Running essays college

College admissions officers don't have a lot of time to spend on each application. After a thousand or so, you feel like you're reading the same essay over and over. You're able to boil it down to a simple description (dead grandmother), an equation (running=life) or a word (violin).

But understand that you are not writing about running you are writing something about yourself. You don't have to answer big questions. In fact, once you start sounding like you have the answers, you're in danger of writing one of those mind-numbing "In society today" essays.

By the end of the essay, after far too much time in the prison-house of someone else's consciousness, I would be screaming to go for a run myself and would have learned no more about the writer than that he had won/lost/finished the race and that it was hard. Only one of those running essays stands out.

Dr. Allen Grove is an Alfred University English professor and a college admissions expert with over 20 years of experience helping students transition to college. The Common Application no longer requires a short answer essay from all applicants, but many colleges continue to include the short answer as part of a supplement.