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Admissions Essay Guides

Guidance for application season, covering personal statements, college essays, scholarship letters, and interviews. These articles show you how to tell your own story convincingly without falling into the cliches admissions readers see every day.

How Long Should a College Essay Be?

How Long Should a College Essay Be?

There is no single number, and that is the actual answer. A college essay is as long as the box you are pasting it into allows, and in the 2 ...

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Scholarship Essay Examples

Scholarship Essay Examples

Almost every page of "winning scholarship essays" has the same two holes in it. You cannot check who wrote the essay, and you are never told ...

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College Application Essay Examples

College Application Essay Examples

Most "college application essay examples" are essays somebody says got somebody into somewhere, printed without the one thing you actually n ...

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How to Write a Scholarship Essay

How to Write a Scholarship Essay

A scholarship essay is not read the way a class paper is graded. It is scored against criteria the funder chose in advance — and often aga ...

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Scholarship Essay Format

Scholarship Essay Format

There is no standard scholarship essay format. There is the formatting instruction printed on the application in front of you, and it is the ...

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How to Start a Scholarship Essay

How to Start a Scholarship Essay

Start a scholarship essay by putting one concrete detail from your own life on the page and engaging the prompt's question inside the first ...

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How to Write a Personal Statement Admissions Readers Remember

How to Write a Personal Statement Admissions Readers Remember

To write a personal statement, pick one specific experience that changed how you think, tell it in concrete scenes instead of summary, and c ...

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The Right Way to Format a Personal Statement

The Right Way to Format a Personal Statement

The standard personal statement format is deliberately plain: an 11- or 12-point font like Times New Roman, Arial, or Calibri, 1-inch margin ...

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Personal Statement Examples That Show What Actually Works

Personal Statement Examples That Show What Actually Works

A personal statement is a short first-person essay — usually 500 to 650 words for college applications — that shows an admissions commit ...

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