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14 College Essay Examples From Top-25 Universities (2024–2025)

College essay examples from students accepted to harvard, stanford, and other elite schools.

REVIEWING SUCCESSFUL COLLEGE ESSAY EXAMPLES CAN HELP YOU UNDERSTAND HOW TO MAXIMIZE YOUR ODDS OF ACCEPTANCE

We recommend using this resource alongside our College Supplemental Essay Premium Example Hub , which includes a sample essay in response to every prompt required by the top universities and BS/MD programs in the United States.

Responding effectively to college essay prompts is quite different from other essay writing. The combined challenge of addressing a question in an interesting way while avoiding clichés and making yourself stand out, all within a limited number of words, is something that students struggle with every year. With a wide variety of prompts used by each school, alongside the Common App essays , it can be overwhelming to write strong, memorable essays.

However, there are some standard practices that will help elevate your essay:

Directly address any questions the prompt asks. Many essay prompts will ask you to write about extracurricular experiences in your life or to list interests such as your favorite movies or music. Be sure to include the answer to any questions and don't get distracted while providing context or other extra information.

Use specific information. Make sure to mention the specific volunteer program you worked at or the name of your favorite instructor from your summer STEM camp. While it's important not to overburden your essay with small details, peppering in a few specifics will highlight what's important to you both academically and personally—in addition to giving admissions committees (adcoms) memorable details to file away about you as they sort through hundreds of other applicants’ essays.

Create a narrative. Just like with any story or news article, you want to start your essays with a good hook. Setting the stage for your experiences, including anecdotes to drive home a point, or carrying a thematic element throughout your essay will help keep the reader interested and will show off your creativity.

Reuse material. There’s no reason to write completely new supplemental essays for every school you’re applying to. Many schools ask the same questions with slightly different wording, like the commonly used “diversity essay,” which essentially asks how you contribute to and benefit from diversity. With some editing, a single essay could answer multiple prompts — and cut down on your stress! Just be sure that you’re still directly answering the prompt, and you’re still demonstrating fit (more on that below).

Demonstrate fit. Many supplemental essay prompts will ask you explicitly to tell them why you chose to apply to their school, or why you’re interested in pursuing your intended major at their school. In other words, they want you to demonstrate why you’re a good fit for their school—and why their school is a good fit for you. The best way to do this is by providing evidence to back up your claims about why their school is your “dream school,” or why their Biology major is “the perfect place” for you to prepare for a career in medicine. The strongest applicants may even demonstrate fit in response to prompts that don’t explicitly ask them to do so. For example, if you know that the school you’re applying to offers a unique elective course that closely aligns with your interests, you should find a way to mention it in one of your essays.

Put yourself in your reader’s shoes. College admissions officers read hundreds of essays from hopeful applicants, each of whom think their personal experiences and reasons for applying to a particular school are unique. This contributes to the difficulty in standing out in your essays, since almost anything you write about will likely have been encountered by your reader before.

Putting yourself in your reader’s shoes can help strengthen your writing. Remember, it’s not necessarily about what you say, but how you say it. If you read your essay back to yourself and some of the descriptions sound trite or typical, these are spots that are ripe for improvement.

For example, if you describe a trip abroad to help build homes in a developing country with words like “life-changing” and “eye-opening,” you may run the risk of boring your reader. That experience could have been truly life-changing for you, but the simple act of thinking of more creative ways to express an idea not only makes your writing more interesting to read, it signals to your reader the amount of effort you’ve put into your essay.

Describing an experience as transformative can sound less cliché and exaggerated. Moreover, allowing your experiences to speak for themselves (showing instead of telling) will display your imagination and grant you space to emphasize what you learned–something always popular with adcoms.

Go through multiple drafts–and do so early. We can’t stress enough the importance of revision. While your initial ideas may be good, the first couple of drafts will never express them as well as they would after a few edits.

Writing takes place in the mind. It’s a thought process that involves reflecting on your experiences and then translating that reflection into words and—most importantly—time. Make sure you start writing your essays as early as possible to grant yourself as much space as possible to revise.

Be vulnerable and show emotion. Remember that college adcoms are people, not robots reading an essay to make sure you’ve ticked all the boxes for a particular university. Showing some vulnerability or emotion in your writing can make your story come alive for the reader.

Keep in mind there is a fine line between “showing emotion” and exaggerating your experiences just for the sake of a dramatic narrative. It’s a good thing to display your vulnerability in an essay, but adcoms can usually tell if you’re embellishing or exaggerating just for the shock value. And remember, emotion encompasses everything from feelings of triumph to feelings of despair — not all emotions are expressed with tears. Letting these shine through in your essay demonstrates your passion, which engages your reader.

Here are some example essays from some of the thousands of students we've helped get accepted to their dream school.

Note: Some personally identifying details have been changed.

College essay example #1

This is a college essay that worked for Harvard University .

(Suggested reading: How to Get Into Harvard Undergrad )

This past summer, I had the privilege of participating in the University of Notre Dame’s Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program . Under the mentorship of Professor Wendy Bozeman and Professor Georgia Lebedev from the department of Biological Sciences, my goal this summer was to research the effects of cobalt iron oxide cored (CoFe2O3) titanium dioxide (TiO2) nanoparticles as a scaffold for drug delivery, specifically in the delivery of a compound known as curcumin, a flavonoid known for its anti-inflammatory effects. As a high school student trying to find a research opportunity, it was very difficult to find a place that was willing to take me in, but after many months of trying, I sought the help of my high school biology teacher, who used his resources to help me obtain a position in the program.

Using equipment that a high school student could only dream of using, I was able to map apoptosis (programmed cell death) versus necrosis (cell death due to damage) in HeLa cells, a cervical cancer line, after treating them with curcumin-bound nanoparticles. Using flow cytometry to excite each individually suspended cell with a laser, the scattered light from the cells helped to determine which cells were living, had died from apoptosis or had died from necrosis. Using this collected data, it was possible to determine if the curcumin and/or the nanoparticles had played any significant role on the cervical cancer cells. Later, I was able to image cells in 4D through con-focal microscopy. From growing HeLa cells to trying to kill them with different compounds, I was able to gain the hands-on experience necessary for me to realize once again why I love science.

Living on the Notre Dame campus with other REU students, UND athletes, and other summer school students was a whole other experience that prepared me for the world beyond high school. For 9 weeks, I worked, played and bonded with the other students, and had the opportunity to live the life of an independent college student.

Along with the individually tailored research projects and the housing opportunity, there were seminars on public speaking, trips to the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and one-on-one writing seminars for the end of the summer research papers we were each required to write. By the end of the summer, I wasn’t ready to leave the research that I was doing. While my research didn’t yield definitive results for the effects of curcumin on cervical cancer cells, my research on curcumin-functionalized CoFe2O4/TiO2 core-shell nanoconjugates indicated that there were many unknown factors affecting the HeLa cells, and spurred the lab to expand their research into determining whether or not the timing of the drug delivery mattered and whether or not the position of the binding site of the drugs would alter the results. Through this summer experience, I realized my ambition to pursue a career in research. I always knew that I would want to pursue a future in science, but the exciting world of research where the discoveries are limitless has captured my heart. This school year, the REU program has offered me a year-long job, and despite my obligations as a high school senior preparing for college, I couldn’t give up this offer, and so during this school year, I will be able to further both my research and interest in nanotechnology. 

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College essay example #2

This student was admitted to Harvard University.

I believe that humans will always have the ability to rise above any situation, because life is what you make of it. We don’t know what life is or why we are in this world; all we know, all we feel, is that we must protect it anyway we can. Buddha said it clearly: “Life is suffering.” Life is meant to be challenging, and really living requires consistent work and review. By default, life is difficult because we must strive to earn happiness and success.

Yet I've realized that life is fickler than I had imagined; it can disappear or change at any time. Several of my family members left this world in one last beating symphony; heart attacks seem to be a trend in my family. They left like birds; laughing one minute and in a better place the next.

Steve Jobs inspired me, when in his commencement address to Stanford University in 2005, he said "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma--which is living with the results of other people's thinking." I want to make mistakes, because that is how I learn; I want to follow the beat of my own drum even if it is "out of tune." The important thing is to live without regrets, so when my heart ceases to beat, it will make one last happy note and move on.

I want to live my life daily. Every day I want to live. Every morning when I wake up, I want to be excited by the gift of a new day. I know I am being idealistic and young, and that my philosophy on life is comparable to a calculus limit; I will never reach it. But I won't give up on it because, I can still get infinitely close and that is amazing.

Every day is an apology to my humanity; because I am not perfect, I get to try again and again to "get it right." I breathe the peace of eternity, knowing that this stage is temporary; real existence is continuous. The hourglass of life incessantly trickles on and we are powerless to stop it.

So, I will forgive and forget, love and inspire, experience and satire, laugh and cry, accomplish and fail, live and die. This is how I want to live my life, with this optimistic attitude that every day is a second chance. All the time, we have the opportunity to renew our perspective on life, to correct our mistakes, and to simply move on. Like the phoenix I will continue to rise from the ashes, experienced and renewed. I will not waste time for my life is already in flux.

In all its splendor The Phoenix rises In a burst of orange and yellow It soars in the baby blue sky Heading to that Great Light Baptized in the dance of time Fearless, eternal, beautiful It releases a breathtaking aurora And I gasp at the enormity

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College essay example #3

This is a college essay that worked for Duke University .

(Suggested reading: How to Get Into Duke )

As soon as the patient room door opened, the worst stench I have ever encountered hit me square in the face. Though I had never smelled it before, I knew instinctively what it was: rotting flesh. A small, elderly woman sat in a wheelchair, dressed in a hospital gown and draped in blankets from the neck down with only her gauze-wrapped right leg peering out from under the green material. Dr. Q began unwrapping the leg, and there was no way to be prepared for what I saw next: gangrene-rotted tissue and blackened, dead toes.

Never before had I seen anything this gruesome–as even open surgery paled in comparison. These past two years of shadowing doctors in the operating room have been important for me in solidifying my commitment to pursue medicine, but this situation proved that time in the operating room alone did not quite provide a complete, accurate perspective of a surgeon’s occupation. Doctors in the operating room are calm, cool, and collected, making textbook incisions with machine-like, detached precision. It is a profession founded solely on skill and technique–or so I thought. This grisly experience exposed an entirely different side of this profession I hope to pursue.

Feeling the tug of nausea in my stomach, I forced my gaze from the terrifying wound onto the hopeful face of the ailing woman, seeking to objectively analyze the situation as Dr. Q was struggling to do himself. Slowly and with obvious difficulty, Dr. Q explained that an infection this severe calls for an AKA: Above the Knee Amputation. In the slow, grave silence that ensued, I reflected on how this desperate patient’s very life rests in the hands of a man who has dedicated his entire life to making such difficult decisions as these. I marveled at the compassion in Dr. Q’s promise that this aggressive approach would save the woman’s life. The patient wiped her watery eyes and smiled a long, sad smile. “I trust you, Doc. I trust you.” She shook Dr. Q’s hand, and the doctor and I left the room.

Back in his office, Dr. Q addressed my obvious state of contemplation: “This is the hardest part about what we do as surgeons,” he said, sincerely. “We hurt to heal, and often times people cannot understand that. However, knowing that I’m saving lives every time I operate makes the stress completely worth it.”

Suddenly, everything fell into place for me. This completely different perspective broadened my understanding of the surgical field and changed my initial perception of who and what a surgeon was. I not only want to help those who are ill and injured, but also to be entrusted with difficult decisions the occupation entails. Discovering that surgery is also a moral vocation beyond the generic application of a trained skill set encouraged me. I now understand surgeons to be much more complex practitioners of medicine, and I am certain that this is the field for me.

College essay example #4

This is a supplemental essay that worked for Stanford University .

(Suggested reading: How to Get Into Stanford Undergrad and How to Ace the Stanford Roommate Essay )

In most conventional classrooms, we are taught to memorize material. We study information to regurgitate it on a test and forget it the following day. I thought this was learning. But this past summer, I realized I was wrong.

 I attended the SPK Program, a five-week enrichment program with New Jersey’s best and brightest students. I lived on a college campus with 200 students and studied a topic. I selected Physical Science. On the first day of class, our teacher set a box on the table and poured water into the top, and nothing came out. Then, he poured more water in, and everything slowly came out. We were told to figure out what had happened with no phones or textbooks, just our brains. We worked together to discover in the box was a siphon, similar to what is used to pump gas. We spent the next weeks building solar ovens, studying the dynamic of paper planes, diving into the content of the speed of light and space vacuums, among other things. We did this with no textbooks, flashcards, or information to memorize.

During those five weeks, we were not taught impressive terminology or how to ace the AP Physics exam. We were taught how to think. More importantly, we were taught how to think together. Learning is not memorization or a competition. Learning is working together to solve the problems around us and better our community. To me, learning is the means to a better future, and that’s exciting.

College essay example #5 

This is a college essay that worked for University of Pennsylvania (UPenn).

(Suggested reading: How to Get Into UPenn)

When I was thirteen and visiting Liberia, I contracted what turned out to be yellow fever. I met with the local doctor, but he couldn’t make a diagnosis simply because he didn't have access to blood tests and because symptoms such as “My skin feels like it’s on fire” matched many tropical diseases. Luckily, my family managed to drive me several hours away to an urban hospital, where I was treated. Yellow fever shouldn’t be fatal, but in Africa it often is. I couldn’t believe that such a solvable issue could be so severe at the time—so I began to explore.

The exploration led me to the African Disease Prevention Project (ADPP), a non-profit organization associated with several universities. I decided to create the first high school branch of the organization; I liked its unique way of approaching health and social issues. Rather than just raising money and channeling it through third parties, each branch “adopts” one village and travels there to provide for its basic needs. As branch president, I organize events from small stands at public gatherings to 60-person dinner fundraisers in order to raise both money and awareness. I’ve learned how to encourage my peers to meet deadlines, to work around 30 different schedules at once, and to give presentations convincing people why my organization is worth their donation. But overall, ADPP has taught me that small changes can have immense impacts. My branch has helped raise almost $3,000 to build water sanitation plants, construct medical clinics, and develop health education programs in the small village of Zwedru. And the effect doesn’t stop there—by improving one area, our efforts permeate into neighboring villages as they mimic the lifestyle changes that they observe nearby—simple things, like making soap available—can have a big effect. The difference between ADPP and most other organizations is its emphasis on the basics and making changes that last. Working towards those changes to solve real life problems is what excites me.

I found that the same idea of change through simple solutions also rang true during my recent summer internship at Dr. Martin Warner’s lab at UCLA. Dr. Martin’s vision involves using already available digital technologies to improve the individualization of healthcare. By using a person’s genome to tailor a treatment for them or using someone’s personal smartphone as a mobile-monitor to remotely diagnose symptoms, everyday technology is harnessed to make significant strides forward. At the lab, I focused on parsing through medical databases and writing programs that analyze cancerous genomes to find relationships between certain cancers and drugs. My analysis resulted in a database of information that physicians can use to prescribe treatments for their patients’ unique cancerous mutations. Now, a pancreatic cancer patient does not need to be the “guinea-pig” for a prototype drug to have a shot at survival: a doctor can choose the best treatment by examining the patient individually instead of relying on population-wide trends. For the first time in my science career, my passion was going to have an immediate effect on other people, and to me, that was enthralling. Dr. Martin’s lab and his book, Digital Healthcare: A New Age of Medicine, have shown me that changing something as simple as how we treat a disease can have a huge impact. I have found that the search for the holy grail of a “cure for cancer” is problematic as nobody knows exactly what it is or where to look—but we can still move forward without it.

Working with Project ADPP and participating in medical research have taught me to approach problems in a new way. Whether it’s a complex genetic disease or a tropical fever, I’ve found that taking small steps often is the best approach. Finding those steps and achieving them is what gets me excited and hungry to explore new solutions in the future.

College essay example #6

This student was admitted to UC Berkeley.

(Suggested reading: How to Get Into UC Berkeley and How to Write Great UC Essays )

The phenomenon of interdependency, man depending on man for survival, has shaped centuries of human civilization. However, I feel, the youth of today are slowly disconnecting from their community. For the past few years, human connection has intrigued me and witnessing the apathy of my peers has prompted me to engage in various leadership positions in order to motivate them to complete community service and become active members of society.

Less than a year before ninth grade began, my cousin and close friend passed away from cancer, and in the hodge-podge of feelings, I did not emotionally deal with either death. However, a simple tale helped me deal with these deaths and take action. 

I was never fully aware of how closely humans rely upon each other until I read The Fall of Freddy the Leaf by Leo Buscaglia in freshman year. The allegory is about a leaf that changes with the seasons, finally dying in the winter, realizing that his purpose was to help the tree thrive. After reading it, I was enlightened on the cycle of life and realized the tremendous impact my actions had on others. 

Last year, I joined the American Cancer Society‘s Relay for Life, a twenty-four-hour relay walk-a-thon designed to raise funds for cancer research and create awareness about its early detection. I started a team at school, gathered thirty students and chaperones, and raised $800 for the cause. I watched as each student created friendships with other students on our team and members of the Phoenix community. This year, I led a team in the relay for life again with the schoolwide team of 95 members, and we raised $2,900 for the cure for cancer. At first the group leader ship consisted of only my advisor in me; however, I gained the support of the administrators. I spent well over an hour a day preparing for the event, and it was all worth it! 

The Sonora Eagles were students of different grade levels, ethnicities, socioeconomic backgrounds, and educational ability. We joked and played football while volunteering. The most important moment occurred during the night’s luminaria ceremony, during which cancer patients of the past and present were commemorated. Our whole team gathered around, and I asked people to share how they have been affected by cancer. As I went through the crowd, their faces illuminated by candlelight, their cheeks were wet with cleansing tears, I realize the impact I had on them, the purpose I was fulfilling; but most importantly, I realized the impact they had had on me. The Sonora Eagles were my means for dealing with the death of my loved ones to cancer. 

The theme for relay for life is a hope for a cure. Through this experience as a leader, I have come to realize, as a community, we hope together, we dream together, we work together, and we succeed together. This is the phenomenon of interdependency, the interconnectedness of life, the pivotal reason for human existence. I have continued this momentum by starting a Sonora High School chapter of American Cancer Society Youth, a club dedicated to youth involvement and several aspects of the American Cancer Society, including the recent Arizona Proposition 45. 

Each one of us leaves behind a legacy as we fulfill our purpose in life. I believe my purpose as a student is to encourage others to become active community members and motivate them to reach new heights. As a student of the University of California, I will contribute my understanding of the human condition and student motivation to help strengthen student relationships within the campus and throughout the community.

