jon

Jon Perkins holds a B.A. in English from Stanford University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He helps students with their college, law school, and medical school applications.

The Emergent Essay

Jargon Alert

If there's one thing that's guaranteed to make me smirk, it's business jargon that tries to sound smart. A list of my favorite examples, with translations:

1. Unrealized synergies: there are still people we can fire to save money
2. Non-recurring expense: we messed up, but it's just this once, so don't worry about it, bro
3. Opportunistic: we don't have a strategy, so let's use this word instead
4. Inflection points: if I borrow a term from calculus, maybe you will believe my fanciful projections
5. Levers: pronounced LEE-vers - also known as steps I can take to solve a problem

I much prefer practical business tips from my MBA friends like "Bring doughnuts" or "Find a new job before you quit your old one." Anyway, you can imagine the look on my face when a friend sent me an email that mentioned "emergent strategy." Without knowing anything about this term except that it sounded fake, I turned to Google for illumination. My smirk, it turns out, was premature.

Emergent Strategy

From what I gather, emergent strategy just means you figure it out as you go. The opposite would be deliberate strategy, which means you follow a set plan. Deliberate strategy is like the queen telling her soldiers where to attack. Emergent strategy is like soldiers scouting the battlefield and figuring out for themselves where to attack. (Yes, I acknowledge that my concept of warfare is 200 years out of date.) In keeping with this post's business theme, I offer you a chart of colorful geometric shapes. Look at all those mischievous red arrows!

Now, as I am learning, geometric shapes inform but rarely move. Can I remember any diagram from any presentation ever? No, actually, I can't. That's why our stories need images. So here's one to remember - emergent strategy is like what army ants do. One wandering ant finds something delicious, like a beetle, and then signals the others to join in, and then these new ants send more signals, and very quickly the beetle becomes a nice afternoon snack. The queen does not dictate strategy to the common ants. The common ants discover it for themselves.

Remember: Emergent Strategy = Ants

Deliberate Mindset v. Emergent Mindset

When you write, you can have either a "deliberate mindset" or an "emergent mindset." That's right, no blog post critiquing business jargon would be complete without the invention of new jargon. Though this jargon, I would argue, is descriptive and, therefore, useful to our discussion about how to approach the application essay. That's right. I have drunk the jargon Kool-Aid, and it is delicious purple.

What do these mindsets look like when it comes to writing the application essay? The student with the deliberate mindset is the one who says, "I'm going to write about X" and then does just that. She defines her topic and conclusion in advance and does not deviate from her plan. In contrast, the student with the emergent mindset is the one who says, "I'm going to write about X" and, as she starts to do so, begins to explore Y, Z, and the whole rest of the alphabet.

In my experience, the students with emergent mindsets tend to write more insightful essays because they understand writing is a process of discovery. They don't get mad when they realize they can only salvage one paragraph from their first draft. They don't get mad when their original theme yields to a deeper one. They don't get mad when they realize on draft #6 that they just need to scrap the whole thing and start over. Instead, they are excited about - or at least open to - discovering their best story.

2 Ways to Apply the Emergent Mindset

Awareness of the emergent mindset has two implications for us as essay writers:

1. Don't over-plan. If you're the type who likes everything planned out from the start, you need to let that go. The deliberate mindset will prevent you from discovering new, better ideas because you will be too focused on your old, worse ideas. The writing process is a road with curves, potholes, and dead ends, so you have to accept some uncertainty. You want to take the freeway to get there fast, but it's closed for repairs, so you have to take a detour.
2. Do lots of freewriting. Freewriting is one of many great tips Phil has shared with me about writing. When you first sit down to write about your topic, you don't really know what angle will work best. The most efficient way to figure that out is to write a long, casual draft - to freewrite. 1200 words for your 650-word Common App essay? Great! The more you write, the greater the chance we will discover something that tells your story. Each sentence is an ant, and each essay an army. Watch your ants and see which direction they're marching. Their destination is your essay's theme. That's how you start writing the emergent essay.

Good luck writing!

Jon

Jon Perkins holds a B.A. in English from Stanford University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He helps students with their college, law school, and medical school applications.

