After a cliched topic, the biggest problem you’ll want to avoid is writing in generalities. This note applies to many elements of an essay, but overall, it means that you should identify something that is of importance to you and to talk about it with commitment. Make sure that you are addressing the most specific elements of it that you understand, and that you’re focusing on the decisions and actions you made during the event you’re writing about.

Avoid phrases like “she’s always there for me” or “looking around the room, I realized…” Avoid phrasings that don’t tell us what someone is actually doing, saying, or feeling.

Here’s a short list of writing suggestions to improve others’ sense of your writing:

• Take a risk
• Show, don’t tell
• Use specific details
  • General: My uncle Mike has been a huge influence in my life.
  • Specific: My uncle Mike was the man who told me my brother had broken both his legs skiing in the Alps. Mike was the man who took me to the father-son picnic when my dad was ill. And when I found myself in need of help that late Friday night that would forever change my life, it was Mike’s number I dialed.

There are a whole lot more here at CEO’s guide for what to do in a college essay.

We would love to hear your ideas or other good examples in the comments.

We’re hard at work here at CEO keeping all the essay requirements current for each school in our extensive database. Each Friday, we send an email out to our current members to let them know which schools have been updated for the coming year, as well as to update them on key admissions data such as application deadlines, SAT and ACT ranges of accepted students, and class rank percentiles for the most recent class to enroll.

As an example, here’s the list of those added just this week, putting our list of updated schools at well over 430!

1. Colby College
2. Columbia College Chicago
3. Davidson College
4. Earlham College
5. Eugene Lang College
6. Fairfield University
7. Fairleigh Dickinson University
8. Long Island University/C.W. Post Campus
9. Marist College
10. Mercer University
11. Michigan State University
12. Montana State University-Bozeman
13. Mount St. Mary’s College
14. New Mexico State University
15. Northeastern University
16. Northwestern University
17. Occidental College
18. Oglethorpe University
19. Ohio State University-Columbus
20. Ohio University
21. Old Dominion University
22. Pennsylvania State University-University Park
23. Philadelphia University
24. Plymouth State University
25. Ramapo College of New Jersey
26. Ringling College of Art & Design
27. Rollins College
28. Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
29. Rutgers-New Brunswick
30. Rutgers-Newark
31. Seattle Pacific University
32. Skidmore College
33. St. Bonaventure University
34. St. Catherine University
35. St. John’s College (MD)
36. St. John’s College (NM)
37. Stonehill College
38. Transylvania University
39. Tulane University
40. University of New Haven
41. University of Pennsylvania
42. Wheaton College (MA)
43. Xavier University (OH)

By using our Essay RoadMap preview page you can see all the schools we’ve updated so far for 2011. Any college without an asterisk has been updated – and while you’re at it, you can see first-hand the potential of what CEO can do for you.

The updating process continues in earnest this weekend, with another large push coming in the early parts of September. Stay tuned.

With so many different sources for this information, such as the Common App, College Board, and NCES, CEO is your trusted source, doing all the investigative work that would take one person days.

If you had a flag for every essay... That'd be thirty flags.

30? You read that right. The powers that be at New York University have so specifically divided the school that there are now 30 essays for undergrads to consider waiting in our database. 30!

To the school’s credit, no undergraduate applicant will have to write thirty individual essays when applying to NYU. The numerous essays mostly belong to specific departments, like the Tisch School of the Arts or the Silver School of Social work – all told, the Violet Bobcats of NYU have essays for programs in Film, Photography, Music Business, you name it. They even have a new satellite school in Abu Dhabi. While no applicant will have to address them all, each applicant will have to write several essays, regardless of which school within the university he or she chooses.

It just goes to show that the breadth and reach of schools like NYU should not be underestimated, and that with tools like CEO you can get a shortcut to those requirements, and in turn, see the opportunities that schools of such great diversity offer.

So keep in mind that the big schools often pose as many challenges in their applications as they do in their classes! It’s all benefits in the long run, but managing the task from the get-go can be daunting. Make sure you have the right tools to guide you on your journey.

And while you’re at it, make sure you’re not just avoiding questions like this guy.

Cree Bautista! Congratulations, you're on CEO blog! Weird, right?

This new article in the New York Times’ Education section talks about unlikely hero to college applicants everywhere, Cree Bautista. Mr. Bautista saw fit to apply to NYU just a few hours after the Common App went live at the beginning of this month, and in so doing became the first applicant of the year through the site.

Cree’s eagerness, though exceptional in degree, isn’t uncommon in practice. The Common App’s directors have already started talking about the speed of this year’s applicant pool, and the sheer number of applications students are managing. From the Times’ article:

“Rob Killion, executive director of the Common Application, said he was particularly unnerved by the flood of early submissions through the organization’s website because he feared that students were rushing their essays. (This year’s Common Application was actually posted several weeks later than last year’s — not as a prod to get applicants to file later, but instead to allow high schools extra time to send final documents before the new year begins.)”

Remember, your top choice is not your only choice! There are many applications to be managed, and sites like CEO are here to get that work out in front of you and help you keep it under control from the get-go. While we can’t all be like Cree, we can all save ourselves from those last-minute crushes of papers and apps.

Not quite the right kind of essays. Close, but no cigar.

