A Plea From the Admissions Office to Go for the \'Dangerous\' Essay

Daniel Grayson is the associate director of undergraduate admissions at Tufts University in Medford, Mass.

The task, as colleges and universities around the country have assigned it, is to describe yourself in 500 words or less. Sum up all of who you are - your aspirations, perspective, strengths, intellect, personality, all of it - in one page, single spaced.

Hit the panic button.

You know what I do when faced with a problem? I ask the Internet. So do a Google search - I dare you - for the phrase “admissions essay advice” and see the mess you get.

One list on a prominent Web site includes the following suggestions (in order, with some paraphrasing): be cautious and then, immediately afterward, be controvers ial.

O.K. Got it: Say something risky without taking chances. That's not helpful.

Neither is the advice you get from most admissions officers when you ask them.

“Just be yourself,” they say. Is there an alternative to that? Were you supposed to lie and pretend to be your smarter and more interesting older brother?

Here are your deceptively complicated essay goals, as I see them:

Show us how you think.

Tell us what matters to you.

I'm not going to sugarcoat this: That is a really difficult task. It demands that you understand yourself in a way that perhaps no one has ever asked of you. It demands that you ask yourself questions perhaps no teacher has ever asked. Questions like:

What invigorates/inspires/angers me?

What do I wish we talked or learned about in school?

What are my most strongly held opinions and where do they come from?

What are the differences bet ween how I see myself and how others see me?

What pieces of my life transform my thinking (whether I want them to or not)?

What ideas fire me up just when everyone else is cooling down?

These aren't easy questions. They are dangerous questions. They are questions with teeth, questions that require you to stake out a position, to have an opinion and to express something of substance.

You don't need to literally answer one of those questions to write a good admissions essay (though you could); think of the list as a set of examples.

Being honest and forceful about yourself may make some adults around you nervous; it's not “safe.” They will worry that you are being too controversial or informal. You should listen carefully and try to see your writing from their perspective. But you should feel comfortable ignoring advice that does not feel right.

If you are not interested in thinking about the big issues (or the small ones) around co mmunity service, here is some radical advice: Don't write about it.

If you love your sport, but it isn't what you are itching to talk about when you get out of bed, don't write about it.

Writing about service or determination reflects important qualities, but no one in our applicant pools writes about how quickly they quit or how much they hate helping society. If you write the “safe” essay, how will you stand apart?

I wrote of your goals, now here is ours: to build the most interesting and intellectually diverse class we can. We want to fill our seats with students who have things to say, who will challenge conventions and advance conversations, who will learn from each other.

The answers to those dangerous questions define who you are. They reflect what you value and how you think, as well as how you will enhance our community and classrooms. You need to be confident and proud enough to stand behind those ideas because if you won't, why would an admissions officer choose to stand behind you?

As a reader, I want to be in your corner, to fight for your cause in a hypercompetitive applicant pool. Can you fit all of who you are into 500 words? Of course not, but you can pick out a couple of important pieces.

Tell me what matters, and give me a reason to fight.