Evoking Emotion with Observation

I came across this clip of a blind chef competing on Masterchef, and I think it’s a good follow up to Jon’s Marklar post on the importance of observation. When Gordon Ramsay describes the way the apple pie looks and sounds, I am able to connect with the contestant, Christine Ha, on a deeper level. Before, I was impressed by a blind person cooking. Now I’m emotionally invested in her. Now I care what her fate on the show is.

I can’t really relate to being blind. But Chef Ramsay’s observations help me begin to empathize, and not just with Christine’s blindness. His description leads the way to some poignant insight. His conclusion isn’t “Congratulations Christine, you overcame your blindness and made a great pie.” He does congratulate her on a great pie, but he uses his observations to address her insecurity and self-criticism. Self-doubt, not blindness, is the demon Christine will have to contend with in the competition. Chef Ramsay’s acute observation brings to light this more subtle and universal truth. We may not be chefs, or reality show contestants, or blind, but we all know what self-doubt is.

Observations draw us into stories. But to convey and evoke emotions, observations must become something more powerful. They must become discoveries.

Phil

Your Essay is Marklar

Understanding Marklar

When I think about admission officers reading essays, I imagine them hearing something like that marklar scene. Comfort zone. The value of _____. And all the other marklar phrases that make readers shrug.

What You See

One of the things I hear on the soccer field is "What you see!" This phrase is supposed to mean that I have time to look around. It's redundant, I think, since any decent player should already be looking around. But "What you see!" is actually great writing advice. It forces you to write about observations, and observations are what help your essay sound less marklar.

Here's what I asked myself last week: Why not ask students to describe what they observe? No commentary. Just what they see, hear, hear, touch, taste, or smell. I tried it out:

"I am sitting at a desk stained-reddish brown. The edges and corners show the bare wood beneath. The desk has eight drawers. Each drawer handle looks like two pawns from a chess board connected with a pencil-thick rod. On top of the desk is my Toshiba laptop. A Skype sticker blocks the camera lens. A blue ethernet cable snakes out of the right side of my laptop and disappears over the edge. So does a black power cord, which has curled itself into a loop like a heart. I am streaming Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto #2 through Classical KUSC. To the left of my laptop, my cell phone sits on top of an unopened, shrink-wrapped package of updates to a landlord tenant practice guide. The top page is pink. In front of the package is a small, yellow legal pad. Some notes are scrawled in pencil. Above me, the recessed lights shine down their white glow. Shadows from the leaves of the tree outside the window flicker across the floor. The window is open, but my office smells of fresh paint, not fresh air."

Try it for yourself. Spend 10 minutes typing everything you observe around you.

Today I Learned

Doing the "What you see" exercise taught me a few things:

1. Observation is Hard. As I typed, I kept wanting to explain what the details meant. I had trouble sticking to what was in front of me.
2. Observations Lead to Insight It's fairly common for students to tell m e, "I want to write about how experience X taught me insight Y." In other words, even before they write about experience X, they think they already know the insight Y. I now think this is wrong a fair amount of the time. How can I know what an experience means if I haven't even described it yet? If, before I did the exercise, you had asked me what my desk reveals about me, I would just say it shows I don't care if my desk is messy. But the details I observed might show something more. Take the fact that though I write notes on a small legal pad, I haven't opened the updates to my Landlord Tenant guide. That suggests some ambivalence about my identity as an attorney. Or take the fact that the Skype sticker covers my camera lens whenever I'm not actually using the camera. That suggests some anxiety about the relationship between technology and privacy. But neither of these ideas occurred to me when I first glanced at my desk. I had to write about them to discover them.
3. Insights Can Be Spoilers. When you go to a movie, the first scene doesn't explain what the whole movie means. Otherwise, why would anyone watch? We like observing and anticipating. Your reader likes that, too. But when you put your big insight about your experience at the beginning of your essay, you spoil the reader's fun by giving give away the ending. So don't start with your main insight. Save it for the end of the paragraph or the end of the essay.

Why Writing This Way Connects

When you write "what you see," you invite the reader to see exactly what you saw. It's like Google glass, except not in a creepy way. When you bombard your reader with generalities, the reader can deflect them and remain untouched. But when your reader sees through your eyes, she starts to identify with you, and maybe even like you. That's writing that connects, and that's what you want.

Good luck writing!

Jon

Jon Perkins holds a B.A. in English from Stanford University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He helps students with their college, law school, and medical school applications.