Unforgettable College Essays: Secrets from the Haunted Mansion

Unforgettable Essays: Secrets from the Haunted Mansion

In this episode, Jen Schoen from College TNT leverages her three decades of experience in college admissions and scholarship reading to guide you on making your college essay stand out. By adding detailed descriptions, creating memorable characters, and utilizing sensory elements, Jen shows how to bring your essay to life. She provides actionable steps and cautions on avoiding common mistakes, underlining the importance of keeping the essay focused on you. Sprinkling in Disney magic with references to the Haunted Mansion, Jen ensures an engaging and informative session. Stay tuned for part two, focusing on avoiding common essay mistakes. Here's the link from the QR code mentioned in the show for the handout Do's and Don'ts.

00:00 Introduction: Making Your College Essay Unforgettable
01:03 The Power of Details in Your Essay
01:39 Creating Memorable Characters
04:10 Activating Your Senses
05:22 Knowing When to Cut Details
07:16 Three Action Steps to Improve Your Essay
09:39 Conclusion and Next Steps

You can find me at CollegeTNT.com and on Youtube at CollegeTNT! 

For more about me - my experience and my speaking, check out the links below.

On Youtube

You can reach me at jen@collegetnt.com.

College TNT

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenschoen/
https://www.firstgenfm.com/speaker-high-school-educators-students-parents

Transcript

999 Details: 3 Essay Tips from the Haunted Mansion

[00:00:00] Just like Disney's Haunted Mansion has room for one more happy haunt. Your college essay has room for more unforgettable essays. Today we're exploring how to make your essay come alive so admissions counselors will learn about you. I'm Jen Schoen of college, TNT, here with the cold, and I'm here to share my three decades of college admissions and scholarship reading experience with you.

I have read lots of essays, so I know what makes an essay stand out in a good way. Right. You wanna stand out in a good way, and my goal with all of these videos is to help you navigate to and through your first year of college. And I like to throw in some Disney magic to make it more fun. Please hit that subscribe button to get all of my tips and hit the bell to get notified when new videos are posted.

Now, be sure you stick around until the end, because I'm gonna share some of the ways to avoid the most common essay mistakes. I have three action [00:01:00] steps for you that are gonna help make your essay better. Now, if you have seen my previous videos, you know. Adding details is the key to a memorable essay for the people who review, right?

Your college and scholarship application. So this is, this essay stuff isn't just for college essays, it's also for scholarship applications, and it doesn't matter what the topic is. Details will improve it. Now I'm gonna share three simple ways you can add details. Then I'll close with three action tips that I told you to stick around for, including one for a quick win.

So let's dive into the details.

The easiest of all details to add is what I call name names like Madame Liotta here, like Madame Liotta there, we're gonna add her, right? That's a character. So I want you to create the characters for us as readers.

You know, like the Haunted Mansion, as I said, beloved characters, right? Madame Lyota, master Gracie, even the hitchhiking ghost. You [00:02:00] picture what that ghost is doing. Your essay needs memorable characters, not just my coach or my grandfather. Even the words haunted mansion conjure up a specific image. It's not spooky house, right?

So I want you to think about the words you use and the details you add. So what might be too general is if you're talking about my basketball coach taught me leadership. So that can be your first sentence, but then the details need to come. So let's name names and add some more details. Okay. So for example, you could add Coach Maria Rivera with her trademark, you know, purple whistle and post practice PEP talks.

You know, go Team taught me that leadership starts with listening. I wasn't very coachable my first year on the JV team and thought I'd never improve. But she took me aside and made sure I understood her directions. I'll bet you can picture her now and you could probably picture my relationship with her, or the [00:03:00] relationship of the person who wrote the essay.

You get just a really good idea of what that's like. Now, I have one caution here, or maybe a few words of caution here. Warning, warning, the essay is about you. Okay. It's not your coach or your mom or the person who inspires you that you're writing about. It's about what you learned from them and how you were transformed because of their help and their guidance.

Now, I, I happened to work at the University of Washington and Northeastern University reading applications and, um. They're both Huskies, right? And I read this great essay about how amazing the student's dog was. The dog won a championship, the dog worked so hard. The dog, the dog, the dog. And I'll tell you, I'm, I was ready to pick up the phone and admit that dog, even though it wasn't a husky.

But unfortunately, right? I didn't learn much about the student applying and their journey, getting their dog to the winning stage because they had to do a lot of the work. [00:04:00] So it's really important. That you remember, the essay is all about you I know I talked about this in the Let It Go episode and it bears repeating.

The second tip is, as you can see here, to activate your senses, okay? The Haunted Mansion ride at Disney, it really engages all of your senses, right? You get the musty smell, you get the mysterious sounds that that kind of add to that spookiness, right? You get the sight of a ghost joining you in your doom buggy at the very end.

