College Essays That Made a Difference

by The Princeton Review

Not sure how to tackle the scariest part of your college application—the personal essays? Get a little inspiration from real-life examples of successful essays that scored! In College Essays that Made a Difference, 5th Edition, you’ll find:

• 114 real essays written by 90 unique college hopefuls applying to Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Yale, MIT, and other top schools—along with each applicant’s test scores, GPA, demographic information, and where they ultimately got in

• A special section with writing tips and the most common grammatical mistakes that students make on their essays

• Insider advice from with admissions pros at Amherst College, Cooper Union, Deep Springs College, Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Northwestern University, University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill, University of Virginia, and Yale University

This fifth edition includes application essays written by students who enrolled at the following colleges:
Amherst College
Bard College
Barnard College
Boston College
Brown University
Bryn Mawr College
California Institute of Technology
Claremont McKenna College
Cornell University
Dartmouth College
Duke University
Franklin W. Olin College of
Engineering
Georgetown University
Harvard College
Massachusetts Institute of
Technology
Middlebury College
New College of Florida
New York University
Northwestern University
Pomona College
Princeton University
Rice University
Smith College
Stanford University
Swarthmore College
University of California—San Diego
University of Notre Dame
University of Pennsylvania
Washington and Lee University
Wellesley College
Wesleyan University
Yale University

Genres: College, Writing

384 pages, Paperback

First published September 9, 2003

About the author

The Princeton Review is an education services company providing tutoring, test preparation and admission resources for students. It was founded in 1981. and since that time has worked with over 400 million students.

Reviews

[Kelley Jansson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked up this older edition just out of curiosity as I know many young people who will be applying to college this year. The upfront explanation did a lot to tune the reader's lens more closely to that of an admissions officer. I wasn't overwhelmingly impressed by the writing samples, but could understand how they each stood out or conveyed something beyond the typical submission. I was also struck that the essay form was most definitely a personal narrative, very close to memoir. Many of the represented students had disproportionately had involvement in extracurricular writing activities, such as yearbook staff. While it's obvious that some kids will write better than others, it's probably not known that many kids will not have had ANY training in the written form required of them. Thus, the literary kids have quite an advantage. My one BIG complaint about the book is that it reinforced the matchmaking of the upper class to elite institutions. I read about kids who had travelled the globe, conducted science experiments in labs, and participated in an abundance of extracurricular activities, all of which screamed "my parents have money!" I wanted to cringe at the "challenges" these kids faced, and there was not a single essay in the bunch that related to economic hardship. Something tells me that had The Princeton Review published the same book with excerpts from the top essays at public schools, the writing quality and content would have been better simply due to the depth of the student experiences.

[Niccmee · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book gives high school students tips about how to write a good college essay. They interviewed many different schools such as Yale, John Hopkins, Wellesley, and more. With the information from those interviews, i got the sense of what colleges want from an essay. So this book really helped me a lot in my own essay.
This book also contains many good essays from students all over the country. But one thing i hate most about this is that all the essays are from students with high GPA and SAT scores (1400 and above). Those students are perfect comparing to me. So it makes me feel very bad about my own grades.