专家说，一篇好的Essay是可以传达你的思想和个性的。
学生应该了解自己并以规范的方式写作，这样他们就可以与招生人员分享他们的生活感。(GETTY STOC
没有Essay的大学申请是不完整的，这对许多学生来说可能是一个让人头疼的难题的。
但是，如果有一些简单的提示，一些反思，并了解招生官员寻找什么样的学生，这些可以帮助缓解写作的压力。U.S. News编写了几篇帮助学生申请的 Essay范例。他们说, 这些论文是招生官分享的，因为学生的传达出光鲜亮丽的形象，十分利于帮助学校去了解他们自己，这使他们脱颖而出。
“我们实际上正在通过学生的描述，试图勾画出他们在校园里的形象，” 马萨诸塞州塔夫茨大学招生和招生管理主任Karen Richardson说。“这不仅仅跟学生选择写作的主题有关，而且他们的写作方式也有很大的关系。我们鼓励学生通过语言描述来帮助招生官了解自己是谁，而不是告诉招生官自己是谁。
专家说，Essay应该给学校展示一个能表现自己个性的例子。
“对我而言，一篇好的Essay是我了解的途径，我不会在申请的其他地方去了解，” 纽约汉密尔顿学院招生管理副总裁Monica Inzer说。
但Inzer指出，找到自己的思想形象对许多学生来说可能是一个挑战，因为他们的生活经历可能有限。此外，她补充说，到目前为止, 他们一直在按照老师的指示写作, 而不是自发的写作。找到自己的思想意味着学生必须了解自己并以规范的方式写作，与招生人员分享他们的生活感受。
汉密尔顿在其招生页面上列出了由入学的学生撰写的多篇Essay范例。虽然Inzer拒绝挑出一篇文章，但她说这些例子提供了多样化的学生思想和背景。在汉密尔顿学院的允许下, 下面摘录的文章通过自己的兴趣爱好展现了学生的个性。
I kept a firm grip on the rainbow trout as I removed the lure from its lip. Then, my heart racing with excitement, I lowered the fish to the water and watched it flash away.
I remained hooked.
I caught that 10-inch fryling five years ago on Fall Creek using a $5 fly rod given to me by my neighbor Gil. The creek is spectacular as it cascades down the 150-foot drop of Ithaca Falls. Only 100-feet further, however, it runs past a decrepit gun factory and underneath a graffitied bridge before flowing adjacent to my high school and out to Cayuga Lake. Aside from the falls, the creek is largely overlooked. Nearly all of the high school students I know who cross that bridge daily do so with no thought of the creek below.
When I was a toddler, my moms say I used to point and ask, "What? What? What?" Even now my inquisitive nature is obvious. Unlike my friends, I had noticed people fly fishing in Fall Creek. Mesmerized by their graceful casts, I pestered Gil into teaching me. From that first thrilling encounter with a trout, I knew I needed to catch more. I had a new string of questions. I wanted to understand trout behavior, how to find them, and what they ate. There was research to do.
I devoted myself to fly fishing. I asked questions. I woke up at 4 a.m. to fish before school. I spent days not catching anything. Yet, I persisted. The Kid's Book of Fishing was replaced by Norman MacLean's A River Runs Through It. Soon Ernest Hemingway's essays found their place next to Trout Unlimited magazines by my bed.
I sought teachers. I continued to fish with Gil, and at his invitation joined the local Trout Unlimited Chapter. I enrolled in a fly-tying class.
There I met Ken, a soft-spoken molecular biologist, who taught me to start each fly I make by crimping the hook to reduce harm to fish, and Mike, a sarcastic Deadhead lawyer, who turns over rocks at all times of year to "match the hatch" and figure out which insects fish are eating. Thanks to my mentors, I can identify and create almost every type of Northeastern mayfly, caddisfly, and stonefly.