College essay example #7

This is a college essay that worked for Cornell University .

(Suggested reading: How to Get Into Cornell )

My fingers know instinctively, without a thought.  They turn the dial, just as they have hundreds of times before, until a soft, metallic click echoes into my eardrum and triggers their unconscious stop.  I exultantly thrust open my locker door, exposing its deepest bowels candidly to the wide halls of the high school. The bright lights shine back, brashly revealing every crevice, nook, and cranny, gleaming across its scintillating, bare surfaces.  On this first day of senior year, I set out upon my task. I procure an ordinary plastic grocery bag from my backpack. The contents inside collectively represent everything about me in high school – they tell a story, one all about me.

I reach in and let my fingers trail around the surfaces of each object.  I select my first prey arbitrarily, and as I raise my hand up to eye level, I closely examine this chosen one.  A miniature Flamenco dancer stares back at me from the confines of the 3-D rectangular magnet, half popping out as if willing herself to come to life.  Instantly, my mind transports me back a few summers before, when I tapped my own heels to traditional music in Spain. I am reminded of my thirst to travel, to explore new cultures utterly different from my familiar home in Modesto, California.  I have experienced study abroad in Spain, visited my father’s hometown in China five times, and traveled to many other places such as Paris. As a result, I have developed a restlessness inside me, a need to move on from four years in the same high school, to take advantage of diverse opportunities whenever possible, and to meet interesting people.

I take out the next magnet from my plastic bag.  This one shows a panoramic view of the city of Santa Barbara, California.  Here, I recall spending six weeks in my glory, not only studying and learning, but actually pursuing new knowledge to add to the repertoire of mankind.  I could have easily chosen to spend my summer lazing about; in fact, my parents tried to persuade me into taking a break. Instead, I chose to do advanced molecular biology research at Stanford University.  I wanted to immerse myself in my passion for biology and dip into the infinitely rich possibilities of my mind. This challenge was so rewarding to me, while at the same time I had the most fun of my life, because I was able to live with people who shared the same kind of drive and passion as I did.

After sticking up my magnets on the locker door, I ran my fingers across the bottom of the bag, and I realized that one remained.  It was a bold, black square, with white block letters proclaiming my motto, “Live the Life You Imagine.” In my four years at Cornell University, I will certainly continue to live life as I imagine, adding my own flavor to the Cornell community, while taking away invaluable experiences of my own. 

College essay example #8

This student was admitted to Northwestern University .

As I sip a mug of hot chocolate on a dreary winter’s day, I am already planning in my mind what I will do the next summer.  I briefly ponder the traditional routes, such as taking a job or spending most of the summer at the beach. However, I know that I want to do something unique.  I am determined to even surpass my last summer, in which I spent one month with a host family in Egypt and twelve days at a leadership conference in New York City. The college courses I have taken at Oregon State University since the summer after 7th grade will no longer provide the kind of challenge I seek.

Six months later, I step off the airplane to find myself surrounded by palm trees, with a view of the open-air airport.  I chuckle to myself about the added bonus of good weather, but I know I have come to Palo Alto, California, with a much higher purpose in mind.  I will spend six weeks here in my glory, not only studying and learning, but actually pursuing new knowledge to add to the repertoire of mankind.  Through the Stanford Institutes of Medicine Summer Research Program, I will earn college credit by conducting original molecular biology research, writing my own research paper, and presenting my findings in a research symposium.

I decided to spend my summer doing research because I knew that I liked scientific thought, and that I would passionately throw myself into any new challenge.  I always want to know more – to probe deeper into the laws of the universe, to explore the power and beauty of nature, to solve the most complicated problems. I have an insatiable curiosity and a desire to delve deeper down in the recesses of my intellect.  At the Summer Research Program, I found out how much I enjoy thinking critically, solving problems, and applying my knowledge to the real world. 

While pursuing research in California, I was also able to meet many similarly motivated, interesting people from across the United States and abroad.  As I learned about their unique lifestyles, I also shared with them the diverse perspectives I have gained from my travel abroad and my Chinese cultural heritage.  I will never forget the invaluable opportunity I had to explore California along with these bright people.

I could have easily chosen to spend that summer the traditional way; in fact, my parents even tried to persuade me into taking a break.  Instead, I chose to do molecular biology research at Stanford University. I wanted to immerse myself in my passion for biology and dip into the infinitely rich possibilities of my mind.  This challenge was so rewarding to me, while at the same time I had the most fun of my life, because I was able to live with people who share the same kind of drive and passion as I do.

College essay example #9

When I turned twelve, my stepdad turned violent. He became a different person overnight, frequently getting into fights with my mom. I didn’t deal with it well, often crying to my mom’s disappointment, afraid that my life would undo itself in a matter of seconds. You might say that my upbringing was characterized by my parents morphing everyday objects into weapons and me trying to morph into the perfect white walls that stood unmoving while my family fell apart.

This period in my life is not a sob story, but rather, the origin story of my love of writing. During a fight once, my stepdad left the house to retrieve a baseball bat from his truck. He didn’t use it, but I’ll never forget the fear that he would, how close he’d gotten. And in that moment, I did not cry as I was prone to do, but I pulled out a book, and experienced a profound disappearance, one that would always make me associate reading with escapism and healing.

Soon I came to write, filling up loose ruled paper with words, writing in the dark when we didn’t have money to pay for electricity. And as I got older, I began to think that there must be others who were going through this, too. I tried to find them. I created an anonymous blog that centered what it meant for a teenager to find joy even as her life was in shambles. In this blog I kept readers updated with what I was learning, nightly yoga to release tension from the day and affirmations in the morning to counter the shame that was mounting as a result of witnessing weekly my inability to make things better at home.

At that time, I felt uncertain about who I was because I was different online than I was at home or even at school where I was editor of my high school literary journal. It took me a while to understand that I was not the girl who hid in the corner making herself small; I was the one who sought to connect with others who were dealing with the same challenges at home, thinking that maybe in our isolation we could come together. I was able to make enough from my blog to pay some bills in the house and give my mom the courage to kick my stepfather out. When he exited our home, I felt a wind go through it, the house exhaling a giant sigh of relief.

I know this is not the typical background of most students. Sharing my story with like-minded teens helped me understand what I have to offer: my perspective, my unrelenting optimism. Because even as I’ve seen the dark side of what people are capable of, I have also been a star witness to joy and love. I do not experience despair for long because I know that this is just one chapter in a long novel, one that will change the hearts of those who come across it. And I can’t wait to see how it will end.

College essay example #10

This student was accepted at Yale University .

(Suggested reading: How to Get Into Yale )

I was a straight A student until I got to high school, where my calm evenings cooking dinner for my siblings turned into hours watching videos, followed by the frantic attempt to finish homework around 4 am. When I got an F on a chemistry pop quiz my mom sat me down to ask me what was happening. I told her I couldn’t focus or keep track of all my materials for classes. I thought she would call me lazy, accuse me of wasting the gift of being an American that she and my father gave me. Instead, she looked around at the walls covered in sticky notes, the index cards scattered on the computer desk, the couch, the table, and she said, “How are your friends managing it?” 

It turned out while my peers were struggling to juggle the demands of high school it didn’t seem like they were working as hard to complete simple tasks. They only had to put things in a planner, not make sure the deadlines were placed in multiple locations, physical and digital. At my next doctor’s appointment my mom mentioned that I had a learning problem, but the doctor shook his head and said that I didn’t seem to have ADHD. I was just procrastinating, it’s natural.

My mom took off from her grocery store job to take me to two more appointments to ask about ADHD, the term the doctor had used, but other doctors were not willing to listen. I had As in every class except for World Literature. But I knew something was wrong. After our third doctor visit, I worked with the librarian after school to sift through research on ADHD and other learning disabilities until we came across the term executive functioning. Armed with knowledge, we went to a new doctor, and before my mom could insist that we get testing or get referred to a specialist, the doctor handed us a signed referral. She asked me about the folder in my hand. I told her it was full of my research. My mom mentioned that some doctors had refused to refer us to a specialist because my grades were too high. “It’s because we’re Asian,” she added. 

I was shocked at this revelation. The last three doctors had mumbled something about grades but had never said a thing about race. Before I could deny it fervently, the doctor, who was from Taiwan, nodded sympathetically. She said it’s common to miss learning disabilities among different races due to biases. And some adolescents learn to mask symptoms by building systems. “You don’t have to prove anything to me. I believe you should get tested.” My mom thanked her fervently and the doctor said to her, “She’s going to be a great lawyer.”

The semester following the confirmation of my learning disability diagnosis was challenging to say the least. My school switched me out of all of my IB courses to “accommodate my special needs,” and I went back to the library, working with the librarian with numerous index cards and stacks of books to make a case for discrimination. The librarian, who had become my close confidante, introduced me to an academic tutor who specialized in learning disabilities and taught me skills like using redundancy and time management to make it easier for me to grapple with moving parts. He noted that with ADHD, the problem wasn’t always the inability to focus but rather the difficulty focusing without adequate perceived reward. It wasn’t that I was not capable but that I had to make myself sufficiently interested or reiterate why something mattered. This reframe changed my life, and when I came back to the library with my new schedule in hand, the most advanced courses my school had to offer, the librarian said, “You’re going to make a great lawyer.”

I smiled and said, “I’ve heard that before.”

College essay example #11

This student was accepted at the University of Pennsylvania.

My brother and I are exactly one year and one day apart. We look like twins — people confuse us — but we couldn’t be any more different. As children we wore the same clothes, received the same haircut. By the time we got to middle school it was clear that my older brother preferred quiet, indoor activities, while I was a born performer who preferred the theatrical, even when off stage. I took his relative silence to be disinterest and found it offensive. To the chagrin of my parents, we simply didn’t get along. 

I didn’t mind having a tense relationship with my brother because I was involved at school. In particular I delved into the world of musical theater in addition to regularly singing solos at our high school choir concerts. I spent hours after school preparing for shows. And when I came home, I practiced as well, falling into a rigorous routine I thought I needed to remain at my best and be competitive for parts. 

My bedroom was far enough from my parents so as not to disturb them, but space to practice became an issue with my brother because, well, we shared a room. Imagine him meditating on a window seat while I am belting, trying to sustain a high note. Needless to say, this created tension between us. From my point of view he could have meditated in the living room or while I was at practice, but he wasn’t willing to budge. From his point of view, high school was hard enough without the constant sound of Glee arrangements.

At the start of the semester, I practiced “Circle of Life” for a concert audition. While I could sing it fine in its original key, I had a hard time singing it along with the music because the arrangement of the song we were working on had a key change that was out of my range. I couldn’t change key without my voice cracking as I switched to a head voice. This was the first time I struggled to learn a song, and I was a week from the audition. I was irritable in that period and stopped practicing, declaring I had reached the height of my singing career. My brother experiencing quiet when I got home for the first time in years. 

After a couple days of this, when I got home, he asked me to join him in meditation. And feeling my anger at my inability to navigate this song gracefully, I did. It was difficult at first. I was trying to clear my head. Later my brother told me that wasn’t the point. When your mind drifts away, you simply come back, no judgment. I liked the sound of that, and it became my new philosophy. I kept trying at the song, no longer getting angry at myself, and just in time for the audition I was able to maintain power in my voice despite the key change. It was important for me to learn you don’t have to always get everything right the first time and that good things come with continual effort. As for my brother, we no longer argue. I now understand why he prefers the quiet. 

College essay example #12

This student was admitted to Brown University .

(Suggested reading: How to Get Into Brown )

My parents are aerospace engineers, humble even as their work helps our society explore new frontiers. They believe that you make a stand through the work that you do, not what you say. This is what they taught me. This is what I believed until my sophomore year when I was confronted with a moment where I could not stay quiet. 

I live outside of a major city in a small, rural town that’s majority white but for a small South Asian population. My high school wasn’t diverse by any standards. Some students were openly the children of skinheads. After a racist exchange with a student who insulted her and refused to sit at the same lunch table, my best friend, who was Muslim, did not stand for the pledge of allegiance in homeroom the next day.

I hadn’t heard about the encounter that sparked this move on her part and was surprised when she didn’t stand up beside me, hand against her heart, mouth chanting an oath. She hadn’t mentioned any mounting discomfort to me, nor had I noticed anything. Unlike my “patriotic” peers, I was less upset by her refusal to stand up for the pledge of allegiance and more upset that she didn’t share with me that she was hurting and what she was going to do to protest how she was treated because of her beliefs and the color of her skin. 

She was suspended for insubordination and when I called her, she said that surely in this situation I might find a way to think of more than my own feelings. I felt ashamed. It didn’t even occur to me to seek to understand what was behind her decision in the first place. I apologized, asking how to best support her. She said it was just important that I listen and understand that she could not thrive in an environment that promoted sameness. She spoke to me with a vulnerability I had never heard before. At the end of our conversation, I apologized profusely. She said she did not need my words and what she needed from me was to take a stand.

This was the opposite of the belief my parents drilled in me. I felt conflicted at first, as if by speaking about the situation I was doing something wrong. However, my friend had to deal with a reality that I did not. And perhaps taking a stand would allow my institution and everyone in it to learn to be a more inclusive space for everyone. Maybe there was a way to take a stand and to do the necessary work to change things.

I started a petition with my friend’s permission to end her suspension and to take disciplinary action instead on the student who had taken racist actions in the first place. Of the 1000 students at my high school, over 200 signed, a number that far exceeded my expectation. When I shared the results with my friend, she said to me, “Because of who you are, you will always have supporters. Use your power to do good.”

Since then, I have tried to be more aware that not everyone experiences comfort in the same environments that I do. Rather than assume everyone feels safe and supported, it’s best to create space to listen and to ask how you can be supportive. My friend and I created a club to foster cross-cultural dialogue. In the past year two other clubs of its kind began at other local schools. More than anything I am proud that I have learned to be a better friend and a more thoughtful community member in a way that honors who I am and what I value.

College essay example #13

This is a college essay that worked for Washington University in St. Louis (WashU).

I held my breath as my steady hands gently nestled the crumbly roots of the lettuce plant into the soil trench that I shoveled moments before. Rainwater and sweat dripped from my brow as I meticulously patted and pressed the surrounding earth, stamping the leafy green creature into its new home. After rubbing the gritty soil off of my hands, I looked at Brian, a co-volunteer and nonverbal 20-year-old with autism, who extended his arm for a high-five. In the year that I’ve been working with him, I’ve watched him revel in planting, nurturing, and eventually harvesting his veggies, especially the grape tomatoes, which we enjoy eating fresh off the vine! Upon walking to the next row of hollowed cavities, we were not contemplating the lengthy work that lay ahead, but rather, we sought to liberate the helpless lettuces, imprisoned in produce cartons that were too small for them to grow in. Finally, after taking a step back to admire the day’s last plant, my chest swelled as a wave of contentment flushed through my body. 

My love for gardening began when I moved to Georgia during my sophomore year. In the time I’ve spent learning how to garden, I’ve developed an affinity for watching my vegetables grow to maturity, eager to be harvested and sold at the Saturday market. Though many see gardening as tedious busywork, I find it meditative, as I lose track of time while combining peat moss and soil in the garden’s compost mixer. Saturday morning garden work has become a weekend ritual, ridding me of all extraneous responsibilities. My body goes into autopilot as I let my mind wander. I don’t actively focus on focusing, but rather I observe myself internally digest the week’s events. I’m a bystander to fireworks of thought that explode in my mind as my perception of important matters becomes trivial. Sometimes, it’s the physics midterm that suddenly seems less daunting or the deadlines I need to meet for my Spanish project that push back farther. Other times, I contemplate alternative endings to conversations or make perfect sense of the calculus answer that was at the tip of my tongue in class. 

I met Brian, a close friend of mine who also basks in the tranquility of nature, through my gardening endeavors. While we aren’t able to communicate verbally, we speak the language of earth, water, peat, and seedlings. He doesn’t speak with words, but his face tells stories of newly found purpose and acceptance, a pleasant contrast to the typical condescension and babying he feels by those who don’t think he’s capable of independent thought. 

Throughout my time in the garden with Brian, I began to understand that he, like everyone, has a particular method of communicating. There are the obvious spoken languages, body languages, facial expressions, and interactions we share on a day-to-day basis that reflect who we are and communicate what we represent. Brian expresses himself through various manifestations of unspoken language that he uses to signal how he feels or what he wants. But the nuanced combinations of different methods of communicating are oftentimes overlooked, raising a barrier to mutual understanding that prevents one from being capable of truly connecting with others. I began to understand that in order to reach people, I have to speak in their language, be it verbally or otherwise. Working with Brian over the past year has made me more aware that people can have difficulty expressing themselves. I found that I can positively lead people if I can communicate with them, whether on the track or in my Jewish youth group discussions. As I move into the next phases of my life, I hope to bring these skills with me because, in order to effectuate positive change in my community, I learned that I must speak in the language of those around me. Those are the words Brian taught me.

College essay example #14

This student was accepted at Brown University.

It felt like I threw myself out of a plane without a parachute. My eyes firmly shut, I feared for my life as I plummeted towards the ground. In hindsight, perhaps half coming out at a public restaurant wasn’t the brightest idea. Then again, living as the half-closeted queer kid meant that I was all too familiar with intimidating situations.

I asked my mom: “What would you do if I had a girlfriend?” She instantly replied that she couldn’t understand. Immediately, my heart dropped and the emotional free fall began. She explained that Americans choose to be gay for personal enjoyment, which in my Korean culture is an attitude that is severely frowned upon. I sat there like a statue, motionless and afraid to speak, blindly hurtling towards a hard reality I hadn’t expected. Rejection cut me deeply and I started to feel the itch of tears welling in my eyes, yet I had to contain myself. I couldn’t let the pain seep through my facade or else she would question why I cared. All I could do was keep looking down and shoveling food into my mouth, silently wishing I could just disappear. That night, I realized it would be a long time before I could fully come out to my mom. My eyes tightened as I continued to fall.

In the following weeks, I started noticing how discomfort played a natural part in my life. I recognized the anxious reactions of my classmates as I argued with my Christian friends when they said my queerness is a sin. I observed the judgmental glances my mentors gave me as I passionately disagreed with my conservative lab mates over my sister’s abortion. Eventually, my friends decided to censor certain topics of discussion, trying to avoid these situations altogether. I felt like vulnerability was the new taboo. People’s expressions and actions seemed to confine me, telling me to stop caring so much, to keep my eyes closed as I fall, so they didn’t have to watch.

Had others felt uncomfortable with me in the same way I had felt uncomfortable with my mom? Do they feel that our passions might uncover a chasm into which we all fall, unsure of the outcome?

Perhaps it was too raw , too emotional .

