Speaker 1: Okay, and now we are rolling. Welcome to the CollegeLead YouTube channel, guys. My name is Kristen and I graduated from Harvard last year where I studied computational neuroscience. If you are a senior in high school right now trying to get started on college essays but have no idea how to even begin, then you have come to the right place. I will cover three steps that you can take to get started with a college essay, and each of these steps are very simple and easy to follow. So with that, let's get started. Okay, so now we are in my laptop and hopefully you can see what is on my screen. For those of you who have been subscribed to my channel for a while, this will look very familiar. We are back in OneNote, one of my favorite tools where I like to write outlines and stay organized and everything else related to that. Before we get started, please give this video a like and also subscribe for more content like this. Also, if you haven't yet, definitely come and say hi in my Slack channel. I post a lot of fun links there from study breaks where you can play Escape the Room, Scribble.io, or even scholarship or even more practical or academic items like scholarship lists, extracurricular opportunities, and more. So stop by and say hi. I will leave the link in the description. Okay, so step one in the college essay writing process. You should always start with breaking down the prompt, so breaking down the prompt. The reason why I want you to start with breaking down the prompt is because the number one mistake that I've seen many students make is that they will write an amazing essay, but the essay will not be answering the prompt or it will kind of go on a tangent and not actually cover something the prompt is asking. If you start from the prompt and exactly what it asks you, then you are less likely to stray from it. So now that we have this, let's hop over to the Common App prompts and I'll pick one of them to use as an example of how I want you to break down that prompt. Okay, so now we are in the Common App and we have here a list of first year essay prompts. So this will apply for you if you are currently a high school senior or recently graduated from high school and are looking to apply to a college and join in freshman year. If you are transferring from one college to another, you might have different prompts, but the same concept of breaking down the prompt will apply. Okay, so we have a list of different prompts here and essentially what you will have to do is choose one of these to answer for your Common App essay. The word limit for this essay, and that actually shows if you log into your account, will be 650 words, so it's quite a lengthy essay. Okay, so this looks like an interesting prompt. Let's choose this for now. And I'm going to paste it here. Notice how long and complicated this prompt is. It's not just a single question, it is three sentences, which is crazy. So let's start from the top. The lessons we take from obstacles we can encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you and what did you learn from the experience? Now that is a huge mouthful, but let me bold the parts that we want to address and write about in our college essay. So this will be the first part. So this is part one. Let me highlight that in blue. And then how did it affect you? This is part two. Let me highlight that in green. And what did you learn from the experience? Let's highlight that. Which color should we go with? Just down the line? Yellow. Okay, great. A breakdown of the prompt and what exactly the prompt wants us to say. First, they want us to recount a time when you faced a challenge, a setback, or failure. Let's say we're going to talk about a challenge. So step one, we need to discuss a challenge. Step two, we need to describe how it affected you. Step three, what did you learn from the experience? Great. And this already brings us to step two in how to write your college essay, which is to outline. And I don't mean just outline like this. I mean to outline like really outline a very detailed outline. And I'll show you what that looks like in just a second after I figure out how on earth to format. Guys, it's been too long since I have been in OneNote. Okay, great. I don't want this outline to just be any outline. You want this outline to be as detailed as possible. As an example, I will just make up a story. Let's say that I have the worst time trying to do well in labs in school. And these labs are just chemistry labs, bio labs, whatever, you name it. So the challenge overall is performing well in labs. And maybe that's because I'm clumsy. Again, I'm not saying that this is the best example idea ever. This is more so an illustrative example. So see how what I do with this idea, rather than how good this idea is. Okay, so let's say that doing well in labs and STEM courses is difficult and discouraging. Great, that's an awesome challenge. But if you really want to write a strong essay, go deeper, give me a very specific example. So let's start this over. Let's say, what was the worst lab that you ever had in a STEM course? Let's just say that in this experiment, you were given a plate of bacteria and had to identify what species this was by the end of the week by performing various experiments on it. For instance, to stain it to see whether it was gram positive or gram negative, test whether it survives in high temperatures or low temperatures, and more tests like that. So this is a challenge. We were able to go from a high level of labs in general are just challenging to a very specific example where this one lab with identifying bacteria was the worst. The reason why I want you to go more specific is because this will enable you to be very descriptive in your essay, really help to draw in the admission officers or your readers into the narrative. As you describe the story, don't forget to incorporate the senses. What did you feel at the time you were doing this experiment? What did you see? What was it like? Put them in your shoes. Why was it frustrating? What wasn't going well? So the first point you can cover in this particular situation would be first, what you saw, point B, what were you doing? And what was the goal you were working towards? Now these will all provide great context for what exactly the challenge was, right? You want to show what was the goal? What were you doing or what was difficult about it? And what you were seeing at the time, you're going to appeal to the senses. Okay, great. Now I want you to bring in some more emotion. How did it affect you? It was probably frustrating, right? I'm a poor example student here. So it was frustrating and demotivating, but I want to dive deeper into understanding why. So the first point would be, why was it frustrating? You can also cover why or how it was frustrating. Point B, what was your thought process? See how these questions will help your essay become a little multidimensional and really draw the reader to seeing the world or this situation from your POV, that will really help the reader to empathize with whatever challenge you were experiencing at the time. And the more a reader can relate to you, the more likely they will be to really understand the learning experience you had and the more likely they will like your application. Now you can cover what lessons you learned to really figure out what exact lesson you learned. There will be a pivot point, right? When did you stop becoming frustrated? So describe the pivot point. And this pivot point will be from when you went from frustrated to motivated. And then it's from this change where the learning happens. So first describe the pivot point. And then state the lesson learned. And then you can go on to say how this lesson helped you to succeed in similar challenges. Let's say that in the future, you have another lab where you need to identify fungi or fungi, however you pronounce it. Describe how whatever lesson you learned was able to help you succeed in other lab experiments or in class. As a bonus point, let's say that the lesson you learned helped you to continue to perform well in track. So that's great. It can be other unrelated areas too. So let me just write track. And then lastly, this is a bonus, but how does this lesson, describe how this lesson makes you a stronger candidate for college or a stronger student and better positioned to succeed in college? Awesome. And then the third step, which is the very final one, is to write. And this will involve write, editing, revising, and all of that fun stuff. If you would like me to make another video detailing how to go about writing your essay, editing it and revising it, let me know in the comments below. I'd be happy to make part two, if that's something that would be helpful for you guys. But hopefully this video and very quick walkthrough gave you an idea of how exactly you can start with a prompt, break it down, create a very detailed and strong outline for it, and then begin writing. In essence, the goal here is to save you as much time as possible, because one of the most difficult parts of writing a college essay is just first figuring out what in the world you should write about. And if you put your thoughts out on paper, you can edit your ideas rather than the exact sentences that you are writing. And by editing the ideas, you'll reduce the amount of time you'll have to spend editing and revising. Let's say when you saw this prompt, you just jumped directly into writing an essay without considering the exact points and how you would like to describe the situation or challenge. It's probably more likely in that case where you'll have to edit and revise or even cut out paragraphs of what you have written before. So I highly encourage you to try this method and let me know how it goes. Again, every student is different. So this method may not necessarily work for you. But this is something that I found to be immensely helpful when I was applying to college. If you enjoyed this video and found it helpful, please give it a thumbs up and also subscribe for more content like this. I will see you guys in the next one. Thank you for watching.