*Or: How to get into Stanford.* Most college application essays could be massively improved. I'm sitting there at my desk. There's an email to me from an ambitious high school student. They want to get into Stanford. I click their draft essay. "Started this club." "Did that research." What does that even mean??? I have no idea how to put it into context. I have no emotional connection to them. Instead, you need to write college admissions essays by showing instead of telling. And you need to zoom in on specific scenes in your life, like a movie director. Not a laundry list of events, one specific scene. This is the movie method for college application essays. *Context: I went to Stanford. I was able to read my admission officers' comments thanks to the FERPA loophole. I talked with lots of other students about what they wrote on their essays. In hindsight, I would've drastically changed my essays - both what I wrote about and how I wrote, and that would've made my admission WAY more of a sure bet.* **Here's a video example of me reading some fake essays, common app activities sections, and "movie scene" brainstorms and saying what goes through my mind as I read them, to help you get inside the mind of people who've never met you reading your essays:** <div style="position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0;"><iframe src="https://www.loom.com/embed/328d955b388e4402b74559c14459c1b6?sid=84492345-1ba5-428e-a998-5e7a57b09fb8" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen style="position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%;"></iframe></div> The ideal college admissions thing would be a video from a documentary crew that has followed you from your whole life, and they pick out a few highlight reels. Putting the viewer in the scene so they can see the context, the details, and exactly what's impressive. You need to get as close to that as possible. The steps are to brainstorm a long list of movie pitches, then for the interesting ones flesh out the other scenes, then for the most interesting turn them into half page movie scripts, then for the most interesting turn those into your full essays. Your essay is a movie. You're going to figure out what clips the documentary person would choose - the ones that'd make them feel emotionally connected to you, want to watch more, and want to admit you and spend more time around you. And then you'll describe the scenes in enough richness to approximate someone being there with a video camera beside you. Only literal actual historical things that you did, that you saw physically in person, that happened to you, etc. No "telling" allowed. Instead of "and then I realized" you'll SHOW how you realized. Did you go and talk to someone? Who? Where? Did you write something down? I think everyone's been led astray. People think they need to write essays about what they've learned. But those kinds of essays do a terrible job of communicating you as an impressive person. Instead, treat it like you're trying to show a few video clips of you, but in words instead of videos. And video clips of things that happened, not video clips of your retrospective. The essay needs to be about things that happened in the literal physical world, in your world, in your past. Nothing hypothetical. Nothing that was only inside your head - a documentary crew wouldn't see that. (You can sometimes say thoughts that went through your mind in some cases, but that's more of an exception.) Oh, and make your movie for the audiences, not for critics. Make the movies from your life that *you* or *your future spouse* or *your future cofounder* would watch and say - woah, I wanna meet that person. You don't need beautiful prose. Stop trying to come up with good analogies. Don't try and sound like a college essay. Instead, just brainstorm a list of the interesting movies you've experienced and then turn them into scripts that bring the reader into the moment. The moments when they would've wanted to admit you. A good heuristic for script writing comes from the South Park writers. At each point in the story, the next point should either be "therefore" or "but". Instead of "this happened and then this happened" which just becomes a list of events - it's "this happened, BUT then this thing happened, THEREFORE I had to do this thing, BUT then this happened". You don't actually need to include the "therefore" and "but" and mostly you should exclude those, but the point is to use that to think about what part to write next. It's about going from tension to tension rather than a boring list of "and then". Imagine if a war movie was instead the protagonist saying "it was really crazy, we lost a lot of good men, but I learned I can rely on myself in tough times" - compared to just a few scenes of seeing them in the action. Or with product demos: imagine if instead of letting you try the product, the founder had to describe it in words only. Or if an actor auditioning for a movie had to write an essay describing themselves instead of being able to submit a video. The latter is infinitely more compelling. 99% of college essays are the former!!!!!!!!!! It's not "what can I write about" it's "when can I write about". **Instructions to follow for each essay:** I'd suggest starting to use this process with the shortest essays and shortest prompts, follow this method for those first, that way when you do it for the main Common App essay you already have practice with this method. 1. Find your inspiration material: your resume, your existing essays, any other lists of past projects and experiences of yours. Don't write anything new yet, just collect the docs you have. 2. Brainstorm 30+ movie scenes (30+ per essay): 2-3 sentences per scene. Ideally you can turn each item on your resume into multiple different movies. Write: "scene 1 = {what the audience would've seen if there was a documentary crew with you - people, setting, actions}. {how long ago, and over what period of time - hours, days, etc}". 3. Run that list by a few friends and ask them to pick the most interesting scenes (I'll happily review the list of 30+ and pick the scenes that are most interesting to me, email me [email protected]) 4. For the most interesting scenes (at least 15), add on more scenes that occurred before and after. What would the camera have seen if it followed you but couldn't talk to you? Now you have the movie outlines 5. Run the list of movie outlines by a few friends and ask them to pick the most interesting movies 6. Turn the top picks (at least 12) into half page essays 7. Run those essays by friends and ask them to pick the ones they most wanna read more about, the ones that make them excited, interested, etc 8. Turn the top picks (at least 9) into full essays 9. Run those essays by friends and ask them to pick the most interesting, the set that makes them most excited about you 10. Take the top picks (at least 6) and read them out to your friends in person, and then ask them to read back what they remember from the top of their head, at the end of each paragraph/scene 11. Rewrite each paragraph/scene (ideally then and there, while they're still with you, or you can write down what they said and do it later) 12. Repeat those steps (read aloud to someone, ask them to repeat back what they remember at the end, then edit the paragraph/scene, then repeat) until there are minimal new iterations. Delete most of the sentences that people don't remember, those don't add much. 13. Have a new set of people read the essays and ask them to pick the ones that they're most curious about 14. Use the top pick as your essay for that question. Now do the process again for the next prompt. **The two main ideas** 1. Historical and specific, not hypothetical or smart thoughts: Instead of talking about what you realized or learned, show. Show, don't tell. Historical, not hypothetical. 2. Explore then exploit: Start with a massive list with one sentence scenes and gradually double down on the best ones into "movie scripts" Every year hundreds or thousands of students don't get into Stanford and other top schools who *could've* gotten in - because they weren't able to communicate themselves. The biggest fixes are 1) using the movie method to make it historical and specific and engaging for the reader and 2) exploring broadly so that you're finding the most interesting things to write about, rather than just picking one topic and polishing it when there could be a much better one.