There was something about pure, uncensored passion during conflict that became too real. It made me, and the people around me, vulnerable, which was frightening. It made us think about things we didn’t want to consider, things branded too political, too dangerous. Shielding ourselves in discomfort was simply an easier way of living.

However, I’ve come to realize that it wasn’t my comfort, but rather, my discomfort that defined my life. My memories aren’t filled with times where life was simple, but moments where I was conflicted. It is filled with unexpected dinners and unusual conversations where I was uncertain. It is filled with the uncensored versions of my beliefs and the beliefs of others. It is filled with a purity that I shouldn’t have detained.

Now, I look forward to tough conversations with a newfound willingness to learn and listen, with an appreciation for uncertainty. I urge others to explore our discomfort together and embrace the messy emotions that accompany it. I try to make our collective discomfort more navigable. Since that dinner, my relationship with my mother is still in free fall. It’s dangerous and frightening. Thankfully, the potentially perilous conversations I’ve had with my friends has given me a newfound appreciation for my own fear. I’ll admit, part of me still seeks to close my eyes, to hide in the safety I’ll find in silence. Yet, a larger part of me yearns to embrace the dangers around me as I fall through the sky. I may still be falling, but this time, I will open my eyes, and hopefully steer towards a better landing for both my mom and me.

THERE'S NO REASON TO STRUGGLE THROUGH THE COLLEGE ADMISSIONS PROCESS ALONE, ESPECIALLY WITH SO MUCH ON THE LINE. SCHEDULE YOUR COMPLIMENTARY CONSULTATION TO ENSURE YOU LEAVE NOTHING TO CHANCE.

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How to Write a College Essay | A Complete Guide & Examples

The college essay can make or break your application. It’s your chance to provide personal context, communicate your values and qualities, and set yourself apart from other students.

A standout essay has a few key ingredients:

• A unique, personal topic
• A compelling, well-structured narrative
• A clear, creative writing style
• Evidence of self-reflection and insight

To achieve this, it’s crucial to give yourself enough time for brainstorming, writing, revision, and feedback.

In this comprehensive guide, we walk you through every step in the process of writing a college admissions essay.

Table of contents

Why do you need a standout essay, start organizing early, choose a unique topic, outline your essay, start with a memorable introduction, write like an artist, craft a strong conclusion, revise and receive feedback, frequently asked questions.

While most of your application lists your academic achievements, your college admissions essay is your opportunity to share who you are and why you’d be a good addition to the university.

Your college admissions essay accounts for about 25% of your application’s total weight一and may account for even more with some colleges making the SAT and ACT tests optional. The college admissions essay may be the deciding factor in your application, especially for competitive schools where most applicants have exceptional grades, test scores, and extracurriculars.

What do colleges look for in an essay?

Admissions officers want to understand your background, personality, and values to get a fuller picture of you beyond your test scores and grades. Here’s what colleges look for in an essay :

• Demonstrated values and qualities
• Vulnerability and authenticity
• Self-reflection and insight
• Creative, clear, and concise writing skills

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It’s a good idea to start organizing your college application timeline in the summer of your junior year to make your application process easier. This will give you ample time for essay brainstorming, writing, revision, and feedback.

While timelines will vary for each student, aim to spend at least 1–3 weeks brainstorming and writing your first draft and at least 2–4 weeks revising across multiple drafts. Remember to leave enough time for breaks in between each writing and editing stage.

Create an essay tracker sheet

If you’re applying to multiple schools, you will have to juggle writing several essays for each one. We recommend using an essay tracker spreadsheet to help you visualize and organize the following:

• Deadlines and number of essays needed
• Prompt overlap, allowing you to write one essay for similar prompts

You can build your own essay tracker using our free Google Sheets template.

College essay tracker template

Ideally, you should start brainstorming college essay topics the summer before your senior year. Keep in mind that it’s easier to write a standout essay with a unique topic.

If you want to write about a common essay topic, such as a sports injury or volunteer work overseas, think carefully about how you can make it unique and personal. You’ll need to demonstrate deep insight and write your story in an original way to differentiate it from similar essays.

What makes a good topic?

• Meaningful and personal to you
• Uncommon or has an unusual angle
• Reveals something different from the rest of your application

Brainstorming questions

You should do a comprehensive brainstorm before choosing your topic. Here are a few questions to get started:

• What are your top five values? What lived experiences demonstrate these values?
• What adjectives would your friends and family use to describe you?
• What challenges or failures have you faced and overcome? What lessons did you learn from them?
• What makes you different from your classmates?
• What are some objects that represent your identity, your community, your relationships, your passions, or your goals?
• Whom do you admire most? Why?
• What three people have significantly impacted your life? How did they influence you?

How to identify your topic

Here are two strategies for identifying a topic that demonstrates your values:

• Start with your qualities : First, identify positive qualities about yourself; then, brainstorm stories that demonstrate these qualities.
• Start with a story : Brainstorm a list of memorable life moments; then, identify a value shown in each story.

After choosing your topic, organize your ideas in an essay outline , which will help keep you focused while writing. Unlike a five-paragraph academic essay, there’s no set structure for a college admissions essay. You can take a more creative approach, using storytelling techniques to shape your essay.

Two common approaches are to structure your essay as a series of vignettes or as a single narrative.

Vignettes structure

The vignette, or montage, structure weaves together several stories united by a common theme. Each story should demonstrate one of your values or qualities and conclude with an insight or future outlook.

This structure gives the admissions officer glimpses into your personality, background, and identity, and shows how your qualities appear in different areas of your life.

Topic: Museum with a “five senses” exhibit of my experiences

• Introduction: Tour guide introduces my museum and my “Making Sense of My Heritage” exhibit
• Story: Racial discrimination with my eyes
• Lesson: Using my writing to document truth
• Story: Broadway musical interests
• Lesson: Finding my voice
• Story: Smells from family dinner table
• Lesson: Appreciating home and family
• Story: Washing dishes
• Lesson: Finding moments of peace in busy schedule
• Story: Biking with Ava
• Lesson: Finding pleasure in job well done
• Conclusion: Tour guide concludes tour, invites guest to come back for “fall College Collection,” featuring my search for identity and learning.

Single story structure

The single story, or narrative, structure uses a chronological narrative to show a student’s character development over time. Some narrative essays detail moments in a relatively brief event, while others narrate a longer journey spanning months or years.

Single story essays are effective if you have overcome a significant challenge or want to demonstrate personal development.

Topic: Sports injury helps me learn to be a better student and person

• Situation: Football injury
• Challenge: Friends distant, teachers don’t know how to help, football is gone for me
• Turning point: Starting to like learning in Ms. Brady’s history class; meeting Christina and her friends
• My reactions: Reading poetry; finding shared interest in poetry with Christina; spending more time studying and with people different from me
• Insight: They taught me compassion and opened my eyes to a different lifestyle; even though I still can’t play football, I’m starting a new game

Brainstorm creative insights or story arcs

Regardless of your essay’s structure, try to craft a surprising story arc or original insights, especially if you’re writing about a common topic.

Never exaggerate or fabricate facts about yourself to seem interesting. However, try finding connections in your life that deviate from cliché storylines and lessons.

Admissions officers read thousands of essays each year, and they typically spend only a few minutes reading each one. To get your message across, your introduction , or hook, needs to grab the reader’s attention and compel them to read more..

Avoid starting your introduction with a famous quote, cliché, or reference to the essay itself (“While I sat down to write this essay…”).

While you can sometimes use dialogue or a meaningful quotation from a close family member or friend, make sure it encapsulates your essay’s overall theme.

Find an original, creative way of starting your essay using the following two methods.

Option 1: Start with an intriguing hook

Begin your essay with an unexpected statement to pique the reader’s curiosity and compel them to carefully read your essay. A mysterious introduction disarms the reader’s expectations and introduces questions that can only be answered by reading more.

Option 2: Start with vivid imagery

Illustrate a clear, detailed image to immediately transport your reader into your memory. You can start in the middle of an important scene or describe an object that conveys your essay’s theme.

A college application essay allows you to be creative in your style and tone. As you draft your essay, try to use interesting language to enliven your story and stand out .

Show, don’t tell

“Tell” in writing means to simply state a fact: “I am a basketball player.” “ Show ” in writing means to use details, examples, and vivid imagery to help the reader easily visualize your memory: “My heart races as I set up to shoot一two seconds, one second一and score a three-pointer!”

First, reflect on every detail of a specific image or scene to recall the most memorable aspects.

• What are the most prominent images?
• Are there any particular sounds, smells, or tastes associated with this memory?
• What emotion or physical feeling did you have at that time?

Be vulnerable to create an emotional response

You don’t have to share a huge secret or traumatic story, but you should dig deep to express your honest feelings, thoughts, and experiences to evoke an emotional response. Showing vulnerability demonstrates humility and maturity. However, don’t exaggerate to gain sympathy.

Use appropriate style and tone

Make sure your essay has the right style and tone by following these guidelines:

• Use a conversational yet respectful tone: less formal than academic writing, but more formal than texting your friends.
• Prioritize using “I” statements to highlight your perspective.
• Write within your vocabulary range to maintain an authentic voice.
• Write concisely, and use the active voice to keep a fast pace.
• Follow grammar rules (unless you have valid stylistic reasons for breaking them).

You should end your college essay with a deep insight or creative ending to leave the reader with a strong final impression. Your college admissions essay should avoid the following:

• Summarizing what you already wrote
• Stating your hope of being accepted to the school
• Mentioning character traits that should have been illustrated in the essay, such as “I’m a hard worker”

Here are two strategies to craft a strong conclusion.

Option 1: Full circle, sandwich structure

The full circle, or sandwich, structure concludes the essay with an image, idea, or story mentioned in the introduction. This strategy gives the reader a strong sense of closure.

In the example below, the essay concludes by returning to the “museum” metaphor that the writer opened with.

Option 2: Revealing your insight

You can use the conclusion to show the insight you gained as a result of the experiences you’ve described. Revealing your main message at the end creates suspense and keeps the takeaway at the forefront of your reader’s mind.

Revise your essay before submitting it to check its content, style, and grammar. Get feedback from no more than two or three people.

It’s normal to go through several rounds of revision, but take breaks between each editing stage.

Also check out our college essay examples to see what does and doesn’t work in an essay and the kinds of changes you can make to improve yours.

Respect the word count

Most schools specify a word count for each essay , and you should stay within 10% of the upper limit.

Remain under the specified word count limit to show you can write concisely and follow directions. However, don’t write too little, which may imply that you are unwilling or unable to write a thoughtful and developed essay.

Check your content, style, and grammar

• First, check big-picture issues of message, flow, and clarity.
• Then, check for style and tone issues.
• Finally, focus on eliminating grammar and punctuation errors.

Get feedback

Get feedback from 2–3 people who know you well, have good writing skills, and are familiar with college essays.

• Teachers and guidance counselors can help you check your content, language, and tone.
• Friends and family can check for authenticity.
• An essay coach or editor has specialized knowledge of college admissions essays and can give objective expert feedback.

The checklist below helps you make sure your essay ticks all the boxes.

College admissions essay checklist

I’ve organized my essay prompts and created an essay writing schedule.

I’ve done a comprehensive brainstorm for essay topics.

I’ve selected a topic that’s meaningful to me and reveals something different from the rest of my application.

I’ve created an outline to guide my structure.

I’ve crafted an introduction containing vivid imagery or an intriguing hook that grabs the reader’s attention.

I’ve written my essay in a way that shows instead of telling.

I’ve shown positive traits and values in my essay.

I’ve demonstrated self-reflection and insight in my essay.

I’ve used appropriate style and tone .

I’ve concluded with an insight or a creative ending.

I’ve revised my essay , checking my overall message, flow, clarity, and grammar.

I’ve respected the word count , remaining within 10% of the upper word limit.

Congratulations!

It looks like your essay ticks all the boxes. A second pair of eyes can help you take it to the next level – Scribbr's essay coaches can help.

Colleges want to be able to differentiate students who seem similar on paper. In the college application essay , they’re looking for a way to understand each applicant’s unique personality and experiences.

Your college essay accounts for about 25% of your application’s weight. It may be the deciding factor in whether you’re accepted, especially for competitive schools where most applicants have exceptional grades, test scores, and extracurricular track records.

A standout college essay has several key ingredients:

• A unique, personally meaningful topic
• A memorable introduction with vivid imagery or an intriguing hook
• Specific stories and language that show instead of telling
• Vulnerability that’s authentic but not aimed at soliciting sympathy
• Clear writing in an appropriate style and tone
• A conclusion that offers deep insight or a creative ending

While timelines will differ depending on the student, plan on spending at least 1–3 weeks brainstorming and writing the first draft of your college admissions essay , and at least 2–4 weeks revising across multiple drafts. Don’t forget to save enough time for breaks between each writing and editing stage.

You should already begin thinking about your essay the summer before your senior year so that you have plenty of time to try out different topics and get feedback on what works.

Most college application portals specify a word count range for your essay, and you should stay within 10% of the upper limit to write a developed and thoughtful essay.

You should aim to stay under the specified word count limit to show you can follow directions and write concisely. However, don’t write too little, as it may seem like you are unwilling or unable to write a detailed and insightful narrative about yourself.

If no word count is specified, we advise keeping your essay between 400 and 600 words.

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Ultimate Guide to Writing Your College Essay

Tips for writing an effective college essay.

College admissions essays are an important part of your college application and gives you the chance to show colleges and universities your character and experiences. This guide will give you tips to write an effective college essay.

Want free help with your college essay?

UPchieve connects you with knowledgeable and friendly college advisors—online, 24/7, and completely free. Get 1:1 help brainstorming topics, outlining your essay, revising a draft, or editing grammar.

Writing a strong college admissions essay

Learn about the elements of a solid admissions essay.

Avoiding common admissions essay mistakes

Learn some of the most common mistakes made on college essays

Brainstorming tips for your college essay

Stuck on what to write your college essay about? Here are some exercises to help you get started.

How formal should the tone of your college essay be?

Learn how formal your college essay should be and get tips on how to bring out your natural voice.

Taking your college essay to the next level

Hear an admissions expert discuss the appropriate level of depth necessary in your college essay.

Student Stories

Student Story: Admissions essay about a formative experience

Get the perspective of a current college student on how he approached the admissions essay.

Student Story: Admissions essay about personal identity

Get the perspective of a current college student on how she approached the admissions essay.

Student Story: Admissions essay about community impact

Student story: admissions essay about a past mistake, how to write a college application essay, tips for writing an effective application essay, sample college essay 1 with feedback, sample college essay 2 with feedback.

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How to Start a College Essay to Hook Your Reader

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• Cliche College Essay Introduction to Avoid

Where to Get Your Essay Edited for Free

Have you sat down to write your essay and just hit a wall of writer’s block? Do you have too many ideas running around your head, or maybe no ideas at all?

Starting a college essay is potentially the hardest part of the application process. Once you start, it’s easy to keep writing, but that initial hurdle is just so difficult to overcome. We’ve put together a list of tips to help you jump that wall and make your essay the best it can be.

The introduction to a college essay should immediately hook the reader. You want to give admissions officers a reason to stay interested in your story and encourage them to continue reading your essay with an open mind. Remember that admissions officers are only able to spend a couple minutes per essay, so if you bore them or turn them off from the start, they may clock out for the rest of the essay.

As a whole, the college essay should aim to portray a part of your personality that hasn’t been covered by your GPA, extracurriculars, and test scores. This makes the introduction a crucial part of the essay. Think of it as the first glimpse, an intriguing lead on, into the read rest of your essay which also showcases your voice and personality. 

Brainstorm Topics

Take the time to sit down and brainstorm some good topic ideas for your essay. You want your topic to be meaningful to you, while also displaying a part of you that isn’t apparent in other aspects of your application. The essay is an opportunity to show admissions officers the “real you.” If you have a topic in mind, do not feel pressured to start with the introduction. Sometimes the best essay openings are developed last, once you fully grasp the flow of your story.

Do a Freewrite

Give yourself permission to write without judgment for an allotted period of time. For each topic you generated in your brainstorm session, do a free-write session. Set a time for one minute and write down whatever comes to mind for that specific topic. This will help get the juices flowing and push you over that initial bit of writer’s block that’s so common when it comes time to write a college essay. Repeat this exercise if you’re feeling stuck at any point during the essay writing process. Freewriting is a great way to warm up your creative writing brain whilst seeing which topics are flowing more naturally onto the page.

Create an Outline

Once you’ve chosen your topic, write an outline for your whole essay. It’s easier to organize all your thoughts, write the body, and then go back to write the introduction. That way, you already know the direction you want your essay to go because you’ve actually written it out, and you can ensure that your introduction leads directly into the rest of the essay. Admissions officers are looking for the quality of your writing alongside the content of your essay. To be prepared for college-level writing, students should understand how to logically structure an essay. By creating an outline, you are setting yourself up to be judged favorably on the quality of your writing skills.

1. The Scriptwriter

“No! Make it stop! Get me out!” My 5-year-old self waved my arms frantically in front of my face in the darkened movie theater.

Starting your essay with dialogue instantly transports the reader into the story, while also introducing your personal voice. In the rest of the essay, the author proposes a class that introduces people to insects as a type of food. Typically, one would begin directly with the course proposal. However, the author’s inclusion of this flashback weaves in a personal narrative, further displaying her true self.

Read the full essay.

2. The Shocker

A chaotic sense of sickness and filth unfolds in an overcrowded border station in McAllen, Texas. Through soundproof windows, migrants motion that they have not showered in weeks, and children wear clothes caked in mucus and tears. The humanitarian crisis at the southern border exists not only in photographs published by mainstream media, but miles from my home in South Texas.

This essay opener is also a good example of “The Vivid Imaginer.” In this case, the detailed imagery only serves to heighten the shock factor. While people may be aware of the “humanitarian crisis at the southern border,” reading about it in such stark terms is bound to capture the reader’s attention. Through this hook, the reader learns a bit about the author’s home life; an aspect of the student that may not be detailed elsewhere in their application. The rest of the essay goes on to talk about the author’s passion for aiding refugees, and this initial paragraph immediately establishes the author’s personal connection to the refugee crisis.

3. The Vivid Imaginer

The air is crisp and cool, nipping at my ears as I walk under a curtain of darkness that drapes over the sky, starless. It is a Friday night in downtown Corpus Christi, a rare moment of peace in my home city filled with the laughter of strangers and colorful lights of street vendors. But I cannot focus. 

Starting off with a bit of well-written imagery transports the reader to wherever you want to take them. By putting them in this context with you, you allow the reader to closely understand your thoughts and emotions in this situation. Additionally, this method showcases the author’s individual way of looking at the world, a personal touch that is the baseline of all college essays.

