By Paula Steers Brown, August 2007

• Introduction
• Meet your match
• What do they have to offer you and what can you offer them?
• Standardized test savvy
• The application: narrow the focus
• Your essay: extract the unique
• Show your passion
• Finding funding
• Download the full article as a

Your essay: extract the unique

Free yourself of others’ expectations and try to get in touch with what it is you love—your passion. What might have made you appear “weird” in the conformist middle-school years now makes you very appealing as a candidate to an admissions committee.

One gifted young man from the University of Virginia remembers being ridiculed for his early passion for musical theater. That perceived eccentricity, however, gave him the edge in college and, only a few months after graduation, at the age of 23, he landed a job with a Broadway show.

If you have ever had an experience that made a big impression on you and you could describe it in vivid detail, include it on your brainstorm list—an unstructured list of words, phrases or slice-of-life moments you slap down in stream-of-consciousness fashion to get your best material. If you can connect these experiences to qualities colleges value—intellectual curiosity, creativity, compassion, leadership ability, an optimistic outlook or initiative—you have hit upon a great formula.

If asked “what is unique about you,” most high school students draw a blank, but each person has something to offer. To loosen yourself up, tell a story aloud and get someone to take dictation. If you simply cannot think of anything, ask someone who knows you well to think back to an instance that captures the way you react to situations. What can seem to be the most ridiculous story or the most insignificant detail can be the nucleus of an entire admissions essay. Try to tell it in your own voice with vivid, sensing words that put you back at the scene in as specific a way as possible. Be yourself. Your right match will love you.