As the Coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic becomes more impactful to an ever-increasing swath of the world, the perspectives of millions of students are inevitably being shaped by the experience. Crises — and trauma — produce changes, and changes become fodder for essays. In the 2020-2021 college application season, many students will be writing essays about this event.
We’ve seen this happen before. When regions are impacted by natural disasters such as floods, tornados, and hurricanes, a significant portion of the students applying to college from that region end up putting their experiences into their application essays. Our team at The Koppelman Group, based in New York, has friends and family who wrote about 9/11 when they applied to college in the early aughts. Psychologically, we’re in a similar position today. After all, our world changed rapidly from Covid-19. Things that seemed perfectly safe before March 2020 suddenly became unthinkable. Gathering with friends became dangerous. The grocery store became an obstacle course. Dusty sewing machines were pulled out to turn pillowcases into home-sewn masks. And with those changes, so many of the “old” topics students like to write about — activities, sports, internships, summer programs — now seem irrelevant. Make no mistake: hundreds of thousands of students are going to write about Covid-19.
The Good News: We didn’t want you to write your main college essay about sports, internships, summer programs, and activities anyway. Those subjects being out of the running for your main college essay is ultimately a good thing.
The Bad News: Writing about the current crisis is a tricky affair. You’ll need to find an angle that goes beyond empty grocery store shelves and sick family members.
Remember: Good essays are more than a description of a period in time — they’re an illustration of the person who lived in it.
In previous posts, we began to explore how to (and how not to) write essays and supplements in the time of the Coronavirus. In this post, we’ll be going deeper by diving into the mechanics of writing an essay about the Coronavirus/COVID-19 and how to do it well. We will be focusing on the Common App essay, but this advice applies to any and all college application essays regardless of school, application system, or questions.
Our System
To keep things simple, we’ve broken down the types of Coronavirus essays we expect to see in the coming months into three categories: Red, Yellow, and Green.
RED: Red essays are useful only in that they get a bad idea out of the way of the great ones you will have next. Scrap and start over.
YELLOW: Yellow essays are not the worst things we’ve ever read, and they are fixable. They are on the right track but need some serious reworking to achieve success.
GREEN: Green essays are what we want to see. There is always room for editing and adjusting, but green essays are not only headed in the right direction — they’re close to arrival.
Let’s break down Red, Yellow, and Green essays with examples to show what works and what needs to be avoided.
The Danger of the Red Essay
An overwhelming percentage of the college essays that we encounter in the ‘wild’ are what we would categorize as “red light essays.” Applying with a red essay doesn’t disqualify you from getting into a good college or even your dream college. However, it makes accomplishing that goal harder. Simply put, a bad essay works against you in the application process, undercutting your scores and transcripts instead of bolstering them.
Red essays accomplish the narrative equivalent of a bulleted list. Rather than telling you a story, they inform you of what you ought to know about the applicant. If it’s hard to envision this kind of essay, imagine the descriptive placard in front of a museum exhibit. Rarely does it excite or inspire. Instead, it states facts. There isn’t story to animate those facts.
The reason red essays are so dangerous is that they can be well-written. They can be grammatically perfect and use a diverse vocabulary. But they still aren’t good college essays because they aren’t memorable.
For example, you could write an ostensibly interesting essay on how you survived the Coronavirus pandemic. But this essay might still fail on the grounds that it doesn’t cause the reader to feel like they’ve truly gotten to know you. A red essay might do a good job of reporting objectively on events, but ultimately fail to be a window into the applicant’s personality, values, or worldview.
Another example of a red college essay is the “Look how crazy my life was during the Coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic” variety. This type of essay could feel good when read aloud because it’s deeply personal and, in a way, tells a story about who you are. But it can lack perspective. Many of the applicants you’re competing against will have a unique story to tell; but few of them will tell their story in a way that demonstrates the way they think. See this sample essay to get a sense of what showing your unique thought process looks like.
The ideas that inspired red essays do not necessarily need to be scrapped, but the writing does. Editing red essays will take more time than writing a better essay from scratch, so it’s worth putting the drafts in the bin and moving on to better work, even if it comes from the same core ideas.
Getting a Yellow Essay on Track
While red essays cover a topic without making the reader see their unique thought process, yellow essays do, in fact, look inward. This is an improvement. Looking inward is better than simply writing about yourself. When you look inward, you’re sharing not just an experience, but how you thought, felt, and grew from that experience.
Yellow essays include reflection. Reflection tells the reader far more about you than an outline of your experiences do. When you reflect, you provide college admissions officers with a sense of how you are a product of your experiences.
So, what’s the problem?
What yellow essays make up for in reflection they lack in narrative arc. There isn’t a story. Despite including your thoughts and feelings on your experiences, they still don’t take the reader on a journey. This is even more noticeable when the writer tries to go deep but can’t because the story the essay is framed around doesn’t have enough substance.
If your essay could be summed up with the line “How the Coronavirus pandemic changed my perspective on X,” your essay is probably too directly reflective and not as story-driven. And it’s almost certain to feel stale. Whatever X is, someone else has written it, and your version of X isn’t more interesting just because it’s yours.
Our Least Favorite Sentence Ever
Our least favorite sentence in college essay writing can be found in almost every Yellow essay. “During this time,” it begins, “I was forced to reflect on…” or “I learned…” or “I discovered…” or “it was finally revealed to me that…” or “I came to realize…”. These types of sentences cause the reader to stop paying attention because they’re telling rather than showing. Stories are far better, because they show rather than tell.
Getting To Green
These are the essays we help our students to write. These are the essays that make our day when they pop up in our inbox. They have story, context, and reflection. They strive for greatness, and they achieve it. They are great college essays, but they are also great essays regardless of the college application process.
Story, context, and reflection. We’ve written about how these traits can variously appear in Red and Yellow essays, but it’s in Green essays that they come together.
You can also address a topic without being overly direct, and this applies particularly well to a topic as overdone as Covid-19. Consider the two essay topic ideas below:
Scenario 1: In this essay, the student tells the story of a passion that they discovered while learning from home, and then continued after the quarantine. This theoretical essay focused on two precise moments of discovery within a broader story arc, allowing for both strong narrative and inspiring creative growth.
Scenario 2: In this essay, a student dives into something they knew about themselves before the pandemic but hadn’t had the opportunity to explore before schools shut down. This passion isn’t academic, but it is cerebral. It requires deep thought and concentration and expands on an existing interest. And this essay, it’s written in a way that expresses the depth of that thought and concentration and passion. It tells a story, and it inspires others.
What do both of these essays have in common? They were facilitated by the pandemic, but aren’t about Coronavirus.
When you sit down to begin writing your essay, keep our descriptions of red, yellow, and green essays in mind. While it’s challenging to write about an experience that was shared by the entire world in a unique way, it’s very much possible to do so. It all comes down to showing who you are through one intriguing moment.
In this post, we’ve been focusing on the 650-word Common App essay, but this advice also applies to shorter pieces such as supplements. We go into more detail in our supplement-specific post.
If you want to get started on your college applications but don’t know where to begin, send us an email. We specialize in helping students craft compelling applications from the ground up.