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4. The Instant Plunger

The flickering LED lights began to form into a face of a man when I focused my eyes. The man spoke of a ruthless serial killer of the decade who had been arrested in 2004, and my parents shivered at his reaccounting of the case. I curiously tuned in, wondering who he was to speak of such crimes with concrete composure and knowledge. Later, he introduced himself as a profiler named Pyo Chang Won, and I watched the rest of the program by myself without realizing that my parents had left the couch.

Plunging readers into the middle of a story (also known as in medias res ) is an effective hook because it captures attention by placing the reader directly into the action. The descriptive imagery in the first sentence also helps to immerse the reader, creating a satisfying hook while also showing (instead of telling) how the author became interested in criminology. With this technique, it is important to “zoom out,” so to speak, in such a way that the essay remains personal to you.

5. The Philosopher 

Saved in the Notes app on my phone are three questions: What can I know? What must I do? What may I hope for? First asked by Immanuel Kant, these questions guide my pursuit of knowledge and organization of critical thought, both skills that are necessary to move our country and society forward in the right direction.

Posing philosophical questions helps present you as someone with deep ideas while also guiding the focus of your essay. In a way, it presents the reader with a roadmap; they know that these questions provide the theme for the rest of the essay. The more controversial the questions, the more gripping a hook you can create. 

Providing an answer to these questions is not necessarily as important as making sure that the discussions they provoke really showcase you and your own values and beliefs.

6. The Storyteller

One Christmas morning, when I was nine, I opened a snap circuit set from my grandmother. Although I had always loved math and science, I didn’t realize my passion for engineering until I spent the rest of winter break creating different circuits to power various lights, alarms, and sensors. Even after I outgrew the toy, I kept the set in my bedroom at home and knew I wanted to study engineering.

Beginning with an anecdote is a strong way to establish a meaningful connection with the content itself. It also shows that the topic you write about has been a part of your life for a significant amount of time, and something that college admissions officers look for in activities is follow-through; they want to make sure that you are truly interested in something. A personal story such as the one above shows off just that.

Cliche College Essay Introductions to Avoid

Ambiguous introduction.

It’s best to avoid introductory sentences that don’t seem to really say anything at all, such as “Science plays a large role in today’s society,” or “X has existed since the beginning of time.” Statements like these, in addition to being extremely common, don’t demonstrate anything about you, the author. Without a personal connection to you right away, it’s easy for the admissions officer to write off the essay before getting past the first sentence.

Quoting Someone Famous

While having a quotation by a famous author, celebrity, or someone else you admire may seem like a good way to allow the reader to get to know you, these kinds of introductions are actually incredibly overused. You also risk making your essay all about the quotation and the famous person who said it; admissions officers want to get to know you, your beliefs, and your values, not someone who isn’t applying to their school. There are some cases where you may actually be asked to write about a quotation, and that’s fine, but you should avoid starting your essay with someone else’s words outside of this case. It is fine, however, to start with dialogue to plunge your readers into a specific moment.

Talking About Writing an Essay

This method is also very commonplace and is thus best avoided. It’s better to show, not tell, and all this method allows you to do is tell the reader how you were feeling at the time of writing the essay. If you do feel compelled to go this way, make sure to include vivid imagery and focus on grounding the essay in the five senses, which can help elevate your introduction and separate it from the many other meta essays.

Childhood Memories

Phrases like “Ever since I was young…” or “I’ve always wanted…” also lend more to telling rather than showing. If you want to talk about your childhood or past feelings in your essay, try using one of the techniques listed earlier (such as the Instant Plunger or the Vivid Imaginer) to elevate your writing.

CollegeVine has a peer essay review page where peers can tell you if your introduction was enough to hook them. Getting feedback from someone who hasn’t read your essay before, and thus doesn’t have any context which may bias them to be more forgiving to your introduction, is helpful because it mimics the same environment in which an admissions officer will be reading your essay. 

Writing a college essay is hard, but with these tips hopefully starting it will be a little easier!

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What to avoid in college application essays | College Connection

An important part of the Common Application, which is accepted by more than 1,000 colleges, is the personal essay. Students are given six options as prompts, as well as a seventh option which is to share an essay on a topic of choice.  So, students can write about anything at all.

The essay is an integral part of the application, as it is typically viewed by all the schools to which a student applies.  It is the one section where students have the opportunity to share what is unique about them and what qualities they will bring to their future college community.

To make their essay stand out, students should avoid some common pitfalls.

Do not cheat. That means students should not turn to ChatGPT or to another person  to write their essay. This should go without saying but, sadly, it does need to be said. College admissions officers know what the “voice” of a teenager sounds like, and that’s exactly what they’re looking for.

More: Top colleges where 'B' students are accepted | College Connection

Do not write about mental health issues. Although many young people, as well as those in every age group, deal with such issues, it is important not to share that information. Due to privacy laws, colleges are not able to contact parents if students struggle with depression, substance abuse, or any other troubling behavior. Therefore, students should not raise a red flag, or they will most likely find their applications in the “rejected” pile.

Do not be redundant. One’s personal essay is not the place to itemize the extracurricular, volunteer, and work experiences that are all included in the Activities section of the Common App. If there is one activity that dominated a student’s high school experience and is particularly compelling, it can be the topic of the essay. But students must elaborate on how they were profoundly impacted by their engagement. 

More: How where you live affects your college admissions chances | College Connection

Do not recycle successful essays that were submitted by prior applicants. Often, students turn to the multitude of articles showcasing essays written by students who were admitted to Ivy League and other elite institutions. What worked for a prior student will not be effective for another as it’s not their story. It’s vital for students to share their genuine story using their authentic voice.   The key to writing a thoughtful, introspective essay is to start early, carefully consider the story you want to share, and then do so in your very own style.

Susan Alaimo is the founder & director of Collegebound Review, offering PSAT/SAT ® preparation & private college advising by Ivy League educated instructors. Visit CollegeboundReview.com or call 908-369-5362 .

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Jul 17, 2024

Admissions tips: How to write a graduate admissions essay

An admissions essay is a standard part of the admissions application. To help, we’ve curated our top tips on how to write a standout graduate admissions essay.

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Everyone has a unique narrative, and we firmly believe that your qualifications go beyond what can be captured on your resume. But the question is, how will you distinguish yourself from the competition when applying to Johns Hopkins Carey Business School?

What to consider when writing a graduate school application essay The essay portion of the application is your opportunity to broaden our admissions team’s understanding of your abilities beyond what they can see on your transcript and resume. Writing an essay is your chance to share your unique strengths, personal history, journey of growth, and any additional qualities that show you are a strong candidate.

Preparing to write your essay Prior to starting your essay, read all prompts carefully. Take a moment to reflect on your reasons for pursuing a graduate business degree. It may be beneficial to have a pen and notepad at your disposal for this reflective exercise. Think about your personal journey and pinpoint pivotal moments in your growth and learning, then take note of how those moments have shaped you and your experiences, and how they could help guide you through your business school journey. Be sure to also use the correct formatting and avoid adding lists and bullet points to your essays.

Outline your thoughts Once you have a solid understanding of how to convey your personal journey within the context of the essay prompts, the next step is to construct an outline. As you shape the direction and flow of your essay, always keep your audience in mind. Our admissions team reviews thousands of application essays, so it’s crucial to find a creative hook that will make your story stand out.

Don’t overthink As you begin to write your first draft, allow your ideas to flow freely. Don’t fixate on grammar or finding the perfect words at this stage–simply capture your thoughts on paper. You can refine your essay in the second draft.

Step away After finishing your first draft, set it aside for a day or two before returning to edit it. Revisiting your work with a fresh outlook allows for a new perspective. During this second review, tackle the details of grammar, punctuation, and vocabulary. You might find it helpful to read your essay in reverse order to catch any typos.

Ask for feedback Once you feel your essay is in good shape, it’s highly recommended that you share your draft with an advisor, professor, trusted colleague, friend, or even your recommender. Gaining insights from a trustworthy source can enhance the quality of your essay and assist in identifying any typos or minor adjustments. While editing is an important step, it should not cut out your authentic voice and tone. When identifying a proofreader, make sure to find someone who knows your authentic voice and tone and can edit your paper while still preserving your natural voice and tone.

Finalize and submit You’re almost done! Before finalizing your essay submission, do one last review. Run a spell check and read your essay out loud to yourself. This approach can help you pinpoint areas that might require clarification or fine-tuning. As you review your final draft, be sure that you thoroughly addressed the question on the application.

Keep in mind that the essay portion of the application is your chance to set yourself apart Admissions team members want to hear your authentic voice, with a style that sounds natural and genuine. By sharing your authentic self, and your transformative experiences, passions, goals, and voice, you can leave a lasting impression.

Best of luck with the rest of your application journey!

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Hire Essay Writers with Superb Experience

An online essay writing service seems to be essential for most students today. They have to hire professional essay writers with enough knowledge, experience, and skills. Through essay help of the highest quality, they can improve or maintain a grade.

Everyone knows that you don't study just about the marks. You study to develop writing skills that cannot be measured with a number or a letter. But the reality is different: your professors do measure your achievements through different marks. You need these grades to be high, so you can get or keep a scholarship. Plus, you want to impress everyone and stand out from other students. It's what drives hundreds of students towards BestEssay with the request: I want a professional essay writer to research and write my essay!

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What Makes Our Essay Writing Service Different?

You'll get thousands of results if you ask Google: "Who can write my essay? " Many paper writing services promise to provide the highest quality for cheap essay prices. But BestEssay doesn't just promise. We guarantee! Our essay service is better than most competitors, mainly because of our writer team. All essay writers from our company earned their MA or/and PhD degrees. Our best essay writers have been through all stages of education, and they know how to help a customer overcome common difficulties.

A professional essay writer understands students. They have studied the educational system, and they understand that it's disproportionate to a learner's capacity. Each writer who works for us developed a career out of their talent for academic writing. They use it to help others to overcome difficulties with lack of time, skills, and anything else that prevents them from completing content.

The excellence of our academic writers is only one of the factors that make us a better choice than other companies. There are other things the customer should consider:

• Our essay writing service gives more affordable prices to a customer when compared to other academic writing services. An essay starts with a price of $21.99 per page, and the customer gets a discount on that!
• You shouldn't worry about plagiarism when you hire a writer on our website. We know the rules of essay writing. An original paper is a high priority for each academic writer!
• We're so confident in the results our professional writers deliver that we guarantee refunds and revisions. If anything goes wrong with your order, you can ask for your money back. As for the revisions, they are available to every customer who isn't 100% happy with the first version of the essay we deliver.
• Each customer can get fast essay help on BestEssay! They set the deadline, and our company respects it! Thanks to the capacity of the writer, we can reach deadlines of 3 hours for essays! If the customer orders a larger project, the deadline options in the form will be more limited. For example, we can complete a 10-page essay within 24 hours.
• We build trust through communication. The customer can always reach our team of representatives with any questions, queries, or complaints.
• Each user can rely on an order tracking system. You'll keep track of the paper's progress, knowing that the delivery is on the right track.

We Can Help You With

• Medical Essay
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Benefits of Our Paper Writing Service

• As any other student, you must be wondering: How do I benefit from hiring someone to write my essay online? Our experts recommend learners to complete their own article. It's how they develop academic writing skills, which they benefit from in the future. But when that's impossible due to some obstacles, the grade depends on hiring an expert essay writer online . When you make that decision, you'll benefit in many ways:
• Your teachers aren't providing sufficient instructions on essay writing, so our customer needs someone to replace them in that role. An essay writer can give them instructions. They don't give general guidelines that are hard to follow in practice. On the contrary; a writer teaches by giving the customer an example. They will get a sample of a high-quality essay, which they can use to create an outline for their future assignments.
• Most students hire an essay writing service because they don't have enough time to write. With so many responsibilities around classes, extracurriculars, work, and friends, you find it impossible to plan some time for homework.
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You Have a Close Deadline? Our Essay Service Can Handle It!

All students ask the same questions: "Why do my professors assign such fast deadlines? Why don’t they give me more time to write my essay? "

They have a reason for assigning a timeframe for each assignment. If they don’t give you the deadline, you would keep procrastinating. That often happens with dissertations and other major projects. For essays, it’s important for students to focus and start the process as early as possible.

There’s a problem that all customers of BestEssay indicate: the deadlines are fine, but teachers assign too many projects at the same time. Without the help of essay writers, it’s impossible to achieve everything.

In addition to the issue of having too many assignments within the same period of time, there’s another problem. It’s called procrastination. We always recommend starting the research and writing process as soon as possible. But your tendency towards procrastination gives you excuses: “There’s plenty of time to do research. I’ll start working on my essay next week.” Next week comes, but you fail to research even then.

You shouldn’t blame yourself for procrastinating. Everyone does it. When you’re young, rebellious and free, you want to spend time with your friends. You’ ll always choose them over essay writing. The idea that you can always hire a paper writer for a cheap price gives you peace of mind. No matter how fast we should be, we can do it! All the customer needs to do is set the date and time when they want the paper to be delivered. We’ll make sure to respect that requirement!

Guarantees to Look for in Essay Writing Services

If this is your first time hiring an essay writing service, you should get informed. Experienced customers know what they are looking for. If you’re new to the process, you’ll appreciate these guidelines:

Hire an essay writer with experience and appropriate education

Who can complete a better paper: a random freelancer or a writer with experience in the area of study? The answer is obvious. When you pay for a paper, you want it to be completed by writers. A custom essay writing service must guarantee to assign a writer with relevant knowledge to your assignment. Their expertise is guaranteed by an MA or PhD degree in the appropriate field of study.

The company’s terms and conditions have to protect users

Most essay writing services try to protect themselves with the terms. A legitimate essay service will protect its users from any potential scams. A customer should get guarantees for privacy protection, timely delivery, a unique paper, and everything else that concerns them. The terms should cover all aspects. You should have access to clear policies, which indicate your rights as a user. With such a foundation, you can be sure that the outcome will be positive.

A personalized approach is essential

A reliable essay writing service will never sell a pre-written article to multiple users. It should guarantee you personalized research. The essay writer will first analyze your requirements and start writing an academic paper from scratch. Their ultimate goal? It’s to reflect your style and your arguments through the writing. You should get a paper that you’ll be proud to present as your own.

You want NO plagiarism in your academic paper

Essay service can never guarantee specific grades when you send the requirement: “I need you to write my essay!” However, it will guarantee the best conditions that lead to high grades. First and foremost, plagiarism is not allowed in essay writing. It’s one of the most serious violations of all college/university rules. Each student is required to submit a unique essay. That’s why a legit essay paper writing service must guarantee the delivery of a plagiarism-free piece, which will be based on your personal guidelines.

Privacy protection makes all the difference

Our writers know this for sure: no professor would be happy to find out that you ordered a paper. You’re not forbidden to use essay writing help. You just don’t want anyone to find out about it. You have to make sure that the chosen paper writing service will never share your information with third parties. The paper must be delivered solely to you, and it must never be published. Check the privacy policies, so you’ll know you’re hiring the right writing company.

You want the best quality for an affordable price

Finally, let’s talk about a major matter of interest: cost-effectiveness. It means finding the perfect balance between quality and price. Don’t fall for the trick that you have to pay a lot to get an assignment of the best quality. Affordable essay writing services, such as BestEssay, will give you a low quote for top-notch results. That’s because they have fair terms towards their writers. When a writer gets most of what the customer pays, the writing service can afford to charge less.

Why Is Uniqueness So Important in a Paper Writing Service?

What’s the point of these assignments if plagiarism was allowed? Any student would copy or paraphrase the content in a matter of minutes. They wouldn’t conduct any research. They wouldn’t bother coming up with their own arguments. They wouldn’t learn anything through the process. That’s why all professors set the no plagiarism rule. Their goal is to push you to research and express your own arguments.

BestEssay is a paper writing service with long-term experience in the industry. No writer from our team has ever delivered a plagiarized paper. We established strict rules for a 100% unique paper and a personalized approach to each customer’s order. When you buy an essay from us, the essay writer will adjust their tone and style to fit your personality. That’s why the form is so detailed. We give you a chance to list all requirements, so we can assign the perfect writer and deliver essays of good quality to you.

Although the customer will hire a paper writer, they are still learning through this process. They will observe the process of developing a unique paper under specific requirements. They witness a writer’s creativity to come up with original arguments. Our customer also learns about the paper’s format, tone, and proper syntax structure.

The overall experience with a custom essay writing service depends on its capacity to deliver a plagiarism-free paper.

Guide Our Professional Essay Writers with Your Requirements!

What instructions should a customer provide when they hire a writer online? We’ll give you brief guidelines that make the writing process more effective:

What’s the topic?

When you come to BestEssay with the request "I want you to write my essay for me", this is the first question we’ll ask: what’s your topic?

The order form requires the customer to set a theme for the writer. If you don’t have a specific topic, you can write it in general. The writer will narrow it down. You’ll also choose the subject area during this step. We have writers covering the areas of literature, nursing, social studies, healthcare writing, science, economics, and many other niches.

What type of work do you need?

We usually get a request for academic essays, but our offer is much broader. You can also hire a writer to complete your research paper, case study, term paper, thesis, reaction paper, reflective thinking paper, and many other types of documents.

What if you don’t see the type of paper in the order form? We have agents attending the live chat 24/7. Contact them with your request, and they will do everything to find a writer who’s qualified to complete your specific project.

What’s your deadline?

This is one of the most important adjustments you’ll need to make in the order form. We’ll allow you to set a deadline that we can and we will meet. If you need a two-page essay for nursing or any other subject area, the shortest deadline available will be 3 hours. But if you hire a writer for a more complex paper that’s also longer, the fast essay options will be adjusted.

Our writers recommend you leave space before this deadline and the actual due date for your project. That gives you the time to ask for revisions and learn from the paper before submitting it.

Set the Other Parameters

The order form also asks for instructions on spacing, quality level, academic level, number of needed references, preferred language style, and more. If you already had a good experience with a writer from our team, you can indicate their ID. We’ll make sure to assign the same writer.

We also let you choose additional services when you hire BestEssay: proofreading by a pro editor, order completed by one of the top 10 writers from the niche, VIP customer support, one-page summary of your paper, and a VIP service package. These add-ons boost the value of writing.

The Importance of Revisions when Hiring an Essay Writing Service

If you hire professional writers, you can feel calm. The results will be brilliant when you deal with a service like BestEssay.

What if you don’t like something in the paper? Maybe it’s a single sentence that sounds unclear. Maybe it’s a gap in the logical flow, which needs to be fixed before you submit the assignment. You hire a writer for writing, and you don’t want to do the editing by yourself.

