The College Essay Time Machine
Are you struggling to write about past life experiences in your college application personal statement? If so, you are not alone. Perhaps you have plenty of ideas, but are uncertain which experience to write about. Or, maybe you want to include several related and overlapping experiences, but do not know how to include them all without the story losing a sense of flow and cohesion. All applicants writing the college essay must draw from past life experiences to tell a compelling story about personal or intellectual growth. By following the pointers below, you can transform your college essay into a time machine that will transport your reader between past, present, and future.
The main obstacle that college essayists encounter when writing about past life experiences is deciding which one to make the central focus of the story. One effective way to write a successful college essay is to choose a single moment in time from the last 2-3 years of high school and to discuss it in a way that reveals how this experience sparked a revelation or moment of growth. The problem is that our path to personal and intellectual growth is often nonlinear and the result of intersecting experiences. Thus many students try to cram all those experiences and flashes of insight into a single essay. These essays often read like lists of unrelated fragments and although they usually have a central message, the lack of space (word count) results in too much telling and not enough showing–storytelling with vivid imagery, gesture, and action.
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At Seneca, we advise our clients to select a single moment in time to begin the story, but then use that moment as a gateway to the past, present, and future. A story told in the present tense, for instance, will immediately transport the reader to the past or future, while making them feel like they are in the present moment. Once you have placed your reader in the desired timeframe, you can introduce other experiences that came before by framing them as memories, recollections, flashbacks (usually presented as internal dialogue and written in past tense), or as words spoken by other characters (written as normal dialogue within the current timeframe of the story). Events that come after the main event can be introduced by allowing the story to progress in time as it would naturally. Using this method, years of personal history and generations of family history may be compressed into a single moment in time, whether the setting for that moment is a few seconds, hours, or days. Be sure to leave about 200 - 250 words for a section of personal reflection at the end of the essay.
Another method we recommend is the “mosaic” style of essay writing in which the essay is purposefully crafted from fragments of text. This is hard to do well, but it can be an effective way to introduce several experiences without conforming to a linear, chronological narrative sequence. This requires sophistication on the part of the college essayist. You will need to plan your essay before you write by mapping out the fragments ahead of time: single images, actions, sensations, feelings, social interactions, etc. All the anecdotes or fragments must be unified by a central theme or main point that guides the essay. As you join the fragments together, use parallel paragraph structure and transitions to lend flow to the writing and to help the reader see patterns in the text. Passages of personal reflection should be interspersed throughout the essay and following each anecdote or vignette. In this kind of essay, it is your job to help the reader find the common thread that ties these fragments together.
Do not be discouraged by having to choose which life experiences to write about in your college essay. Just because you select a single experience as the main focus of your essay does not mean that you can not discuss others that came before or after. They just need to be introduced as part of the natural, linear flow of the narrative. Another sophisticated option is the mosaic essay, which combines several experiences in a nonlinear way. Whatever method you choose, shifting verb tenses and settings between past, present, and future will enable you to craft the perfect college essay time machine.