College Applicants Struggle to Craft Key Essays

They’ve already taken the SAT, the ACT and at least three SAT II subject tests. Now thousands of high school seniors are filling out college applications and pondering the most perplexing question of all: Who am I?

All this introspection can be chalked up to the need to write a college essay or personal statement, part of the application process for the University of California system and most private colleges.

Facing a Nov. 30 deadline for the UC system, most students have written and rewritten several versions of the two-page essays, which “can make or break you,” as one college counselor put it.

“It’s your one and only chance to say something that’s not numbers-based to admissions officers,” said Sean Basford, of the SPL Educational Group (Students Preparing for Life) in Mission Viejo.

Who needs to write a really excellent essay? Two kinds of applicants: the borderline student and the top student who is competing with all the other top students for a spot at an elite university.

“People with a 3 or a little bit better grade point average who got an 1100 on the SAT need to write a good essay,” said Basford, who has done college admission counseling for more than 10 years.

“They are not stellar students but they are good students, and a strong essay that conveys who they are can make up for the rest of the application being somewhat average,”

At the other end of the spectrum are the super students, those with 4.0 GPAs and scores of 1400 on the SAT. They face such depressing college admission facts as these:

* Princeton University rejected 175 students with perfect scores of 1600 on the SAT last year.

* More than 12,000 applicants with GPAs of 4.0 applied to UCLA last year. Only 10,800 students were admitted.

The personal statement can make students stand out from the pack, but just what are college admissions officers looking for?

“We are really looking for more of who this person is, what can they bring to the university. What do they expect to find or do here and what have they accomplished under what sets of circumstances?” said Rae Lee Siporin, UCLA’s director of undergraduate admissions.

In the UC system, essays must be based on one of three writing directives: Describe the qualities and achievements you would bring to the student body; describe an achievement and what you gained from it; describe unusual circumstances or challenges you faced and how you responded.

Writing a revealing essay is the most difficult thing for students to do, said Susan Wilbur, UC Irvine’s director of admissions and relations with schools.

“Most of them have spent the greater part of recent years trying to fit in, be a member of a peer group. Now we are saying, ‘Separate out, be an individual. Pick yourself apart.’ ”

Students don’t have to be aspiring novelists and the subject matter doesn’t have to be a glorious accomplishment, advisors say.

But the real you has to shine through.

The best way to think of it, Basford said, is “like an interview on paper.”