Don’t worry; we will never ask you to pay for additional editing when you buy an essay from us. If you have any remarks on the writer’s work, they will immediately act upon them.

We ask you to check the paper for any mistakes. It doesn’t matter what element of writing you want us to improve; just send us a request and we’ll cover the revisions for free.

You should analyze our terms and conditions before placing the order. They cover your rights to free revisions. As long as you provide detailed instructions for our writers, you can ask for amendments based on those requirements.

Even the best writers can make mistakes. Misunderstandings happen, too. Maybe they will do their best work, but the customer won’t like parts of it. We don’t suffer from a big ego. As our customer, you deserve to be 100% satisfied with the work you receive.

We Understand Your Need for an Affordable Price!

Affordability is of essential importance for each customer. They pay thousands of dollars for their education each year. Even if they earned a scholarship, they still have to cover the expenses for accommodation, books, bills, and everything else you need to support your lifestyle. They deserve to have a decent social life, too. It’s okay to have a share of the partying experience.

Do you have the budget to hire essay writers with all those expenses on your shoulders? You may have a job, but it doesn’t provide a good income. That’s why you need cheap quotes. Even if it’s a larger project, it should still fit in your budget.

Our pricing system is flexible. It’s based on these factors:

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• Quality level
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We’ll give you great discounts when you hire a writer. You’ll always save money when working with BestEssay. 15% off is a massive price reduction for all new customers. Our loyal users get up to 15% off, too!

The price calculator will give you an estimation for your project. In the order form, you’ll see a final price that doesn’t come with any hidden costs. If you have any questions, you can contact a customer service agent. We’ll immediately answer!

You Can Learn from Your Professional Paper Writer

What will you gain by collaborating with a pro essay writer?

• Let’s say you’re working on a science project and you don’t have experience with it. The research sources are confusing. You need someone to clarify the concept and develop strong arguments. When you hire our essay writing service, we offer professional writing assistance. We write an elaborate essay that explains the concept from a knowledgeable point of view. If your professor asks a question, you’ll be able to answer it just by reading the content.
• The writer won’t provide broad instructions. You could easily get such guidelines online. They are meaningless, since they aren’t tailored to your paper writing assignments. For example, a healthcare project requires a unique structure, which differs from the one you construct for a research paper. The writer you hire knows how to handle different types of projects.
• Our writers teach about the proper tone used in academics, too. When a professor requires you to complete essays, they don’t want something that looks like blogging. They want you to show your capacity for critical thinking and reflective thinking. They need to see strong arguments based on facts. That’s how you earn a good grade.

Do you Have More Questions? Talk to Us

BestEssay is non-stop available to offer professional essay writing services to any customer who needs them. You can talk to the representatives of our essay writer service at any moment. Use the live chat, send us an email, or call us by phone. We’ll be happy to attend to you.

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Getting College Essay Help: Important Do's and Don’ts

College Essays

If you grow up to be a professional writer, everything you write will first go through an editor before being published. This is because the process of writing is really a process of re-writing —of rethinking and reexamining your work, usually with the help of someone else. So what does this mean for your student writing? And in particular, what does it mean for very important, but nonprofessional writing like your college essay? Should you ask your parents to look at your essay? Pay for an essay service?

If you are wondering what kind of help you can, and should, get with your personal statement, you've come to the right place! In this article, I'll talk about what kind of writing help is useful, ethical, and even expected for your college admission essay . I'll also point out who would make a good editor, what the differences between editing and proofreading are, what to expect from a good editor, and how to spot and stay away from a bad one.

Table of Contents

What Kind of Help for Your Essay Can You Get?

What's Good Editing?

What should an editor do for you, what kind of editing should you avoid, proofreading, what's good proofreading, what kind of proofreading should you avoid.

What Do Colleges Think Of You Getting Help With Your Essay?

Who Can/Should Help You?

Advice for editors.

Should You Pay Money For Essay Editing?

The Bottom Line

What's next, what kind of help with your essay can you get.

Rather than talking in general terms about "help," let's first clarify the two different ways that someone else can improve your writing . There is editing, which is the more intensive kind of assistance that you can use throughout the whole process. And then there's proofreading, which is the last step of really polishing your final product.

Let me go into some more detail about editing and proofreading, and then explain how good editors and proofreaders can help you."

Editing is helping the author (in this case, you) go from a rough draft to a finished work . Editing is the process of asking questions about what you're saying, how you're saying it, and how you're organizing your ideas. But not all editing is good editing . In fact, it's very easy for an editor to cross the line from supportive to overbearing and over-involved.

Ability to clarify assignments. A good editor is usually a good writer, and certainly has to be a good reader. For example, in this case, a good editor should make sure you understand the actual essay prompt you're supposed to be answering.

Open-endedness. Good editing is all about asking questions about your ideas and work, but without providing answers. It's about letting you stick to your story and message, and doesn't alter your point of view.

Think of an editor as a great travel guide. It can show you the many different places your trip could take you. It should explain any parts of the trip that could derail your trip or confuse the traveler. But it never dictates your path, never forces you to go somewhere you don't want to go, and never ignores your interests so that the trip no longer seems like it's your own. So what should good editors do?

Help Brainstorm Topics

Sometimes it's easier to bounce thoughts off of someone else. This doesn't mean that your editor gets to come up with ideas, but they can certainly respond to the various topic options you've come up with. This way, you're less likely to write about the most boring of your ideas, or to write about something that isn't actually important to you.

If you're wondering how to come up with options for your editor to consider, check out our guide to brainstorming topics for your college essay .

Help Revise Your Drafts

Here, your editor can't upset the delicate balance of not intervening too much or too little. It's tricky, but a great way to think about it is to remember: editing is about asking questions, not giving answers .

Revision questions should point out:

• Places where more detail or more description would help the reader connect with your essay
• Places where structure and logic don't flow, losing the reader's attention
• Places where there aren't transitions between paragraphs, confusing the reader
• Moments where your narrative or the arguments you're making are unclear

But pointing to potential problems is not the same as actually rewriting—editors let authors fix the problems themselves.

Bad editing is usually very heavy-handed editing. Instead of helping you find your best voice and ideas, a bad editor changes your writing into their own vision.

You may be dealing with a bad editor if they:

• Add material (examples, descriptions) that doesn't come from you
• Use a thesaurus to make your college essay sound "more mature"
• Add meaning or insight to the essay that doesn't come from you
• Tell you what to say and how to say it
• Write sentences, phrases, and paragraphs for you
• Change your voice in the essay so it no longer sounds like it was written by a teenager

Colleges can tell the difference between a 17-year-old's writing and a 50-year-old's writing. Not only that, they have access to your SAT or ACT Writing section, so they can compare your essay to something else you wrote. Writing that's a little more polished is great and expected. But a totally different voice and style will raise questions.

Where's the Line Between Helpful Editing and Unethical Over-Editing?

Sometimes it's hard to tell whether your college essay editor is doing the right thing. Here are some guidelines for staying on the ethical side of the line.

• An editor should say that the opening paragraph is kind of boring, and explain what exactly is making it drag. But it's overstepping for an editor to tell you exactly how to change it.
• An editor should point out where your prose is unclear or vague. But it's completely inappropriate for the editor to rewrite that section of your essay.
• An editor should let you know that a section is light on detail or description. But giving you similes and metaphors to beef up that description is a no-go.

Proofreading (also called copy-editing) is checking for errors in the last draft of a written work. It happens at the end of the process and is meant as the final polishing touch. Proofreading is meticulous and detail-oriented, focusing on small corrections. It sands off all the surface rough spots that could alienate the reader.

Because proofreading is usually concerned with making fixes on the word or sentence level, this is the only process where someone else can actually add to or take away things from your essay . This is because what they are adding or taking away tends to be one or two misplaced letters.

Laser focus. Proofreading is all about the tiny details, so the ability to really concentrate on finding small slip-ups is a must.

Excellent grammar and spelling skills. Proofreaders need to dot every "i" and cross every "t." Good proofreaders should correct spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and grammar. They should put foreign words in italics and surround quotations with quotation marks. They should check that you used the correct college's name, and that you adhered to any formatting requirements (name and date at the top of the page, uniform font and size, uniform spacing).

Limited interference. A proofreader needs to make sure that you followed any word limits. But if cuts need to be made to shorten the essay, that's your job and not the proofreader's.

A bad proofreader either tries to turn into an editor, or just lacks the skills and knowledge necessary to do the job.

Some signs that you're working with a bad proofreader are:

• If they suggest making major changes to the final draft of your essay. Proofreading happens when editing is already finished.
• If they aren't particularly good at spelling, or don't know grammar, or aren't detail-oriented enough to find someone else's small mistakes.
• If they start swapping out your words for fancier-sounding synonyms, or changing the voice and sound of your essay in other ways. A proofreader is there to check for errors, not to take the 17-year-old out of your writing.

What Do Colleges Think of Your Getting Help With Your Essay?

Admissions officers agree: light editing and proofreading are good—even required ! But they also want to make sure you're the one doing the work on your essay. They want essays with stories, voice, and themes that come from you. They want to see work that reflects your actual writing ability, and that focuses on what you find important.

On the Importance of Editing

Get feedback. Have a fresh pair of eyes give you some feedback. Don't allow someone else to rewrite your essay, but do take advantage of others' edits and opinions when they seem helpful. ( Bates College )

Read your essay aloud to someone. Reading the essay out loud offers a chance to hear how your essay sounds outside your head. This exercise reveals flaws in the essay's flow, highlights grammatical errors and helps you ensure that you are communicating the exact message you intended. ( Dickinson College )

On the Value of Proofreading

Share your essays with at least one or two people who know you well—such as a parent, teacher, counselor, or friend—and ask for feedback. Remember that you ultimately have control over your essays, and your essays should retain your own voice, but others may be able to catch mistakes that you missed and help suggest areas to cut if you are over the word limit. ( Yale University )

Proofread and then ask someone else to proofread for you. Although we want substance, we also want to be able to see that you can write a paper for our professors and avoid careless mistakes that would drive them crazy. ( Oberlin College )

On Watching Out for Too Much Outside Influence

Limit the number of people who review your essay. Too much input usually means your voice is lost in the writing style. ( Carleton College )

Ask for input (but not too much). Your parents, friends, guidance counselors, coaches, and teachers are great people to bounce ideas off of for your essay. They know how unique and spectacular you are, and they can help you decide how to articulate it. Keep in mind, however, that a 45-year-old lawyer writes quite differently from an 18-year-old student, so if your dad ends up writing the bulk of your essay, we're probably going to notice. ( Vanderbilt University )

Now let's talk about some potential people to approach for your college essay editing and proofreading needs. It's best to start close to home and slowly expand outward. Not only are your family and friends more invested in your success than strangers, but they also have a better handle on your interests and personality. This knowledge is key for judging whether your essay is expressing your true self.

Parents or Close Relatives

Your family may be full of potentially excellent editors! Parents are deeply committed to your well-being, and family members know you and your life well enough to offer details or incidents that can be included in your essay. On the other hand, the rewriting process necessarily involves criticism, which is sometimes hard to hear from someone very close to you.

A parent or close family member is a great choice for an editor if you can answer "yes" to the following questions. Is your parent or close relative a good writer or reader? Do you have a relationship where editing your essay won't create conflict? Are you able to constructively listen to criticism and suggestion from the parent?

One suggestion for defusing face-to-face discussions is to try working on the essay over email. Send your parent a draft, have them write you back some comments, and then you can pick which of their suggestions you want to use and which to discard.

Teachers or Tutors

A humanities teacher that you have a good relationship with is a great choice. I am purposefully saying humanities, and not just English, because teachers of Philosophy, History, Anthropology, and any other classes where you do a lot of writing, are all used to reviewing student work.

Moreover, any teacher or tutor that has been working with you for some time, knows you very well and can vet the essay to make sure it "sounds like you."

If your teacher or tutor has some experience with what college essays are supposed to be like, ask them to be your editor. If not, then ask whether they have time to proofread your final draft.

Guidance or College Counselor at Your School

The best thing about asking your counselor to edit your work is that this is their job. This means that they have a very good sense of what colleges are looking for in an application essay.

At the same time, school counselors tend to have relationships with admissions officers in many colleges, which again gives them insight into what works and which college is focused on what aspect of the application.

Unfortunately, in many schools the guidance counselor tends to be way overextended. If your ratio is 300 students to 1 college counselor, you're unlikely to get that person's undivided attention and focus. It is still useful to ask them for general advice about your potential topics, but don't expect them to be able to stay with your essay from first draft to final version.

Friends, Siblings, or Classmates

Although they most likely don't have much experience with what colleges are hoping to see, your peers are excellent sources for checking that your essay is you .

Friends and siblings are perfect for the read-aloud edit. Read your essay to them so they can listen for words and phrases that are stilted, pompous, or phrases that just don't sound like you.

You can even trade essays and give helpful advice on each other's work.

If your editor hasn't worked with college admissions essays very much, no worries! Any astute and attentive reader can still greatly help with your process. But, as in all things, beginners do better with some preparation.

First, your editor should read our advice about how to write a college essay introduction , how to spot and fix a bad college essay , and get a sense of what other students have written by going through some admissions essays that worked .

Then, as they read your essay, they can work through the following series of questions that will help them to guide you.

Introduction Questions

• Is the first sentence a killer opening line? Why or why not?
• Does the introduction hook the reader? Does it have a colorful, detailed, and interesting narrative? Or does it propose a compelling or surprising idea?
• Can you feel the author's voice in the introduction, or is the tone dry, dull, or overly formal? Show the places where the voice comes through.

Essay Body Questions

• Does the essay have a through-line? Is it built around a central argument, thought, idea, or focus? Can you put this idea into your own words?
• How is the essay organized? By logical progression? Chronologically? Do you feel order when you read it, or are there moments where you are confused or lose the thread of the essay?
• Does the essay have both narratives about the author's life and explanations and insight into what these stories reveal about the author's character, personality, goals, or dreams? If not, which is missing?
• Does the essay flow? Are there smooth transitions/clever links between paragraphs? Between the narrative and moments of insight?

Reader Response Questions

• Does the writer's personality come through? Do we know what the speaker cares about? Do we get a sense of "who he or she is"?
• Where did you feel most connected to the essay? Which parts of the essay gave you a "you are there" sensation by invoking your senses? What moments could you picture in your head well?
• Where are the details and examples vague and not specific enough?
• Did you get an "a-ha!" feeling anywhere in the essay? Is there a moment of insight that connected all the dots for you? Is there a good reveal or "twist" anywhere in the essay?
• What are the strengths of this essay? What needs the most improvement?

Should You Pay Money for Essay Editing?

One alternative to asking someone you know to help you with your college essay is the paid editor route. There are two different ways to pay for essay help: a private essay coach or a less personal editing service , like the many proliferating on the internet.

My advice is to think of these options as a last resort rather than your go-to first choice. I'll first go through the reasons why. Then, if you do decide to go with a paid editor, I'll help you decide between a coach and a service.

When to Consider a Paid Editor

In general, I think hiring someone to work on your essay makes a lot of sense if none of the people I discussed above are a possibility for you.

If you can't ask your parents. For example, if your parents aren't good writers, or if English isn't their first language. Or if you think getting your parents to help is going create unnecessary extra conflict in your relationship with them (applying to college is stressful as it is!)

If you can't ask your teacher or tutor. Maybe you don't have a trusted teacher or tutor that has time to look over your essay with focus. Or, for instance, your favorite humanities teacher has very limited experience with college essays and so won't know what admissions officers want to see.

If you can't ask your guidance counselor. This could be because your guidance counselor is way overwhelmed with other students.

If you can't share your essay with those who know you. It might be that your essay is on a very personal topic that you're unwilling to share with parents, teachers, or peers. Just make sure it doesn't fall into one of the bad-idea topics in our article on bad college essays .

If the cost isn't a consideration. Many of these services are quite expensive, and private coaches even more so. If you have finite resources, I'd say that hiring an SAT or ACT tutor (whether it's PrepScholar or someone else) is better way to spend your money . This is because there's no guarantee that a slightly better essay will sufficiently elevate the rest of your application, but a significantly higher SAT score will definitely raise your applicant profile much more.

Should You Hire an Essay Coach?

On the plus side, essay coaches have read dozens or even hundreds of college essays, so they have experience with the format. Also, because you'll be working closely with a specific person, it's more personal than sending your essay to a service, which will know even less about you.

But, on the minus side, you'll still be bouncing ideas off of someone who doesn't know that much about you . In general, if you can adequately get the help from someone you know, there is no advantage to paying someone to help you.

If you do decide to hire a coach, ask your school counselor, or older students that have used the service for recommendations. If you can't afford the coach's fees, ask whether they can work on a sliding scale —many do. And finally, beware those who guarantee admission to your school of choice—essay coaches don't have any special magic that can back up those promises.

Should You Send Your Essay to a Service?

On the plus side, essay editing services provide a similar product to essay coaches, and they cost significantly less . If you have some assurance that you'll be working with a good editor, the lack of face-to-face interaction won't prevent great results.

On the minus side, however, it can be difficult to gauge the quality of the service before working with them . If they are churning through many application essays without getting to know the students they are helping, you could end up with an over-edited essay that sounds just like everyone else's. In the worst case scenario, an unscrupulous service could send you back a plagiarized essay.

Getting recommendations from friends or a school counselor for reputable services is key to avoiding heavy-handed editing that writes essays for you or does too much to change your essay. Including a badly-edited essay like this in your application could cause problems if there are inconsistencies. For example, in interviews it might be clear you didn't write the essay, or the skill of the essay might not be reflected in your schoolwork and test scores.

Should You Buy an Essay Written by Someone Else?

Let me elaborate. There are super sketchy places on the internet where you can simply buy a pre-written essay. Don't do this!

For one thing, you'll be lying on an official, signed document. All college applications make you sign a statement saying something like this:

I certify that all information submitted in the admission process—including the application, the personal essay, any supplements, and any other supporting materials—is my own work, factually true, and honestly presented... I understand that I may be subject to a range of possible disciplinary actions, including admission revocation, expulsion, or revocation of course credit, grades, and degree, should the information I have certified be false. (From the Common Application )

For another thing, if your academic record doesn't match the essay's quality, the admissions officer will start thinking your whole application is riddled with lies.

Admission officers have full access to your writing portion of the SAT or ACT so that they can compare work that was done in proctored conditions with that done at home. They can tell if these were written by different people. Not only that, but there are now a number of search engines that faculty and admission officers can use to see if an essay contains strings of words that have appeared in other essays—you have no guarantee that the essay you bought wasn't also bought by 50 other students.

