Why High-Achieving Students Often Write Weak College Essays
If you’re a high-achieving student, you’ve likely spent the past few years pushing yourself to succeed at every step in high school. You took the hardest classes and got excellent grades; you pursued high-level research and demonstrated serious leadership in your community; and you achieved things that set you apart from your peers.
Now that it’s time to write your college essay, you assume — given your track record — that this is the place to explain why you deserve admission to one of the top schools in the country.
But this assumption misunderstands the purpose of the essay. Let’s walk through the problem so we can explain what you should be doing instead.
High-Achieving Students Treat the Essay as Proof of Their Success
We understand your thinking, of course. After working so hard and accomplishing so much, the last thing you want to do is undersell yourself. It’s the same kind of thinking that prompts students to tell us all the things they don’t want to leave out of their essays every year:
“My parents think I should connect my robotics work with the volunteer tutoring I did, because it shows leadership.”
“I’m not sure what the essay should be about yet, but I feel like I have to mention the research I did last summer somewhere.”
“My counselor said the essay might be a good place to mention everything I’ve done — my debate team, the nonprofit I started, and the internship at the startup.”
Students assume, in other words, that the college essay is a place to tie together all their activities and achievements and make the case for admission.
But admissions officers already know about these accomplishments from the rest of your application. Reading about them again in the essay is repetitive and uninteresting.
And there’s an even deeper problem with this mindset.
High-Achieving Students Write Essays That Feel Strategic Rather Than Real
If a student sets out to prove they deserve admission to a top school, they’ll inevitably write an essay that sounds calculated. When they read the Common App prompts, they won’t genuinely reflect on a time they experienced self-growth or discovered something about themselves. Instead, they’ll think, “How can I frame this question so I make it about my robotics research (or my nonprofit work, or the company I founded, etc)? After all, that’s what colleges want.”
Consider this excerpt from an essay by a very distinguished student:
“When I think about a time I experienced personal growth, I immediately think of my robotics research project. During my junior year, I designed an autonomous navigation algorithm for our team’s competition robot. At first, the system failed repeatedly during testing, which taught me the importance of perseverance and resilience. Ultimately, when the robot qualified for nationals, I understood that setbacks are simply opportunities to grow stronger.”
So much is wrong with this essay. The student is obviously saying what they think they’re supposed to say; their conclusions are riddled with clichés; and their writing lacks any sense of individuality. But at the heart of the problem is the fact that the student has avoided answering the Common App prompt and is instead using the idea of “self-growth” as an opportunity to talk about their achievements.
Once students start thinking this way, several predictable kinds of essays appear. Some write what is essentially a résumé in narrative form, moving from one accomplishment to the next. Others attempt the humble brag, disguising an achievement as a lesson about perseverance or leadership. And some try to hide the same strategy inside a creative-writing college essay filled with elaborate metaphors or storytelling tricks. The surface style changes, but the underlying problem is the same: the student is trying to present an image of themselves rather than honestly examine an experience.
Interestingly, many students who haven’t accumulated a long list of achievements don’t fall into this trap. When they’re asked to reflect on something meaningful, they often approach the question honestly — which often leads to moments of vulnerability, surprise, or genuine self-examination.
But high-achieving students are so anxious to include their achievements that they frequently avoid the question, and in doing so they alienate the admissions officers reading their file.
The Strongest College Essays Usually Begin Where Achievement Ends
If you’re a high-achieving student applying to college this season, we’d encourage you to change your mindset. First, stop worrying that your achievements may be overlooked. If you’ve listed them in your activities list (where they belong), the admissions officer who reads your file will see them and be impressed.
If you then use your essay as an opportunity to talk about something unrelated to your achievements — and it could be anything, as long as it’s genuinely important to you — the admissions officer will sit up and take notice.
Why? First, because they’ll see you’re secure in your accomplishments and don’t need to waste your 650 words repeating something they already know. And second, because you’ll give them the opportunity to learn something about you that couldn’t appear anywhere else in your application.
So read the Common App prompts closely and spend some time reflecting on what they bring up for you. Be open to small experiences that were important to you, private obsessions, ideas you’re confused about, and contradictions in your character. In short, treat the college essay as an honest attempt to understand yourself. If you do that, you’ll impress the person reading your file much more than by listing your accomplishments.
For high-achieving students, the college essay becomes interesting when they stop presenting a polished version of themselves and start examining something real.
This article is part of the College Essay Misconceptions Series, which examines the most common myths about college essay advice.
If you’re working on your own college essay and want one-on-one guidance, learn more about our college essay coaching.