THE BRIDGE TO COLLEGE
Artificial Intelligence, Grammar and How To Destroy A College EssaY
In pursuit of college acceptance, applicants and their families overstress about writing perfect essays. After 43 years of admissions experience, I say this without hesitation:
It doesn’t work.
Colleges ask questions to evaluate the applicant, not the applicant’s writing abilities. The essays are intended to transfer content, not style. As one admissions professional told me:
“The essays should be about showing who the individual is more so than judging their writing.
Unfortunately, I see too much pressure to write a ‘unique piece of prose’ that usually results in the same, trite, overdone essays. A student's emails when they're ‘off’ speak to me more than when they're trying to show their ‘best’ side. It's all about being genuine and authentic.”
One of my favorite admissions deans offered this insight:
“The first rule is ‘be real.’ Admissions readers crave authenticity and genuine stories. Trying to be someone you’re not is not good. I’m very skeptical of the perfect teenager. In fact, I’ve never met that person.”
Yet, in pursuit of that elusive gold ring known as an admissions offer, too many families discard authenticity in favor of what they perceive to be “great writing.”
Today, we drown in the chopping wake caused by artificial intelligence. It’s a new tool that’s still developing, but unfortunately most people use that tool as if it guarantees success. In college and graduate admissions, AI will lead you down a foolish road to failure.
Why? Most of us can tell when AI has been employed, and “most of us” includes admissions readers. While they are trying to understand you, artificial intelligence is not you, nor does it make you sound like you. In pursuit of “better” words, you’ll end up submitting counterfeit content. If they can’t find you, they won’t pick you.
In my experience, ChatGPT and the like are simply these latest models of the wanderlust for success through perfect grammar. Colleges don’t care about perfect grammar. As long as your writing is not careless and sloppy, it’s OK. Although I appreciate grammar, let’s not let grammar get in the way of what’s important: your authenticity and your message. If we have to break a few rules to communicate something in a better way, let’s break the rules!
When we edit, our job is to help our clients communicate their ideas in the best possible way. You might be surprised to learn that, at UCA, we have hired excellent grammarians, only to let them wade away when they couldn’t see the forest for the trees. Yes, we do have internal editing guides (our guide for the Personal Statement alone is 25 pages long), but the rule is always “form follows function.”
Remember, the goal is to get selected, not win a writing prize. So, while English teachers do a fine job of coaching English, very few understand what admissions readers want. They don’t know the grading rubrics of individual admissions offices, nor do they study the forever-evolving strategies that each college employs differently. That being said, it is always valuable to get input from others, but please consider outside input as suggestion, not mandate. It’s your essay.
This is why UCA insists that our students write quickly and loosely. Get your normal conversational tone into your essay. If necessary, dictate instead of typing. And, after we have completed all of our editing, at UCA we return to each student’s Speed Draft and reinsert their favored verbiage and sentence structures.
In the world of admissions, the rule is, “Don’t do it all perfect. Do it all you.”
Which brings me to today’s final urban legend: the need for a “hook.” Yes, you should quickly engage your admissions reader, who is busy and tired and probably only skimming your essay. However, a hook is not the way to do engage them properly. Although it is critical to catch their attention in the first few sentences, the idea is to communicate your ideas, not impress them with poeticism that is likely unrelated to what you really want them to learn about you. In your Personal Statement, start with a “tell” (btw – implication works better than being express), but hooks seldom accomplish that.
How do you charm them? Sound like yourself! Relax. Be you. Sound like you. Let them discover youRobert LeVine is the founder and CEO of University Consultants of America, an independent educational consultancy assisting students around the world with applications to colleges, universities and graduate schools. For more information, call University Consultants of America, Inc. at 1-800-465-5890 or visit www.universitycoa.com
FAMILY MATTERS
Communities and Milestones
By Anu Verma Panchal
A few months ago, I had the good fortune to stand by my parents’ side as they celebrated a significant milestone, their golden anniversary. One of my favorite parts of the event was that in addition to uncles, aunts and cousins, we had with us their closest friends, the extended “framily” that had helped my parents recreate a sense of home and family when they were thousands of miles away from the place of their birth.
Circa 1980, with a toddler and 6-year-old in tow, my parents moved to a little town in Zambia called Kabwe. They knew no one and nothing about this new country beyond my dad’s offer letter and one phone call with a relative who had once lived in Africa.
But on their very first evening, there was a knock at the door. It was a young Malayalee couple with two little boys our age. Hearing that a new family from Kerala had arrived, they had stopped by to welcome us. From that one introduction, my parents were immediately absorbed into a group of friends.
The same thing happened every time we moved towns. The news of our impending arrival reached before we did, and we were pulled into existing Malayalee social circles. Our weekends were spent at each other’s houses, uncles in safari suits swilling whiskey, aunties in sarees holding deafening conversations while we ran around and played. As the years passed, my parents grew into the veterans who welcomed new families and organized the elaborate cultural events that gave the community a sense of home away from home.
And all around town – and across the South Asian diaspora – others were doing the same thing. In Tamil, in Bangla, in Hindi, they created communities that served a familial function for each other. Community building seems to be in our genes. Or, as a friend once told me, “We’re like goats ... we can only travel in packs.”
During the college years and in my early 20s, plugging into the local desi community was nowhere close to being a priority; in fact, I reveled in the freedom from it. It was irritating, even, to see the insularity that I imagined permeated those associations. Why move to another country and only hang out with the same people? Why not at least try to assimilate?
It was only when I became a parent that I found myself searching, maybe even yearning, for some small level of connection. I wanted my daughters to learn Bharatanatyam like I had, wanted them to celebrate Hindu holidays and go to the temple occasionally. Does that mean that I want my communities to be restricted by ethnicity, language or religion? Certainly not. I am blessed with close “framily” from many backgrounds, and I enjoy Gasparilla as much as I do Onam and Navaratri.
Yet I am grateful for the generations who came before we did and established everything from the Tampa India Festival to the India Cultural Center so that we now have the option to dip a toe, an ankle or our whole selves in cultural life if we so desired.
A week before my older daughter was due to leave for college, I took her on one of our habitual visits to the Hindu temple here in Tampa. By a happy coincidence, the pujari on duty that day was the same one who had presided on the day that we had taken her on her first temple visit when she was a 6-month-old baby. “You’re the one who carried her to the front of the room when she was born, and now she’s starting college,” I told him. He beamed. “Look at that!” he marveled.
Look at that indeed. That kind of continuity doesn’t just happen. It’s the result of hard work from a lot of people who came before us, many of whom we’ll never even know. The roots they put down gave us the luxury to pick and choose how much we want to hold on to, because some variation of it has been preserved here for us.