• You should get college essay help with both editing and proofreading
• A good editor will ask questions about your idea, logic, and structure, and will point out places where clarity is needed
• A good editor will absolutely not answer these questions, give you their own ideas, or write the essay or parts of the essay for you
• A good proofreader will find typos and check your formatting
• All of them agree that getting light editing and proofreading is necessary
• Parents, teachers, guidance or college counselor, and peers or siblings
• If you can't ask any of those, you can pay for college essay help, but watch out for services or coaches who over-edit you work
• Don't buy a pre-written essay! Colleges can tell, and it'll make your whole application sound false.

Ready to start working on your essay? Check out our explanation of the point of the personal essay and the role it plays on your applications and then explore our step-by-step guide to writing a great college essay .

Using the Common Application for your college applications? We have an excellent guide to the Common App essay prompts and useful advice on how to pick the Common App prompt that's right for you . Wondering how other people tackled these prompts? Then work through our roundup of over 130 real college essay examples published by colleges .

Stressed about whether to take the SAT again before submitting your application? Let us help you decide how many times to take this test . If you choose to go for it, we have the ultimate guide to studying for the SAT to give you the ins and outs of the best ways to study.

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Anna scored in the 99th percentile on her SATs in high school, and went on to major in English at Princeton and to get her doctorate in English Literature at Columbia. She is passionate about improving student access to higher education.

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Best Teacher Intro Letter to Parents – with Examples

July 30, 2024

As many teachers know, a successful school year involves clear communication between teachers and their students’ parents and guardians. To open communication from the very start, there is the teacher introduction letters to parents, letting them know a bit about what to expect. In general, these letters introduce the teachers and provide basic information on how the parents can best engage with the learning experience. They can range in length and tone, from serious, to sincere, to silly. The tone often depends on the grade level, since an overly serious preschool intro letter or a cutesy high school letter may feel out of place. Continue reading for some tips on what to include in your intro letters to parents, as well as examples by grade level (plus an example of an intro letter from a student teacher).

Tips for Writing a Teacher Intro Letter to Parents

Before we get started with examples, here are some tips for writing your intro letter to parents. While you don’t always need all of these elements, they can be great starting points for structuring your letter.

1)  Address parents and caregivers

  It can be thoughtful to address parents and caregivers directly, even if much of your letter is copied and pasted between families. For example, you might begin with “Dear Brown Family,” “Dear Parents of Sofia Miller,” or “Dear Mr. and Ms. Garcia-Jones.” You can also address all families together, for example, “Dear 7 th Grade Families.”

2)    Introduce yourself

  This is perhaps the most important part of the letter (it’s an “intro letter” after all). Introducing yourself turns you from an abstract teacher figure to a relatable human being from the perspective of the families. It doesn’t hurt to add a few “fun facts” to the mix (where you’re from, your favorite color, things you like to do in your free time, etc.) in order to communicate your warmth and unique personality.

Teacher Intro Letter to Parents (Continued)

3)  describe your background and experience.

  The purpose of including your experience is to gain the trust of parents and guardians receiving your letter. It can include how long you’ve taught, where you earned your degree, and any other relevant experience. For example, if you are a 5th grade music teacher, you might say, “I became certified as a music instructor after 7 years of playing in a professional orchestra, and I’ve been teaching children the basics of string instruments since 2015. I also help to run the Hamilton County Orchestra Camp each summer.”

4)  Include a bit of your teaching philosophy

This does not need to be a long statement, but a few sentences about how you run your classroom. What beliefs about education guide your teaching? In addition to course material, how do you create a healthy learning environment? Check out this University of San Diego resource for teaching philosophy prompts to pull from).

Teacher Introduction Letter to Parents (Continued)

5)    guide how parents and caregivers should participate.

  How much should parents participate? While some teachers expect parents and guardians to be active participants in their students’ education (particularly teachers of younger grade levels), other teachers prefer if parents only involve themselves when necessary. Make sure it’s clear how you expect parents to support your students. Should they provide homework help? Chaperone field trips? Let you know when difficulties arise? Communicating your expectations helps parents and caretakers best support your students, and it lowers the likelihood of conflict or misunderstanding later on.

6)    Share your contact information

  When it’s necessary for parents to get in touch, make sure they know how to reach you. Provide an email and/or phone number, and let them know how to schedule a private conference or phone call if needed.

7)    Show enthusiasm

  Throughout the letter, it’s important to show your excitement about teaching your students. Even a simple “I’m excited to get to know this new class and begin the year” to can leave parents and caregivers feeling confident that their students are in good hands.

Example 1: Teacher Introduction Letter to Parents of Preschool Students

Dear families of Ms. Lee’s pre-K students,

Welcome to Pre-K, a year for your young learners to shine as they make the leap from preschool to kindergarten. I believe that pre-K students can blossom when offered a balance of challenge and play, and I’ve prepared a year full of lovely learning, cheerful challenges, amazing adventures, and glistening growth for your student. I can’t wait to meet this new class and letting the excitement begin.

Communication is key when it comes to teaching students of this age, and I hope to foster an open and honest parent/teacher relationship. I will communicate with you each week by sending home a communication folder with updates on Friday, which your students can return to the classroom on Monday. You can also email me any time at ___________ if you have any questions or concerns. I am happy to set up individual meetings over email.

Lastly, here’s a bit about me:

• My name is Erica Lee
• My favorite color is red.
• My favorite food is ravioli.
• My favorite season is fall.
• One day, I want to hike in the mountains of Colorado.

If you wouldn’t mind emailing me back with your student’s answers to these questions, I will prepare special name cards for the first day of school. Feel free to include any other information you’d like to share and questions you’d like to ask.

• My name is:
• My favorite color is:
• My favorite food is:
• My favorite season is:
• One day, I want to:

Until next week!  

Example 2: Teacher Introduction Letter to Parents of Elementary School Students

Dear Mr. Brown and Dr. Anderson,

As his homeroom teacher, it is my pleasure to welcome Drew to 4th grade for an exciting year of learning. I’m Ms. Katz and I teach 4th grade social studies. I began teaching because of my love for learning about historical civilizations and most importantly, the joy I receive from working with elementary school students.

In addition to teaching about world cultures, religions, and governments, each year I look forward to creating a warm and welcoming home-base for my homeroom students. I believe that this “home-base” should extend to families as well.

To start the year of right, I’m pleased to welcome you and Drew to our 4th Grade Open House (August 25th, 5-7 PM), an evening for students, guardians, and teachers to gather and learn a bit about each other before the school year begins. On this day, I will share a bit about the curriculum and homework expectations, as well as events and fieldtrips throughout the year. You are welcome to bring Drew’s school supplies to this event if it would be helpful for reducing the first-day-of-school hassle.

If you have any questions or concerns in the meantime, you can contact me at ______________. I check my emails on a daily basis, and I will respond to you within 24 hours.

I look forward to meeting you and Drew in a just a few short weeks!

Example 3: Teacher Introduction Letter to Parents of Middle School Students

Dear 6th Grade Families,

Welcome to middle school! I am Mx. Davis, your student’s homeroom teacher and math instructor for the year. A bit about me: I’ve been teaching at Newtown Middle School for 10 years. I graduated from Penn State University in 09’ with a Bachelor’s in Physics, and continued on to pursue my Master’s in Education with a specialization in Mathematics Education. When I’m not teaching, I love cooking, watching stand-up comedy, and playing piano.

I look forward to getting to know this new group of young mathematicians. Though middle school can be a stressful time for many students and families, I want to assure you that I will work to foster a welcoming community for your students. I take great care to emphasize kindness and inclusion while teaching middle school students.

In my 10 years of teaching, I’ve found that each student learns differently. Nobody is “bad at math” in my class, and I recognize and respect individual learning styles of my students. That said, I also ask that parents and guardians help to make sure that students complete their weekly homework assignments, which will be assigned each Tuesday and Thursday. While you should not need to help them with the math itself, I recommend setting aside 30-60 minutes for daily math practice at home. I am also open to meeting about any special needs throughout the school year (as is our excellent school guidance counselor, Mrs. Williams). Please email me with any questions or concerns.

I will also be at the Newtown Middle School welcome night for new families (August 18th, 7-9pm), and I hope to meet you there!

With great excitement,

Example 4: Teacher Introduction Letter to Parents of High School Students

Buongiorno e benvenuti!

My name is Signor Rossi, and I teach introductory and intermediate Italian at Riverview High School. I grew up outside of Rome, and I’ve been teaching Italian in the United States for over 20 years. 

As you might know, we have a unique language program here at Riverview, with special opportunities to take languages not always offered (including Italian, of course). In addition to practicing written and conversational skills, I believe it’s important that students learn about Italian culture, from opera, to literature, to cooking.

In this class, we only speak Italian. When it comes to language learning, practice makes perfect, and mistakes lead to greater understanding. Because of this, I ask my students not to use online tools such as Google Translate and ChatGPT for Italian learning, unless specified in an assignment. Though I hold my students accountable for their own homework assignments, I request that, when possible, you also discourage them from using these tools at home.

As all students will soon be informed, I will hold office hours every Wednesday and Thursday from 3-4:30 PM, as well as lunchtime Italian conversation practice on Fridays. I’m also happy to be in touch with parents regarding any concerns. I hope that we will meet at the school-wide Riverview Family Open House on September 14th, as well as parent-teacher conferences on October 21 st . In the meantime, don’t hesitate to email me at ____________.

As we say in Italy, “non vedo l’ora” (I can’t wait) to begin the year.

Signor Rossi

Example 5: Teacher Introduction Letter to Parents from a Student Teacher

  Dear 2nd Grade Parents and Guardians,

My name is Alexis Jackson, and I’m thrilled to be a student teacher in your child’s classroom, where I will be working closely with Mrs. Martin. Since I will be seeing your child daily over these next four months, I wanted to tell you a bit about myself.

I’m a Master of Science in Education student at Johns Hopkins University, with focus on elementary education, special education, and reading. I’m a Maryland local, having graduated from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County three years ago. It wasn’t long before I realized that I had a passion for elementary education and decided to pursue my Master’s degree. In my free time, I enjoy riding my bicycle, watching films, and volunteering at a local animal shelter.

I look forward to helping your children learn as I learn how to become an excellent teacher. I can already tell that this will be an amazing group of students. If you have any questions, you can direct them to my graduate school email address, __________, and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

Additional Resources – Teacher Intro Letters to Parents 

Whether you teach preschool, 5th grade, or 9th grade students, it’s never a bad idea to write a teacher intro letter to the parents and caretakers of your students, welcoming the families and sharing your expectations. Hopefully, these tips and examples have provided some letter-writing inspiration. For further reading on teaching resources, we recommend the following articles:

• 124 Good Icebreaker Questions for Students/Adults
• 141 Fun, Weird, and Interesting Facts—2024
• 100 Best Quotes About Education & Teachers
• 60 Team-Building Activities for Kids & Middle/High School Students
• 150 Journal Prompts for Kids, Middle & High School Students
• 102 Fun Last Day of School Activities
• 30 Writing Activities for Preschool & Kindergarten 
• Teacher Tools

Sarah Mininsohn

With a BA from Wesleyan University and an MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Sarah is a writer, educator, and artist. She served as a graduate instructor at the University of Illinois, a tutor at St Peter’s School in Philadelphia, and an academic writing tutor and thesis mentor at Wesleyan’s Writing Workshop.

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200 Beautiful Wedding Wishes and Messages to Write in Their Card

For family, friends or colleagues — honor their day with these congratulatory words.

Funny Wedding Wishes

Wedding wishes based on bible verses, wedding wishes for a colleague, meaningful wedding wishes, wishes for a new family member, wedding wishes for a son or daughter.

That’s right, figuring out what to write inside a wedding card is an important part of gift-giving that should be taken seriously. After all, marriage is a major step in a person’s life and a commitment intended to last a lifetime — so crafting a special message for the loving pair will go a long way.

Stumped on what to write? Well, you’ve come to the right place. We’ve rounded up some of the best wedding messages and wishes to write inside a card . Whether you’re attending the wedding of your child, family member, close friend or co-worker, we have just the right words to help you wish them well. Keep in mind that tailoring your message to suit the relationship is key. For example, what you write for your favorite cousin may not resonate with a professional acquaintance or colleague. And remember, what you write in a bridal shower card should be different than what you pen in a wdding card! So, we’ve put the messages into simple categories to help you strike the right tone and find the one that will work the best for you.

From light-hearted and funny to formal and sentimental this round-up of wedding messages and wishes are sure to brighten the couple’s big day. Plus, if you’re unable to send a card or attend the wedding, you can always share them as Instagram captions to commemorate the couple’s official union.

So, now that you’ve nailed down what you plan to write, you can focus on other important details like finding the perfect dress to wear and purchasing a unique wedding present from their gift registry . Regardless of what you wear, buy, or write inside the wedding card, all that matters is that you send the newlyweds good vibes as they embark on this blissful new journey.

Formal Wedding Wishes

• Wishing you a lifetime of wedded bliss.
• May your special union bring unbelievable joy to your life.
• May the years ahead be filled with lasting love and happiness.
• May today be the beginning of a new tomorrow that you will cherish forever.
• Wishing you nothing but a lifetime of love.
• May this day be the start of forever for you two.
• May your love burn brighter every day as you grow in love.
• Wishing you a lifetime of love and happiness.
• Always remember this special day and why you’re saying, “I do.”
• Wishing you joy, love and happiness on your wedding day and as you begin your new life together.
• Together, may you experience joy beyond your imaginations.
• May this day mark the beginning of a lifetime together.
• Wishing you both a happy and prosperous future.
• As you grow older together, may your love for one another grow stronger.
• Congratulations on your marriage and best wishes for a happy and fulfilling future.
• Congratulations on your marriage. May it be fulfilling and everlasting.
• Wishing you a beautiful wedding day and an enduring love.
• With every hug and kiss, may your bond grow stronger.
• Thanks for allowing me to be a part of your special day and witness your undying love.
• Best wishes for a lifetime of happiness together.
• Cheers to the happy couple. Congratulations!
• May your love continue to thrive to infinity and beyond.
• Wishing you nothing but endless love.
• It’s a joy to watch your love blossom. Here’s to you!
• There’s nothing like the celebration of true love!
• Today is the beginning of forever. Happy wedding day!
• May today be the start of a love that will never end.
• Blessings on your nuptials.
• Here’s to a joyous life together as you embark upon this love-filled journey.
• May the two of you continue to love unconditionally. Congratulations!
• Wishing you love, joy and happiness today and always!
• Keep love in your heart and every day will feel like today. Happy wedding day!
• Today is just the beginning of a lifetime of fun, love-filled adventures. Cheers!
• So honored to witness your special day. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of it.
• Your love is so bright that it radiates the room. Congratulations!
• May your years ahead be filled with nothing but hugs and kisses.

• Congratulations! You’re finally getting hitched!
• Thanks for inviting me to the best party ever! Oops, I meant your wedding. Congratulations!
• Remember, in order to have a successful marriage, you must fall in love many times and always with the same person.
• Enjoy your special day because tomorrow the real hard work starts!
• Your free booze was greatly appreciated. Wishing you a lifetime of wedded bliss!
• Here’s the secret to a successful marriage…oh wait, no one has figured that out yet. Good luck!
• Congratulations on signing away your freedom and privacy!
• Never forget that this might be the happiest day of your life. It’s all downhill from here! Best wishes.
• Best of luck to your new spouse. They don’t know what they’re getting into. Thankfully, they love you unconditionally!
• Now you’ll both have someone to laugh at your corny jokes!
• It’s good that you two found each other. You’re practically the same person in different bodies!
• Eat, drink and be married!
• Congratulations! Here’s a piece of advice: don’t build furniture together if you want it to last!
• You two have just started your lives together, but you’re already starting to look alike!
• Marriage is a bond between a person who never remembers anniversaries and another who never forgets them.
• Don't mess this up! But in case you do, just know that you can keep my gift... Congrats!
• Congratulations on your wedding, may you always be able to put up with each other!
• It's a true blessing to know that, for the rest of your life, there's only one special person you want to annoy. Congratulations!
• Marriage: Where “Yes Dear” are the magic words.
• Getting married is like being in drama school. You get to practice everything from comedy to melodrama to tragedy. Congratulations.
• Congratulations and best of luck on continuing to ignore the little annoying things.
• And now you two have officially become one: one bed, one remote, one bathroom!
• Congratulations! Thanks for officially taking [insert name] off my hands.
• I just have one thing to say: finally!
• “Be kind to each other, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, just as God through Christ has forgiven you.” — Ephesians 4:32
• “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love." — 1 Corinthians 13:13
• “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.” –1 Corinthians 13:4-5
• “Let all that you do be done in love.” — 1 Corinthians 16:14
• “I have found the one whom my soul loves.” –Song of Solomon 3:4
• “Be devoted to one another in love. Honor one another above yourselves.” –Romans 12:10
• “Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” –Mark 10:9
• “Let love and faithfulness never leave you; bind them around your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart.” –Proverbs 3:3
• "Most important of all, continue to show deep love for each other, for love covers a multitude of sins." –1 Peter 4:8
• "Serve one another through love." –Galatians 5:13
• "I have found the one whom my soul loves." –Song of Solomon 3:4
• "No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is made complete in us." –1 John 4:12
• "So, they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, let no one separate." —Matthew 19:6
• "Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace." —Ephesians 4:2-3
• "Therefore encourage one another and build each other up, just as in fact you are doing." —1 Thessalonians 5:11
• “Do everything in love.” 1 Corinthians 16:14
• "Love and faithfulness meet together; righteousness and peace kiss each other." —Psalm 85:10
• "Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins." —1 Peter 4:8
• "Many waters cannot quench love; rivers cannot sweep it away. If one were to give all the wealth of one’s house for love, it would be utterly scorned." —Song of Solomon 8:7
• "Let the morning bring me word of your unfailing love, for I have put my trust in you. Show me the way I should go, for you I entrust my life." —Psalm 143:8
• "He who finds a wife finds what is good and receives favor from the Lord." —Proverbs 18:22
• “The Lord appeared to us in the past, saying: I have loved you with an everlasting love; I have drawn you with unfailing kindness." —Jeremiah 3:13
• "But Ruth replied, 'Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go, I will go, and where you stay, I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if even death separates you and me.’” —Ruth 1 16-17
• "Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law." —Romans 13:8

• Congratulations on finding your soulmate!
• Wishing you an everlasting union.
• May your love burn brightly forever.
• Best wishes!
• Here's to many happy years together!
• Congratulations on your nuptials.
• All the best to you today and always.
• Seeing you two together brings me so much joy. Best wishes!
• Tons of love for you today and always.
• Wishing you a long and healthy marriage.
• It is a privilege to witness such pure love. Congratulations!
• Following your heart always leads to a lifetime of love.
• Here's to an exciting and loving future together.
• I’m so glad to share this special day with you two!
• Congratulations on your marriage. I wish you both the best.
• Best wishes for today and beyond.
• We are honored to celebrate your love and special day.
• A lifetime of love begins today. Enjoy every minute!
• I'm so honored to share this special day with you.
• Well wishes!
• I wish you both a long and happy marriage!
• Well wishes to you and your partner!
• If you’re as good of a partner as you are a co-worker, I know that your spouse is one lucky person!
• I’m so happy for you. Congratulations!
• Blessings on your union.
• Tons of love for you today.
• It’s such a joy to see you so happy. Continued blessings!
• Your future as a bride/groom is exceptionally bright. Congratulations on finding your special someone.
• Today is just the beginning of endless fun, laughter and of course, love!
• Here’s to a lifetime of happiness.
• It’s a blessing to find your soul mate. I’m so glad you found yours!
• Married life is going to look so good on you!

