hey everyone its Logan welcome back so today is August 2nd 2016 which means that the college application season is upon us so now that the common application is open and ready to be submitted it’s time for you to start thinking about writing those essays in order to help you out a little bit with the brainstorming process and actually writing the essays I’ve decided to share with you a list of five tips that I have that might help make this process just a little bit easier for you number five is start early since the common application is now open you can start browsing through all of the different essay topics so you can see what areas of your life you might want to talk about in these different essays and what I like to do is open in a separate document maybe in Google Docs and put the essay topics in there so that you can start putting your essay in your Google Doc and constantly be updating it and changing it but it is important that you start with something right now even if it is just a very rough draft ultimately the more time you have to work on these essays the better they’re going to be in the end there’s nothing wrong with starting before school starts because you want to make sure that when you do submit your application the piece that you submit is something that you are proud of and also you want to make sure that it’s something that reflects who you truly are think about it you’re trying to summarize almost eighteen years of your life in just a few essays so it’s really important that you spend more than just a few minutes on them number four is make multiple drafts it’s inevitable that your first draft of any essay won’t be your final one everyone has to start somewhere so you might as well just get something down on paper and start with a very very rough draft from there you can make subsequent drafts where you constantly improve the essay so you can work towards creating that final piece that you truly are proud of next this one’s an easy one you can ask other people to help you but before you ask a person to edit your essay you want to make sure that you know what you’re asking them for for example sometimes you just want someone to edit the grammar of your paper other times you might want them to edit the punctuation and perhaps the most important one is asking someone to look at the content of your paper and give you feedback on whether or not it actually addresses the prompt and does justice to who you are as a person when you go to ask someone to review your paper based on the content I would suggest going to someone who doesn’t know you very well I say this because if you ask a parent or a very close friend ahead of your paper they might not realize if you’re missing some very important part of your life that could add to the essays value on the other hand if you ask someone who doesn’t know you that well they might tell you if it seems like something is missing and then it’ll be easier for you to fill that in number two might sound a little strange but just bear with me for a minute it’s things small when people start thinking about college essays they think that it has to be that’s a monumental piece about this struggle that you went through in life and overcame and all of the hardships you’ve had along the way but that’s not necessarily true some of the best essays that I’ve ever seen are about really small things in life there’s something very powerful about a very small moment in a person’s life giving them inspiration and ambition far beyond the magnitude of the actual event it’s called a personal essay for a reason and there’s no recipe that can help you make the perfect essay for one of my essays personally which I thought was one of my best I wrote about a very small moment that was very impactful to me I did a research project in Brooklyn New York during my junior year of high school and I actually traveled out to New York City to work on it at one point and while I was there I took the subway from Manhattan to Brooklyn I was surrounded by complete strangers who I’d never seen before in my life I was a bit intimidated and scared by the whole experience but as I began to travel closer and closer to the place where I was doing my research I began to feel a togetherness that the people on the train I thought about the fact that these were the very people that I could be helping with my research and it helped me to realize that I wanted to dedicate my life to performing research projects and helping people around the world so this is just an example of one moment in my life when I was inspired by something that might otherwise go unnoticed and I would advise you to look back at your life and see which moments have inspired you to become the person you are and pursue your life’s ambitions and lastly the arguably most important piece of advice I have for you is be different when it comes down to it these admissions officers are reading hundreds and maybe even thousands of essays every application season don’t get lost in the crowd don’t try to fit in but be different so that you stand out and that admissions officer remembers who you are give them a reason to admit you while you’re writing your essay make sure to experiment with things like structure style and voice and change it up but on that same note I want to caution you don’t try to be someone you’re not just try to be yourself but express it in a very unique way I hope this advice has been helpful to you and I wish you the best of luck in the college application process make sure to reach out to me if you have any other questions and also let me know how this advice worked for you and getting into the colleges that you want to go to if you liked this video make sure you give it a thumbs up and subscribe and also share with your friends have a good week and I’ll see you again on Tuesday bye everyone