College Essays that Made a Difference

by The Princeton Review

College Essays That Made a Difference, 4th Edition includes real-life essays written by applicants to Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Yale, MIT, and more, as well as complete application profiles of over 100 students, including test scores, GPAs, demographic information, and where they got in and where they didn't.

College Essays That Made a Difference, 4th Edition includes essays submitted to the following

Amherst College
Bard College
Barnard College
Brandeis University
Brown University
Bryn Mawr College
California Institute of Technology
Carleton College
Claremont McKenna College
Columbia University
The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art
Cornell University
Dartmouth College
Davidson College
Duke University
Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering
Georgetown University
Hamilton College
Harvard College
Kenyon College
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Middlebury College
New College of Florida
New York University
Northwestern University
Pomona College
Princeton University
Reed College
Rice University
Smith College
Stanford University
Swarthmore College
Tufts University
University of California–Los Angeles
University of California–San Diego
University of Notre Dame
University of Pennsylvania
Washington & Lee University
Washington University in St. Louis
Wellesley College
Wesleyan University
Whitman College
Williams College
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.