• As the days go by, hold onto the burning love that ignited your journey.
• Don't let anything stand in the way of your love.
• As you take this big step, know that you have my love and support today and always.
• Be sure to always lean on your unconditional love even when things aren't easy.
• As a couple, you are living proof that following your heart will always lead to true love.
• Never forget what brought you two together. Stay focused on your love and you’ll never go wrong.
• Keep your love close to your heart, it can conquer anything.
• Respect your union and each other and the rest will always fall into place.
• All that matters is your love for one another. Congratulations on making the commitment.
• The connection you share is unbreakable. Cherish and honor your love.
• Don't lose sight of your love, it can overcome anything.
• Honor your spouse and you will be prepared for anything that comes your way.
• Keep humor at the forefront of your marriage and you’ll have a lifetime of laughs.
• Congratulations on your marriage. We want you to know that you can always call and count on us for anything.
• Put your marriage first and watch it flourish.
• Always remember to make time for each other no matter the circumstance.
• Your sweetest dream has come true. Never forget what this feels like. Best wishes!
• May this day stay in your heart forever.
• True love trumps all. As you embark on this new journey, make it your guiding light.
• Prioritize spending time together and you will have a long-lasting love.
• Keeping your heart in the right place will always lead to true love, as you have shown with your union.
• When things get tough, always remember what brought you two together: love.
• Cherish every moment together because you guys were made for each other.
• Never lose sight of what’s important. Keep the flame going by respecting and loving each other unconditionally.
• Prayer will keep your marriage strong. Never hesitate to seek guidance. Congratulations!
• There may be ups and downs down the road, but stay the course because love always prevails.
• Marriage takes work, but if there’s anyone who can handle the challenges and keep the love flowing, it’s you. Here’s to a lifetime of wedded bliss!
• You two are a prime example of what following your heart can bring: pure happiness!
• Marriage is a commitment that comes with immeasurable benefits. Congratulations on taking this journey.
• You two epitomize the meaning of soul mates. It’s an honor to witness your love.
• You’re an inspiration for couples who want to take the next step. Thank you for leading with love.
• Witnessing the love between you two is nothing short of amazing. Cheers to a lifetime together!
• Lead with love and everything will always fall into place. Never lose sight of what sparked your union.
• Keep each other first in your lives and watch how your marriage thrives.
• Respect is paramount in successful marriages. Remember this and you’ll have a lifetime of happiness.
• Keep all lines of communication open and your marriage will flourish until the end of time.
• Remember to laugh a lot and never go to bed angry. These simple rules are cheat codes for a successful and happy marriage.
• Joy is what I feel when I see your union. You’re an example of what true love looks like.
• Keep love in your heart and every day will be blissful.
• Surround yourself with people who respect your marriage. Never let outside forces cause chaos in your home. Congratulations on your nuptials!

• Best wishes. Welcome to the family!
• I am so blessed to have gained another loving family member.
• Our family has gained a wonderful new member. We’re so happy to share in your love and special day.
• I’m so happy to call you family. Here’s to a lifetime of making precious memories together.
• Today we added another member to our family tree, and we are overjoyed. Here’s to more family gatherings.
• We love you both so much. Thank you for inviting us to celebrate your union.
• Nothing warms my heart more than seeing you two together. Welcome to our family.
• You fit right into our family. We’re welcoming you with open arms. Congratulations.
• Our family just got better because you joined it. Cheers!
• This special day will go down as one of our family’s finest moments. We’re so happy to have you in our lives.
• Since our first encounter, I knew you were destined to be in our family. Congratulations!
• You bring such a joyful presence to our brood. Welcome to our big, wacky family.
• You’ve always exuded such a calm and peaceful vibe that blends in perfectly with our family. I can’t wait to spend more time with you. Wishing you a lifetime of love.
• We fell in love with you too! Thank you for loving him/her the way you do. Looking forward to more holidays together.
• Your connection isn’t just with your spouse, you’re part of our family for life.
• Congratulations! May your union be blessed, family.
• I’ve never seen anyone bring so much joy to our family. Thank you for being you and welcome to the family.
• It’s crystal clear that you two were made for each other. Continue to walk in that light and the rest of your years together will be blissful.
• You two are one of my favorite couples. I’m so happy it’s official because now you’re family. Congratulations!
• You are the yin to her/his yang. Keep bringing out the best in each other. You two are a match made in heaven. Welcome to the family!
• I pray that God continues to bless your union. We’re so grateful to welcome you into the fold.
• You’re now a treasured branch on our beloved family tree and we’re forever grateful. Congratulations on your nuptials.
• Family is everything and we’re so proud to have you in ours. We love you! Welcome to the family!

• I couldn’t be prouder of the beautiful/handsome young man/woman you’ve become. Congratulations on stepping into this new chapter.
• As your mom, witnessing your union makes my heart sing. I am overjoyed to watch your love grow.
• I’ve watched you blossom into a wonderful young woman/man. Always know that I’m here for you no matter what. Congratulations!
• Although you will always be my baby, you’re now entering a new role in your life. Wishing you nothing but best wishes and everlasting love.
• It makes me so happy to see you marrying the love of your life. I always knew you’d find someone who cherishes you as much as I do. Cheers to a lifetime of happiness.
• May you bring each other as much happiness as you’ve brought into my life. Best wishes for a long and healthy marriage.
• I always knew you were special, and it warms my heart to see someone else love and appreciate you as much as I do. Congratulations on your special day!
• From the moment you were born, I knew that you would grow up to become an exceptional individual. Now that you’re getting married, never lose sight of your values and principles that have taken you this far in life.
• I’m so happy to be part of your special day, daughter. As always, I’m wishing you the best in everything that you do.
• To my beautiful/handsome daughter/son, it’s such a lovely feeling to witness your union. May your marriage be filled with joy and happiness on this special occasion.
• It’s one of my greatest joys to see you find your special someone. Wishing you a lifetime of love.
• It’s been an honor to raise you. You’ve grown into a warm, compassionate and loving human being and I couldn’t be prouder. May your union be blessed for an eternity.
• You’re truly blessed to have found your soulmate. Always stay true to yourself and don’t let outsiders interfere with your unique love.
• It’s been a pleasure to see you in love. Getting a front row seat in your life has been one of my greatest blessings. Wishing you infinite love today and always.
• I’ve never known a love that shines as bright as yours. Continue to spread your unconditional love and your union will forever flourish.
• From the first day I laid eyes on you, I knew that you were special. It’s always been my hope that you’d find someone who loves you the way you deserve to be loved. That day has come, and I’m overjoyed.
• You’re the most beautiful/handsome bride/groom that I’ve ever seen. May you continue to glow in your light as you enter this new chapter.
• You’ve always been a loving child. Now you’ve grown into an even more loving young man/woman. It’s such a privilege to witness your love evolve. Eternal blessings to you and your partner.
• Even though you’re married now, you’ll always be my baby. Happy wedding day to my beloved baby girl/boy!
• Besides your original birthday, this is probably one of the happiest days of my life. Wishing you nothing but matrimonial bliss.
• It brings me the greatest joy to see you embarking on this new journey. I know that you will be an amazing husband/wife. Congratulations!I’ve been there with you since day one, so watching you take this step into holy matrimony is a blessing that I’ll forever cherish. I love you so much!

Karla Pope is a longtime writer, editor and blogger with nearly two decades of editorial experience. She’s written for a variety of outlets including Good Housekeeping , Woman’s Day , People , Parade , BET.com. WebMD and more. Her coverage includes entertainment, beauty, lifestyle, parenting and fashion content. If she's not exploring New York City with her two young children, you can find her curled up on the couch watching a documentary and eating gummy bears. 

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A POWERHOUSE OF VOICES. A CHAMPION OF DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES. A PIPELINE OF TALENT. This is Girls Write Now.

Connect with us, writing contests & publication opportunities for youth.

Girls Write Now is a dynamic, multi-generational community of writers on a mission. For more than 20 years, our nationally award-winning programs have provided creative, critical and digital writing training, college and career readiness, personalized mentoring and massive opportunities for the next generation of leaders.

Know about a great writing contest for teens or young adults? Feel free to reach out to Kenna McCafferty at [email protected] .

Girls Write Now Contests

FIRST CHAPTERS CONTEST A Writing Contest in Partnership with Penguin Random House and Electric Lit Girls Write Now is proud to team up with Penguin Random House and Electric Lit for  an exciting opportunity to be published on the Electric Lit website and win a cash prize of $500! The First Chapters contest is part of Penguin Random House’s and Electric Lit’s commitment to support Girls Write Now in amplifying diverse voices. To qualify your first Chapter MUST:

• Be 4500 words or fewer
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• Be submitted as a Google Doc via the form below  before   11:50PM ET on May 9, 2024

SELECT YOUTH CONTESTS

The Alexandrian Review is an entirely student run international youth literary magazine and they are looking for submissions. To submit, applicants must be 10-20 years of age. The Alexandrian Review receives any submissions within their guidelines. While they do emphasize the theme of amplifying the voices of marginalized communities, they are happy to accept and provide feedback on any works. The submission window will be open from  April 7 – July 31.  Learn more about the submission requirements  here .

Select Annual Contest Schedules

Bennington’s Young Writers Awards exists to promote excellence in writing at the high school level. Included genres are poetry, fiction and nonfiction. A first, second, and third place winner is selected in each category. The details below can be found on their Submittable page at https://www.bennington.edu/events/young-writers-awards .

Awards & Rules First-place winners in each category are awarded a prize of $1,000; second-place winners receive $500; third-place winners receive $250.

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All entries must be original work reviewed, approved and sponsored by a high school teacher. We will use your sponsoring teacher as a contact for the competition should we have any questions. For homeschooled students, please contact a mentor to sponsor your writing.

Young Writers Award finalists and winners are also eligible for undergraduate scholarships at Bennington. YWA finalists who apply, are admitted, and enroll at Bennington will receive a $10,000 scholarship every year for four years, for a total of $40,000. YWA winners who apply, are admitted, and enroll at Bennington will receive a $15,000 scholarship every year for four years, for a total of $60,000.

Black Lawrence Press has annual awards and competitions for a variety of genres. The schedule below, as well as individual descriptions for each award, can be found on their Submittable page at https://blacklawrencepress.submittable.com/submit . The Big Moose Prize: Open December 1 – January 31 (Open competition, novels) The Hudson Prize: Open February 1 – March 31 (Open competition, poetry and short story collections) The Spring Black River Chapbook Competition : Open April 1 – May 31 (Open competition, poetry and prose chaps) Open Reading Period 1: Between June 1 – June 30 The St. Lawrence Book Award: Open July 1- August 31 (First book competition, poetry and short story collections) The Fall Black River Chapbook Competition: Open September 1 – October 31 (Open competition, poetry and prose chaps) Open Reading Period 2: Between November 1 – November 30 (Please note that Black Lawrence Press occasionally offers early bird specials on their contests. These specials allow authors to submit their manuscripts ahead of time at a discounted rate.)

The American Writers Museum, John Estey Student Writing Competition, has opened its 4th annual student writing competition. To learn more, visit American Writers Museum

PUBLICATION OPPORTUNITIES FOR EMERGING WRITERS

THE ADROIT JOURNAL  is run by high school students, college students, and emerging writers. Adroit publishes within “over 21” and “under 21” categories, so your writing will appear alongside great work by writers of any age. Adroit publishes fiction and poetry, and includes art and photography. They will reopen our submission reading period in January 2021. Find them online at:  http://www.theadroitjournal.org/

AFFINITY MAGAZINE works to spotlight teen voices about current events. We find that the media sometimes forgets the voices of teens on many topics! So we are here to give them a voice. Affinity Magazine allows you to get your writing published and read by thousands of people! You can get your work published and sharpen up on your writing so you can write for The New York Times one day (hopefully!!). For ages 13-20. Visit http://affinitymagazine.us/write-for-us/ for more information on all the different

AGNI  is Boston University’s well-respected journal. It appears in both print and online. AGNI submissions are not limited to high school writers, but the journal is known to accept and publish lots of work by new writers. Get published in high school at AGNI and you’ve taken an important step to becoming a writer in the real world! Find them online at:  http://www.bu.edu/agni/submit.htm

THE ALCOTT YOUTH MAGAZINE is a magazine devoted to sharing the written perspectives of young people. The magazine publishes work on a variety of topics, including current events, young adult life, and women’s rights issues. Published works are primarily focused on young women from ages thirteen to twenty-two. However, anyone who is interested in sharing their voice is encouraged to submit to the magazine, regardless of age or gender. The Alcott Youth Magazine is open to publishing articles, essays, short stories, illustrations, cartoons, photographs, or any other works. Visit https://www.alcottmagazine.com/submit

THE AUDACITY is Roxanne Gay’s bi-monthly newsletter where she features emerging writers with fewer than three article/essay/short story publications and no published books or book contracts. The Audacity features only non-fiction and is particularly interested in literary essays and memoir. All essays are paid a flat fee of $2,000. For more information, visit https://gay.submittable.com/submit

BLUE MARBLE publishes four times a year and accepts submissions of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, essays, opinion pieces, travel writing, photography and art on a rolling basis. Blue Marble looks for new work from writers ages 13-21 that hasn’t been published anywhere else either online or in print. For more details on how to submit your work, visit https://bluemarblereview.com/submit/ .

DIALOGUE HUMANITIES is an online, biannual journal that publishes high quality, humanities-focused essays written by middle and high school students. Essays will be reviewed by a panel of experts in various humanities-based fields and will be chosen based on the strength of the writing, the author’s familiarity with his or her chosen topic, and the appropriateness of the essay’s content. Dialogue Humanities Review aims to include academic essays from a wide variety of fields, including but not limited to: African-American Studies; American Studies; Anthropology; Archaeology; Art Criticism, History, and Theory; Classics; Ethics; Ethnic Studies; Folklore; Geography; History; History and Ethics of Science; International Studies; Jurisprudence; Languages and Linguistics; Literature; Music History and Criticism; Philosophy; Political Science; Psychology; Religion and Comparative Religion; Sociology; Social Sciences; Theatre History and Criticism; and Women’s Studies. If selected, authors will be asked to revise their essays to ready it for publication. Please visit http://dialoguehumanitiesreview.org/about/ or contact Jessica Rafferty at [email protected] for more information.

ÉLAN LITERARY MAGAZINE accepts original fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, screenwriting, plays, and all kinds of art from students ages 14-18 in locations internationally. Élan produces two online editions a year, one in the Fall/Winter and another in the Spring/Summer. The two editions are combined into a single Print Edition each Summer. For more information on how to submit, visit: https://www.elanlitmag.com/submit .

EMBER only publishes twice a year, but this beautiful and dreamy journal of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction appeals to all age groups. Although it doesn’t exclusively publish young writers, submissions from writers and artists ages 10 to 18 are strongly encouraged. Submissions open March 1, 2023 . For more details, visit them online at:  http://emberjournal.org/ .

ENOUGH PLAYS is taking submissions from teen writers (ages 13-19) of 10-MIN PLAYS confronting the issue of gun violence. Six plays will be selected by a panel of astonishing writers to be published and performed nationwide and the writers will receive $500. Deadline for submissions is April 20, 2023 . Visit them online: https://www.enoughplays.com/amplify

GIRLS RIGHT THE WORLD  is a literary journal inviting young, female-identified writers and artists, ages 14–21, to submit work for consideration for the fourth annual issue. They believe girls’ voices transform the world for the better. We accept poetry, prose, and visual art of any style or theme. Girls Right The World ask to be the first to publish your work in North America; after publication, the rights return to you. Please include a note mentioning your age, where you’re from, and a bit about your submission. Send your best work, in English or English translation, to [email protected] between September 1 and December 31. 

HANGING LOOSE PRESS has had a section of high school writing in their issues since 1968. Hanging Loose has long been known for its special interest in new writers. This press reads manuscripts throughout the year, accepting poetry and prose. For more details on the submission process, visit https://www.hangingloosepress.com/submissions/ .

HELLOGIGGLES a positive online community for female-identifying readers (although others are always welcome!) covering the latest in beauty and style, relationships, career and money, culture, identity, and more. Featuring a mix of news, personal essays, reported features, and service, we’re committed to providing our readers with smart, thoughtful, and relatable content representing a range of voices. We were founded by Zooey Deschanel, Molly McAleer, and Sophia Rossi in 2011 as a place on the Internet to inspire a smile, and years later, we’re still doing just that. Tor ages 14 and up.

HOT DISH MAGAZINE , an online journal serving up a bubbling mixture of poetry and fiction by teens (grades 9–12), wants your voice to be heard! We award cash prizes for fiction, poetry, and the Hot Dish Challenge. Our submission period is October-January. Visit us at  www.hotdishmagazine.com .  The GOAT ( the-goat.org ) publishes student writing on everything sports related and is looking for new submissions. Students can email their writing pieces to me. No work is rejected, and editors provide any mentoring and editing necessary. Students will see their work online within weeks and can include the link on their college or summer school applications.

ICE LOLLY REVIEW:  Ice Lolly Review accepts a variety of pieces including, creative nonfiction, fiction, haikus, poems, plays, spoken word, and etc. They are looking for pieces that have a strong, solid voice and aren’t afraid of delving into deep topics. For more details, go to  https://www.icelollyreview.com/submissions .

jGIRLS   MAGAZINE:   jGirls Magazine accepts submissions on an ongoing basis from self-identifying Jewish teenage girls and gender-expansive youth ages 13-19. You can submit articles, essays, fiction, poetry, cultural reviews, humor, photographs, music, videos, artwork and other creative materials. You can submit as often as you’d like. For more details, visit  https://jgirlsmagazine.org/submission-guidelines/ .