Spoiler alert. If you have never been there, um, or the cobwebs that are just absolutely everywhere. So your essay needs to transport the reader to the place that you're talking about and activating your senses and adding those things can really help do that. So let me give you an example of maybe a first sentence, right?

A first sentence that could be at any hospital is the hospital was very busy. Now that could be your first sentence, but [00:05:00] then you add the details and here's a lot of sensory details. The hospital where you were. Okay. The pediatric ward squeaking sneakers on linoleum floors mixed with Disney songs from the playroom.

And the alcohol smell of hand sanitizer became my Saturday morning soundtrack. You are putting us in the room with you when you add those sensory details. Okay. Okay, so I know what you're saying. You're saying details are great, but how do you know when enough is enough? Right? Sometimes knowing when to leave a detail out is important, like in that, on that lamp right there.

Sometimes you may need to cut the cobwebs, and so I want you to be aware that. Every detail must serve a purpose. You know, like the haunted mansion's, perfectly curated scenes, right? Every detail is serving a purpose to advance the story of the haunted mansion. Your essay's gonna do the same thing, so be careful.[00:06:00] 

If you add details that maybe don't make sense, um, this is an example. Um, and it's really a, a good example, but it's a, it's a bad sentence that the person did a great job improving. And I love science is what the student wrote because I have a dog named Max. Max is six years old this year, and he's the best dog I've ever had.

Even if he does sometimes smell like corn chips. Max has been a great part of my Science Fair project. Now you can picture Max the dog. I must have a thing about dog essays, right? You can picture Max the dog and all the things that Max is, but. Those details don't advance your story.

So here's how the essay kind of turned out when we, we pruned it down a little bit, max. My golden retriever inspired my science fair project on canine color perception and my future career in veterinary ophthalmology. So you get some really good, good details there. What, what the future holds. That max is a golden retriever and [00:07:00] that's plenty.

Not as many details. 'cause knowing details about Max is less important than how Max helped inspire you. So again, always the essay needs to be about you. Okay, so now I have those things. So let's talk about three action steps. All right? And I have three of them. And the first one is for a quick win. Grab your essay, your draft, and just circle every generic noun, like teacher, friend.

Or if there's a generic place, school house, um, I can't think of anything right now, but other generic places and replace each with specific names and locations. Um, just do this right now. I'd say pause the video, like I'll wait. Okay, welcome back. Um, that you can do in five minutes. You can do that very quickly and I highly recommend it.

Now for a deeper dive, I'd say that may take you 30 minutes later this week. Go ahead and create a sensory chart, right, for [00:08:00] your essays key moments. You don't have to do it for every part of your essay, but what are the key moments in your essay? And write one specific detail for each sense. Sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste, and then try to weave maybe three of these details into your essay.

And again, does it advance your story? If it does, it can really enrich the reader's perspective of what you're sharing and it gives us a really good snapshot of that experience that you're sharing with us. And then, I mean, I would absolutely love it if you dropped a comment below with your best sensory detail.

Um, I would really appreciate reading them. That would be really cool. So if you want to just down below, drop your comment. Now here's the third and final action step. Okay? And this is probably gonna take you 20 minutes, 30 minutes depending on how, how far along your essay draft is. And I call this character enhancement.

So for this exercise, I want you to choose the three most important people [00:09:00] mentioned in your essay. And for each, add one unique detail, just one that shows their impact on your story. It could be like. Coach Rivera's purple whistle, or you know, if your grandfather has a Sunday morning pancake tradition, um, add some unique detail that gives me a really good sense of that person.

Okay. And, and I'm gonna add, I'm going to add this. Don't forget that this includes adding a detail about you, details about you are important because you are the main character in the story, right? And then. These details really should help tell your story better. So don't forget about that. So my final question for you is what details are just dying to get out of your head and into your essay?

I know I couldn't help that. Now that you know how to add some magical details to your essay, join me next time. I have a part two for this Haunted Mansion video, The [00:10:00] next part two is the last in this essay series to learn about making your essay better by storytelling the Pixar way, and then by adding and taking away disasters.

And I'm gonna share three detailed disasters that could be haunting. Your college essay. I know I couldn't help it and I could tell you for sure. One of these essay mistakes shows up in a, probably about 80% of the essays I read. Um, and you'll learn how easy it is to fix if you watch my next video. Now, if you need help with your storytelling, check out the link to get my Haunted Mansion tips for this episode and the next episode, uh, and get on my mailing list for even more tips.

Thank you so much for watching. Uh, I really do appreciate it. Wa you're watching and you're sharing with your friends and family, and now go and write your unique story. You have some great tools to do it.