The more I learned, the more protective I felt of the creek and its inhabitants. My knowledge of mayflies and experience fishing in many New York streams led me to notice the lack of Blue-Winged Olive Mayflies in Fall Creek. I figured out why while discussing water quality in my AP Biology class; lead from the gun factory had contaminated the creek and ruined the mayfly habitat. Now, I participate in stream clean-up days, have documented the impact of invasive species on trout and other native fish, and have chosen to continue to explore the effects of pollutants on waterways in my AP Environmental Science class.
Last year, on a frigid October morning, I started a conversation with the man fishing next to me. Banks, I later learned, is a contemporary artist who nearly died struggling with a heroin addiction. When we meet on the creek these days we talk about casting techniques, aquatic insects, and fishing ethics. We also talk about the healing power of fly fishing. I know Banks would agree with Henry David Thoreau, who wrote "[Many men] lay so much stress on the fish which they catch or fail to catch, and on nothing else, as if there were nothing else to be caught."
Initially, my goal was to catch trout. What I landed was a passion. Thanks to that first morning on Fall Creek, I've found a calling that consumes my free time, compels me to teach fly fishing to others, and drives what I want to study in college.
I will be leaving Fall Creek soon. I am eager to step into new streams.
“这更多传达的是学生的思想形象而不是其他任何东西，”Inzer说，并指出一篇太平淡的文章可以使学生变得个性全无。
“你可以把这篇文章看作是申请者的灵魂。虽然我们认识到在高中生涯中拥有一个丰富的大学申请背景需要多年的努力，但是有助于招生委员会了解你的是在我们的教室里，我们的俱乐部和我们的社区描述你自己的思想和观点，”马里兰州约翰霍普金斯大学本科招生主任艾伦金说。
“这篇文章是让我们看到生命的空间。招生官并没有特别寻找任何一件事物，因为很大部分的原因是学生在这个领域分享自己是很重要，”金说。
除了个人论文之外，一些大学还要求补充Essay。招生专家指出，通常情况下，这些论文较短，需要专注于回答学院提出的具体问题。
但在某些情况下，学校可能会将补充论文作为重中之重。St. John's College就是这种情况，该学院在马里兰州和新墨西哥州设有校区，圣约翰系统入学副管理本杰明鲍姆说。
“我们称之为补充，但实际上，这是学生将作为我们申请的一部分撰写的最重要的文章，”鲍姆并补充说，St. John's允许学校围绕圣约翰学院的学术优先事项为申请人量身定制问题。
专家说，补充文章往往很短，但圣约翰学院突破了这种限制，需要至少400字。这是因为学校有兴趣看到学生长篇大论地写一个选定的话题。
鲍姆强调这篇关于学生对政治和法律哲学的热爱的补充文章是一个很好的例子：
Last year in my Constitutional Law class, I fell in love with political and legal philosophy. Sexy, right?
Maybe not, but I loved the rules, the structure, and the big questions that surrounded organizing a government. I thought about these things constantly—while brushing my teeth, doing chores, and driving to school. Unable to take this beloved course a second time, I chose my senior classes with more than a touch of melancholy. I was skeptical that even the most appealing humanities class, AP Literature, would be anything but anticlimactic by comparison. I'd become so accustomed to reading the function-focused writings of Locke, Rousseau, Madison, Thoreau, that I found it difficult to see "literature" as anything more than mere stories. I wanted substance that I could actually do something with, and I didn't expect to find it in AP Lit.
Settling down to read our first assigned book, Sophocles' Antigone, I was apathetic. We'd done a pre-reading exercise earlier in class and I'd gathered that Antigone was just the sad story of a wannabe-martyr-descendant-of-Oedipus who crosses the wrong king, dies, breaks her fiance's heart with her death, leading him, and her would-be mother-in-law by extension, to suicide, blah, blah, blah. I fanned the pages with my thumb, checked the time (10:15 p.m.), and willed myself to make it through the first ten pages without falling asleep.
Rousseau's familiar skepticism of an unchecked ruler, Locke's notions of natural rights philosophy, and Thoreau's willingness to violate immoral laws. Wait—this was a literature class, and yet here was Sophocles articulating the same concerns of the Framers of the Constitution (hundreds of years before any of them were born).