KIDSPIRIT is a nonprofit online magazine and community by and for youth to engage each other about life’s big questions in an open and inclusive spirit. Its mission is to promote mutual understanding among 11- to 17-year-olds of diverse backgrounds and support their development into world citizens with strong inner grounding. KidSpirit is in syndication on the Huffington Post and Spirituality & Practice and has won numerous awards from major educational, parenting, and spiritual organizations. Visit the Get Involved section to learn more about publishing your work, becoming an editor, or facilitating a conversation about one of the 50 themes KidSpirit contributors have explored: https://kidspiritonline.com/get-involved/

THE LUMIERE REVIEW is a literary magazine dedicated to shining the light on all voices through poetry, prose, and art. General submissions are now open. Submissions to the forthcoming Issue 08 of The Lumiere Review in poetry, prose (creative fiction and non-fiction), and all forms of art can be sent to [email protected] . Details on how to submit and format your work can be found at: https://lumierereview.com/submit .

NARRATIVE MAGAZINE A prize of $2,500 and publication in Narrative is given annually for a short story, a short short story, an essay, a memoir, or an excerpt from a longer work of fiction or creative nonfiction. A second-place prize of $1,000 is also awarded. The editors will judge. Using only the online submission system, submit up to 15,000 words of prose with a $27 entry fee by March 28. All entries are considered for publication. Visit the website for complete guidelines. Deadline, March 28, 2024 at midnight PST.

POLYPHONY LIT:  invites submissions of poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction from high school students worldwide. Student editors provide feedback to all submissions, including the ones not accepted for publication. Submissions are open from February 1-28, 2022 and June 1-30, 2022. More details can be found at  https://www.polyphonylit.org/.

TEEN INK is one of the most popular and diverse writing spaces to get published in high school. The broad categories for publication reflect the diversity of writing that this lively online magazine celebrates. Some publication categories include: community service, travel and culture, the environment, health, reviews of TV shows and video games, and college essays, among the more traditional poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Visit online at:  http://www.teenink.com

THE TRAILBLAZER LITERARY MAGAZINE is an international high school publication dedicated to push for cultural diversity through creative writing. For general submissions, the magazine accepts fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction all year, from middle and high school students between 14 and 18 years old. In addition, they host the Cultural Heritage Writing Contest, which welcomes submissions about the young creatives’ cultural background, ancestry, values, customs, etc. Visit online at: https://www.thetrailblazerreview.com/ TRAVELNITCH was founded in 2018 to encourage a love of travel and make it more accessible to all families. Travelnitch believes travel has the power to changes lives, open minds, and build stronger communities. They love to feature new & aspiring travel writers who can delight and entertain readers. They currently need support developing family-centric travel content to engage kids (and sometimes parents) in fun and innovative ways.  If you are a writer who loves to travel, this could be the perfect fit for you—turn your own passion into an inspiring story for our readers! https://travelnitch.org/writers/storyteller-spotlight/

TYRIAN INK is an independent LGBTQIA+ press that is dedicated to uplifting youth voices. TYRIAN INK is currently open to chapbook manuscripts of any genre (poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, hybrid, etc) with a minimum of 30 pages and a maximum of 50 pages in length. Please only submit if you are a member of the LGBTQ+ community and are 22 or below. Writers will be paid $250 for their manuscripts and receive a percent of royalties for every chapbook sold. https://tyrianinkpress.com/home/submission-guidelines/

WRITING RESIDENCIES & FELLOWSHIPS

Hedgebrook’s mission is to support visionary women-identified writers,18 and older, whose stories and ideas shape our culture now and for generations to come. Writers must be women, which is inclusive of transgender women and female-identified individuals.

Hedgebrook’s Writer-in-Residence Program supports writers from all over the world for fully-funded residencies of two to four weeks (travel is not included and is the responsibility of the writer to arrange and pay for). Up to 6 writers can be in residence at a time, each housed in their own handcrafted cottage. They spend their days in solitude – writing, reading, taking walks in the woods on the property or on nearby Double Bluff beach. In the evenings, “The Gathering” is a social time for residents to connect and share over their freshly prepared meals.

Writers can apply here for a residency in Fiction, Non-fiction, Playwriting, Poetry, Screenwriting/TV Writing, or Songwriting. Read more and apply at https://www.hedgebrook.org/writers-in-residence.

MacDowell’s mission is to nurture the arts by offering creative individuals an inspiring environment in which they can produce enduring works of the imagination. We encourage applications from artists representing the widest possible range of perspectives and demographics, and who are investigating an unlimited array of inquiries and concerns.

MacDowell  is currently accepting applications for the Spring Summer 2023 residency season (March – August 2023). Learn more at https://macdowell.slideroom.com/#/Login.

The NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship is a $8,000 unrestricted cash grant available to artists living in New York State and/or one of the Indian Nations located therein. This grant is awarded in fifteen different disciplines over a three-year period (five categories a year) and the application is free to complete. The NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship is not a project grant, but is intended to fund an artist’s vision or voice, at all levels of their artistic development.

Learn more at https://www.nyfa.org/awards-grants/artist-fellowships/ .

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Best Tablets For Students To Study Long Into The Night

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While students need a wide variety of applications to complete their education, a tablet can bring an extra level of versatility to read ebooks, take notes and multitask during long study sessions. The best tablets for students can be a great supplementary piece to a companion laptop, or in the case of our top pick—the Apple iPad Pro M4 —it can be a computer all its own.

The best tablets for students can be used alongside a laptop or on their own.

But we’ve also got great options from Android, Chrome and Windows, too. The best Android tablet for students, the Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 Ultra , can keep you fully integrated into the Samsung ecosystem. For those that want a powerful machine with Copilot, the Microsoft Surface 11 ticks those boxes. There are more options, too. Here are the best tablets for students in 2024.

• Best Tablet For Students Overall: Apple iPad Pro M4
• Best Budget Tablet For Students: Amazon Fire Max 11
• Best Apple Tablet For Students: Apple iPad Air
• Best Android Tablet For Students: Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 Ultra
• Best Windows Tablet For Students: Microsoft Surface Pro 11
• Best E-Ink Tablet For Students: Amazon Kindle Scribe

Best Tablet For Students Overall

Seamless integration with your laptop, earbuds and more, apple ipad pro m4.

Adam has been a leader in the tech media field for over a decade, with bylines at a number of different publications. When he's not hosting the Benefit of the Doud podcast, he's busy getting his hands on as many phones, tablets and laptops as possible. He regularly uses both iOS and Android (six-month rotation for each), and he fully embraces technology. He hasn't carried cash money since 2018, and pays for everything with his phone wherever possible.

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Display size: 13-inch | Resolution: 2,064 x 2,752 | Storage: Up to 2TB | Operating system: iPadOS | Size: 11.1 x 8.5 x 0.2 inches | Cellular option: Yes | Weight: 582 grams

Best for: Enjoying a fully integrated ecosystem 

• Powerful M4 processor
• Gorgeous OLED display
• Seamless integration with other Apple products
• Keyboard/stylus not included

Apple has long dominated the tablet space since the introduction of the original iPad. Since then, the company has been pushing the boundaries of what a tablet can do and what a tablet can be. It offers a 13-inch Tandem OLED display, which is essentially two layers of OLED pixels stacked on top of one another, which solves two problems tablets have with OLED—brightness and burn-in. The dual-layer of OLED pixels allows for greater brightness and more power efficiency with less chance of burn-in during normal use. 

Moreover, the iPad Pro gives you a huge screen with a fully integrated app ecosystem that allows you to do basically anything you might need during your studies, from writing to research. You can even start typing on your favorite MacBook and seamlessly transfer to the iPad to streamline your study session. Plus, Apple supports the iPad for a very long time. The longevity of iPads means that this tablet will stay with your student long after graduation. Just keep in mind that you'll need to add the Apple Pencil (2nd Gen) to take notes and the Magic Keyboard to make it function as a laptop.

Best Budget Tablet For Students

Amazon productivity combined with microsoft software, amazon fire max 11.

Display size: 11-inch | Resolution : 2,000 x 1,200 | Storage: Up to 128GB | Operating system: FireOS | Size: 10.2 x 6.4 x 0.3 inches | Cellular option: No | Weight: 490 grams

• Inexpensive compared to the competition
• Included trial of Microsoft Office 365
• Underpowered
• Weak app ecosystem (beyond MS Office)

Amazon tablets are a close second to iPad when it comes to tablet market share. Generally they’re pretty respectable devices for content consumption and some light gaming. Recently, Amazon decided to make a push into productivity, and its first steps into that arena come with this Amazon Fire Max 11. You can get the tablet on its own or you can get the Amazon Fire Max 11 bundle that includes a keyboard and stylus for typing and note taking. Amazon also partnered with Microsoft to bundle in a three-month trial of Office 365, meaning you get Word, Excel and Powerpoint for your classes and presentations at a discount for a short time. Bringing one of the most popular productivity suites to the Amazon Appstore was a great move because the rest of that app store is decidedly not great.

Specifically, the Amazon Appstore is something of a wasteland of broken and forgotten apps beyond the typical content streamers and Microsoft apps. You can get the main apps like Netflix and Hulu (and, of course, the Kindle app), but most simply aren’t available. Maybe that’s a good thing to send with your student to keep them from getting distracted. But mostly, this is a light and portable writing and streaming machine which should get your student through a day of studying and a night of relaxing.

Best Apple Tablet For Students

The best value for dollar of all ipad devices, apple ipad air.

Display size: 11-inch | Resolution: 1,640 x 2,360 | Storage: Up to 1TB | Operating system: iPadOS | Size: 9.8 x 7.0 x 0.2 inches | Cellular option: Yes | Weight: 462 grams

• Rich app ecosystem filled with productivity apps
• Works great with other Apple devices.
• Good balance of cost and power
• Keyboard and stylus can be expensive
• Not great for multitasking

If you want a great Apple tablet, but you don’t want to shell out for the best of the best, the iPad Air is a great alternative that will offer a similar experience at a significantly more affordable price. You still have the same disadvantages as the iPad Pro—notably the lack of included keyboard and stylus. Not only are they not included, but the cost of those accessories alone almost equal to the cost of the tablet by itself, effectively doubling your investment.

But if you’re carrying an iPhone and/or MacBook, the iPad Air is a wonderful companion serving as a second monitor for the MacBook, or syncing with the Wi-Fi hotspot from the iPhone for 5G connectivity. You can also use the devices almost interchangeably, snapping a photo with your iPhone and importing it directly into a PowerPoint slide on the iPad.

iPadOS has come a long way in terms of being a great tablet interface, but there’s still some work to do. It’s not the greatest multitasking experience, lacking the taskbar for easily switching apps. Other apps don’t work very well with multitasking in general, so don’t expect to get a full PC-like experience. Overall though, you still get a ton of power in a thin package that can almost completely replace a laptop in a pinch.

Best Android Tablet For Students

Samsung's best tablet is a productivity machine, powered by dex, samsung galaxy tab s9 ultra.

Display size: 14.6-inch | Resolution: 1,848 x 2,960 | Storage: Up to 1TB | Operating system: Android | Size: 12.9 x 8.2 x 0.2 inches | Cellular option: No | Weight: 732 grams

• Huge, gorgeous display
• Samsung DeX is a multitasking game changer
• Keyboard case not included

Samsung is one of a couple of tablet makers still pushing the envelope when it comes to the devices. Samsung’s Galaxy Tab S9 Ultra is loaded with the best processor, RAM and storage space in an effort to draw in the productivity crowd. One of Samsung’s signatures is in the gorgeous display. The 14.6-inch AMOLED 2x display gives you that large canvas to work on with a high contrast ratio and super deep blacks. You also get the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor, which was the flagship processor at the time when this tablet debuted in the summer of 2023. At the time, I tested this tablet, and you can read the full Samsung Tab S9 Ultra review for plenty of more insight.

Samsung adds DeX, its multitasking platform that imitates a desktop operating system, complete with floating windows and a task bar for fast app switching. If you’re looking for a desktop experience with Android’s extensive catalog of apps, look no further. But the tablet is expensive, and doesn’t include the keyboard (though the stylus comes in the box), so it doesn’t come cheaply. But it has all the power and more than you'll need for your studies, and some gaming afterward.

Best Windows Tablet For Students

The very best from microsoft, with a powerful processor, microsoft surface pro 11.

Display size: 13-inch | Resolution: 2,880 x 1,920 | Storage: Up to 1TB | Operating system: Windows | Size: 11.3 x 8.2 x 0.4 inches | Cellular option: Yes | Weight: 895 grams

• Full desktop OS
• Snapdragon X Elite with Copilot
• Built in kickstand
• Keyboard not included
• 1st Gen processor could be tricky

If you want a combination laptop/tablet, the Surface Pro is about as close as you’ll get. The Surface Pro Flex Keyboard completes this package as a laptop replacement, but it isn’t shipped in the box, which means you’ll need to shell out extra for it. The Surface Pro certainly isn’t the only tablet that sells the keyboard separately, but it feels extra egregious when you consider that this is, for all intents and purposes, a Windows laptop.

The Surface comes with lovely industrial design that has become a trademark of the brand pretty much since its inception. The device has an all metal chassis with a tight hinge that can pose the tablet at any angle you might need. This year’s Surface also comes with Microsoft’s all-new Copilot button, which summons the AI engine when you press it—if one were so inclined.

The Surface also runs on Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X Elite processor, which is the next generation in ARM-based processing. Essentially, it’s a hard pivot away from the likes of Intel and AMD, who have ruled this space for years. By all reports, the processor seems to hold up well compared to its x86 compatriots, but as of this writing, it’s still very new, so it’s hard to see how it’ll hold up long-term. Of course, the fact that Microsoft used the chip for its flagship hardware speaks to Microsoft’s confidence in the architecture.

Best E-Ink Tablet For Students

Great reader with pen support for highlights and notes, amazon kindle scribe.

Display size: 10.2 | Resolution: 300ppi | Storage: Up to 64GB | Operating system: Kindle OS | Size: 7.7 x 9.0 x 0.2 inches | Cellular option: Yes | Weight: 1.0 pounds

• All the Kindle reliability that you know and love
• Adding markup to books is awesome
• Amazing battery life
• Limited functionality beyond just reading and note-taking

The Amazon Kindle is something of a staple in reading habits these days. Though people still appreciate the physical book, digital e readers are more often the norm when it comes to reading books. But one thing that e-readers have traditionally lacked was the ability to markup texts like what one might do if studying. To that end, the Kindle Scribe might have been made just for your student headed off to college.

The Scribe gives you a much larger canvas for reading and battery life that is measured in months, not weeks. That’s no small thing. It’s no good showing up to class with a dead tablet, especially if that tablet is your primary study device. The battery life on the Kindle Scribe should ensure that basically never happens.

The only problem is, that's about all this tablet does. The E Ink screen is not suitable for displaying anything except books—even web pages are a challenge. So while the Kindle Scribe can be great for reading and taking notes, it falls short when it comes to general research. Put simply, there is zero chance this is the only large-screened computing device you’ll use at college. 

What our editors say: Consumer tech editor Rebecca Isaacs says in her full review , “One of my favorite things about the Scribe is the notebook feature and the writing experience itself. The notebook comes with complete customizability. If I wanted to swap between a large rule-lined page or a dotted grid, I could open the settings and change it with a couple of taps. Additionally, writing on the page felt smooth and fluid. One of my great concerns when I test out E Ink tablets is that my script can sometimes appear pixelated. The Kindle Scribe keeps my handwriting looking natural and like I actually used a pen to write.”

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How to get glass skin, according to korean skincare experts, why trust forbes vetted.

The Forbes Vetted team has amassed an impressive library of tech content, including recommendations roundups and tested reviews .

• The author of this story, Adam Doud , is a Chicago-based freelance reviewer who has been writing about consumer electronics for over a decade with a focus on mobile phones, tablets and cellular technology. He has tested almost every major phone on the market over the past several years, including the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5 and the Google Pixel 8 Pro .
• Rebecca Isaacs is Forbes Vetted’s consumer tech editor, and she oversees and approved this article. She’s spent the past several years learning everything there is to know about consumer technology, with a special focus on smart home.
• Since the computing world moves at lightning speed, we regularly review and fact-check our articles to make sure the recommendations are still current and accurate. This article was last updated in July 2024 to include an all-new lineup of tablets.

How We Chose The Best Tablets For Students

At Forbes Vetted, we’ve tested plenty of tablets to get a sense of the top picks across a range of needs. Our picks for best tablets for students largely came down to our experience with each device.

• Our writers and editors have tested all of our picks.
• We looked at tablets that spanned all operating systems. These days, personal technology is so interconnected, it makes a lot of sense for your phone and tablet to run on the same operating system, or at least comparable operating systems. This way, you can have the same apps and experiences from device to device.
• In addition to our own testing, we spoke with industry experts and consumer tech analysts to determine the top features a student might need to complete their tasks.
• Finally, cost came into play. Since some students will be buying their tablets themselves. To that end, we wanted to span as large a field as possible, while remaining within the confines of what a student will find useful.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Can a tablet replace a laptop.

The answer to this question largely depends on individual needs. For many people, a tablet like the Apple iPad Pro M4 can absolutely replace a laptop for a thinner, lighter portable machine. Where you might run into trouble is when it comes to desktop-class apps like video editors, graphics programs and even some sound editing tools. Many of them aren’t available on tablets, but that is a rapidly evolving shift. There are indeed apps that can accomplish all of those tasks, but the key difference comes in missing some heavier duty features. All that being said, it’s fair to say that well over half of a computer’s capabilities can be replicated on a tablet with very little compromise involved.

What Are The Advantages Of Choosing A Tablet Over A Laptop?

The key advantage to choosing a tablet is in the touchscreen. Not all laptops have touch screens, and that can be a disadvantage when it comes to things like drawing or marking up documents—both of which happen frequently when conducting research and/or writing papers in school. The other advantage is the posture you take when working on them. Yes, you can lean back on a chair and read off of your laptop, but it’s a lot easier and nicer with a tablet. Laptops can also outperform tablets in some scenarios, such as when perched on someone’s lap during a lecture (hence the name). It will boil down to your needs.

Should A Student Have A Tablet And A Laptop?

There’s a good argument to invest in both for the school year, especially if you’re investing in a note taking tablet like the Amazon Kindle Scribe . Tablets can act as a second screen when conducting research, or just keeping track of a sports game while doing research. There are many apps that you can buy that allow you to extend your screen onto a tablet even when built-in functionality isn’t there. A art student may want a tablet for drawing, and a laptop for writing, as an example. When going into a versatile environment like school, those multiple options can make the difference.

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