What do admissions officers actually look for in an essay?
Readers are looking for a specific human being on the page. Not the most dramatic story, not the widest vocabulary, and not a summary of achievements already listed elsewhere in the application. The essays that work show how a student thinks and what they notice, in language that sounds like an actual seventeen year old wrote it.
What the essay is for
Everything else in the application is evidence about what a student has done. The essay is the only part that shows what they are like to have in a room. That is the job it does, and it is why an essay listing accomplishments is a wasted slot: the reader already has the transcript and the activities list.
The failure modes, in rough order of frequency
- The résumé in prose. Achievements restated in paragraphs. Adds nothing.
- The thesaurus voice. Vocabulary a student would never use out loud. Readers spot it instantly and it costs credibility.
- The lesson learned. A tidy moral bolted onto the last paragraph. Real reflection is rarely that neat.
- Trauma as a strategy. Hardship belongs in an essay when the student wants to write about it. Manufacturing or exaggerating it reads as false, and no student owes an admissions committee their worst experience.
- The parent's draft. An adult's syntax under a student's name is obvious to anyone who reads these for a living.
What tends to work
Small subjects, closely observed. A job, a routine, an argument, something the student is genuinely curious about. Specificity is the whole game: the detail only this student would have noticed is the detail that makes the essay theirs. And the ordinary registers better than the extraordinary, because most seventeen year olds have ordinary lives and readers know it.
On artificial intelligence
Colleges are actively thinking about this and policies differ, so check what each school states. Setting policy aside, there is a practical problem: an essay generated for you is by definition made of the most probable next words, and the entire point of this essay is to be unlike anyone else's. Use it to interrogate a draft if you like. Do not let it write one.
How Dana works on essays
By asking questions until the student says the thing they actually mean, then helping them say it well. The drafting stays with the student. That is both an ethical line and a practical one, because a reader can tell.