Antigone has become my favorite book because it wraps political and legal theory around complex characters and a compelling narrative. Prior to reading Antigone , I assumed that if I hadn't read every book that pertained to the architecture of US government, I had at least heard of them. But I was so mistaken. Antigone proved this assumption wrong because Antigone itself was a case study in the actual consequences of ideas discussed by political philosophers. In other words, Antigonehumanized the esoteric and function-driven debates I'd studied last year. Witnessing Haemon cradle his dead fiance in his arms, then subsequently kill himself before his father's eyes, allowed me to see all of the ideas I'd spent hours considering as not purely political questions, but as human ones. Finishing the play, I was ashamed that I'd harbored such skepticism at the outset of my reading. My experience with Antigone reminds me why I get excited each time I use calculus in physics or art in cooking, and I look forward to a lifetime of making these connections.
从一个引人注目的开场白到对主题的强调，鲍姆说这个例子因学生的“智力热情”而脱颖而出。她对深入学术概念的接受向招生官表明, 她很适合学院。
虽然圣约翰学院可能会要求更深入的答案，但其他学校重视简洁，要求学生简明扼要地写作。塔夫茨大学共享的一个这样的例子，将读者从学生对折纸的热爱转化为对科学的热情，不到250字。
Using a flimsy piece of printer paper, I remember folding my first paper crane. Reading instructions off a dusty origami book from my basement, my fingers fumbled with the paper, folding, unfolding, refolding, and possibly some frustration-induced crumpling. Nearly an hour later, with little creases scattered across its body and a misaligned beak, it was clear that origami wasn't a natural talent of mine.
Despite its deformities, there was an endearing quality to the bird I couldn't quite explain. After sixteen folds, it resembled the paper only in color and material. I would fold countless other designs, until my room was covered with creations from simple paper boats to intricate seven part lotus flowers.
The joy I found in origami lied in the fact that I had the freedom to invent anything; with each fold, creativity flowed through my fingers, converting curiosity of the potential of each fold into an irrepressible desire to create more. It is what motivated me to read about 2D kinematics to win a projectile motion challenge, and understand the chemistry behind qualitative analysis of cations for a lab.
Everything I could ever want to know and more is right at my fingertips. From the change in weight I feel in a moving elevator, to the chemical reactions that cause the plastic stars in my room to glow, science is a field that permeates every single aspect of life. I know my curiosity to understand the world around me nurtures my love for science.
理查德森说, 一篇关于折纸等非典型话题的文章的吸引力表明, 作者愿意冒险。
“折纸不是大学文章的典型话题，但除此之外，她向我们展示了而不是告诉我们她制作物品的过程并不总是能达到预期或想要的效果。不过，她仍在努力。它帮助我们看到她是一个愿意在我们的校园里跳入新体验的人。这里还有一个突出的是她用来表达她的观点的形象—— 我可以想象她地板上皱巴巴的纸片和她所感受到的挫折。最后, 她能够把制作折纸的创作过程与她的学术兴趣联系起来，”理查森在一封电子邮件中写道。
在撰写Essay时——无论是个人Essay还是补充Essay——专家建议学生遵循相同的规则：找到他们的思想，写下对他们来说重要的观点，分享他们的个性，表达自己并大量校对。还有一点，专家建议学生在提交之前与熟悉他们的人分享他们的Essay。
老师，朋友和家长都可以成为有用的校对员，但专家指出，学生的思想应保持完好。
“Essay真的需要成为学生的申请重点。我鼓励学生要求亲近的人阅读这篇文章并提问'你知道这篇文章是关于我的吗？' 如果没有，是时候重做Essay了。但要确保它仍然是你的思想形象，“理查森说。
Inzer还鼓励学生不要在Essay上有过多压力，以免在申请时加重不必要的压力。虽然一篇强有力的文章可能会在拥挤的领域提升候选人的高度，但她表示这不会成就或破坏申请。
“仅凭这一点是无法让他们进来的；这涉及他们的成绩和努力的学习以及很多其他的方面。但这可能会让他们多看一眼，尤其是在一个有很多强候选人的高度选择性的地方，”Inzer说。
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