CEO minimizes your essay requirements – this might be something you have heard us mention from time to time on the blog. But what exactly does that mean? How does CEO help students and counselors who are strapped for time and looking to sift through an ever-growing pile of application work?

Imagine that you have three separate applications in front of you, and they have these three prompts:

Question for College #1: “There is a Quaker saying: ”Let your life speak.” Describe the environment in which you were raised—your family, home, neighborhood or community—and how it influenced the person you are today.”

Question for College #2: “We honor the many different forms of diversity in our community. Your perspective is valuable because if comes from your life experiences, family background, and culture. Please tell us about yourself and what you believe is the best way to share your perspective. Also, what do you hope to learn from the experiences of others?”

Question for College #3: “In our ever-changing society, people have defined ‘equity’ and ‘community’ in many different ways. How do you define these terms and what are the implications of equity and community for our 21st century society?”

These three questions can each be answered by writing about a personal value you hold. What CEO’s Essay RoadMap does – automatically and instantly – is determine these overlaps, and then show you the shortest path through your many essay requirements, regardless of whether you’re using the Common App or the schools’ own applications. Oh, by the way, CEO figures out which of those you should choose, too.

The key is to read all three of these questions and find one personal value that addresses each specific question.

You might, for example, write about the unique way community plays a role in your life (i.e. how you volunteer at a hospital reading to the elderly and how this relates to your perception of the generation gap in our culture). This can then be easily modified to address the other two questions.

Easy, neat, and dynamic, too – CEO updates its results automatically as you add schools to your list. Quite the time-saver.

Where does the road in that logo roam? To new technologies, my friend.

The Journal of College Admission, a publication that discusses the National Association for College Admission Counseling (or NACAC), recently put out an article called “Using Technology in Undergraduate Admission: A Student Perspective.”

It points out that nearly all students are using various forms of technology to guide them through the admissions process. In fact, the article mentions that, “One survey found that 88 percent of college-bound prospective students would be disappointed or possibly eliminate a school from consideration if the institution’s web site did not meet expectations.”

We encounter many college websites that are more complicated than they need to be, especially in their organization of honors, scholarship, and departmental essays, so we commiserate with applicants who are frustrated by this. Lucky for you, CEO’s goal is to design a simple technology that provides a solution while streamlining your efforts to simplify and organize the process. Glad to have you with us as we head into the new application season.

That's right. It says 35 years.

The Common App has updated for the class of 2015. This year’s application features twenty-nine new schools, including Columbia University, the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, UConn, and three SUNY schools – Maritime College, Morrisville State College, and Potsdam.

As in past years, many schools require supplements to the Common App, which means additional writing, sorting, and organization. CEO is right on the edge of these releases and we make sure our application information is up to date. So as these supplements are made available, we’ll have them here, and your Essay QuickFinders and Essay RoadMaps will update automatically to reflect the latest information for the schools you’ve selected.

Make the most of these early releases and get your writing done ahead of time! Remember that CEO is a great resource for finding scholarship and honors programs, too. That’s cash money and respect! What else could you ask for?

One of the reasons schools make these requirements known so far ahead of time is to allow you to explore the departmental and honors requirements so many of them have without getting overwhelmed. Too often we hear about students who choose not to apply to programs or even entire universities just because of the application workload! That just won’t do. So use CEO’s tools as much as you can and keep your eye on the prize.

In the next few weeks we’re going to up the ante a little bit and open the floor to you in a more hands on, nuts-and-bolts way. If you have a question you’d like answered about the college essay process in general, about a specific prompt, or about CEO, let us know by dropping us an email.

As we roll into the fall and the admission season heats up, we’ll continue to maintain an open forum so you can get answers to your questions about your struggles, your curiosities, and your successes.

NEW YORK, July 25, 2010 – College Essay Organizer (‘CEO’), the web-based college essay management tool, announced today that it has joined forces with leading online educational platform ConnectEDU, further streamlining the college admissions process for students, parents, and counselors.

CEO’s groundbreaking technology instantly provides each student with all essay questions for any selected colleges and delivers a personalized plan for writing the fewest essays that work for all questions. The results are less time, less stress, and more attention to the actual writing process resulting in better essays.

“For applicants looking to stand out, personal essays are of the utmost importance,” says Daniel Stern, President of College Essay Organizer. With long, short, department-specific, scholarship, and optional questions, many students are surprised to learn they have 15 or more essays to write, and they don’t know where or how to begin. Even if students use the Common App, they typically have many different supplemental essays for their colleges. “If a student can see how to write, say, only 3 essays instead of 15, that student is going to write more compelling essays. We developed CEO so students and those who support them could optimize their time, and the results have been sensational.”

With a network of 2 million users, ConnectEDU develops innovative technology to enable students to successfully manage their educational and career plans. Its data-driven solution helps to bridge the transitions between high school, college, and career, by making certain that students take the necessary steps at the right time to reach their goals.

“We are excited to partner with CEO and to have the opportunity to offer this valuable tool to our students,” says Craig Powell, Chief Executive Officer of ConnectEDU. “This partnership furthers our goal of helping more students successfully transition from high school to college.”

CEO looks forward to extending its unique technology to ConnectEDU’s existing platform. The partnership of these pioneering educational organizations will make the college application process as efficient and successful as possible.