→ Move past the words today's college applicants are married to: passionate, determined, and persistent. Gordan Allport spent his life uncovering 4,500 words to describe the human personality, and now, we will uncover yours.
→ Discover your Mementos by completing a 35 statement brainstorming exercise. Often, the most meaningful essays are born from the objects we hold dearest to us.
→ You’ve finally reached The Final Venn! Learn how strategically matching your experiences and core values will give rise to each of your essays. Wield the power of Intersectionality to light your "common" experiences with personal backdrops.
6. Taste & Voice
7. Story Structures
8. Find your Icing
9. Aristotle's Eye
10. Stickiness
→ Congratulations! You've officially completed the first challenge of essay writing - knowing yourself. Now it's time to master the next challenge, storytelling. In this episode, we're going to take a deep dive into the anatomy of a story, examining Multiple frameworks that almost every essay revolves around like the 3 Act Structure and the Hero's Journey.
→ The founding father of Rhetoric, Aristotle put forward literary devices that have been practiced and perfected by actors, orators, politicians, debaters, and advocates. From repetition to anaphoras, chiasmus to metaphors, we will learn different rhetorical devices by analysing the essays of students who have successfully deployed them.
→ When the core of your essay is ready, one way to take it to the next level is by creating a creative vehicle, or Icing. We'll discuss the three elements of a good creative vehicle, from its ability to bring ease to complex ideas to tying down your abstract concepts in the physical world.
→ You dread it, you run from it, you might even have finished it - but somewhere you're secretly dissatisfied with your Common App Essay. In this episode, we're going to be looking at different kinds of common application essays, discussing how HYPSM Students stood out from their peers, and offer a few nuggets of advice to keep in mind while ideating, writing, and editing your essay.
→ What sparked your love for Chemistry? Was it the daily concoction of home-made perfumes you’d make when you were seven? When did you truly realize you wanted to surround yourself with bubbling sulphates for the rest of your life? We'll help you uncover that in the Why Essays.
→ Apply RIT Template to your Shorties. To tie it all up, we'll look at the shorties of accepted students, discuss what made them work, and how you can emulate the same.
11. The Why Us Essay
12. The Why Major Essay
13. The Community Essay
14. The Extra-Curricular Essay
15. The Shorties
16. The Writer's Diet
17. Cut Big, Then Small
18. Word Territory
19. Insight Template
20. Conclusion
→ According to Helen Sword, most prose can best be characterized as flabby - maybe even yours. Don't take it personally because as she writes in her book The Writer's Diet, your work can be transformed into a lean mean machine in just 5 key steps.
→ Evaluate the effectiveness of your anecdotes, quotes, and paragraph structures with The Insight Template. Prune the big limbs, and then we'll understand how to trim adverbs and adjectives towards the end.
→ Understand how admissions officers evaluate your essay with The Insight Template. Wield the So What exercise and attempt to match your insights to your experiences.