Hi!

I'm back on land. For now. I know many of my students are just coming up for air after AP exams, or still swimming in the thick of finals preparation.

I've been super busy too. The IECA conference just wrapped up, which means I spent three days talking to college admissions officers from schools across the country - public, private, big, tiny, selective, very much not. Dozens of conversations. And if I had to distill every single one into one word, it would be: authenticity.

I know. You've heard that word. Every counselor, every admissions info night, every school website says it. "Be authentic." Super helpful, thanks.

So let me tell you what they actually mean - especially now, when half the essays landing in their inboxes were written by a machine.

AI has changed something real in admissions offices. AOs are reading essays that are grammatically perfect, structurally sound - and completely forgettable. The voice has been smoothed out. The weird edges sanded down. What's left is something that technically says all the right things but feels like it's only designed to do that.

What admissions officers told me, over and over, in different ways: they want the stuff that couldn't have been generated. The kid who judges local 4-H competitions. The sailor who also writes terrible poetry about tides. The girl who runs a niche Discord server for fans of 1970s Japanese sci-fi. The more specific, the better. The weirder, the better.

This is counterintuitive for most students. They think the goal is to sound impressive. It's not. The goal is to sound like themselves - the specific, particular version of themselves that no language model could plausibly invent.

Most students skip the brainstorming phase entirely. They sit down in June with a blank doc, type a few sentences about a meaningful experience, decide it's not interesting enough, and start over. That cycle repeats until August, when panic sets in and they write something generic under deadline pressure.

The brainstorming phase is where the real essay lives. It's where you find out which details are actually interesting, which experiences have more beneath the surface than you realized, which version of yourself is going to carry the whole thing. You cannot get there by staring at a prompt.

I put together a free guide that walks students through exactly how to do this - questions to sit with, frameworks to try, ways to get to the specific before chasing the polished. If your student is working on app essays right now, this is for them.

​[Download the free brainstorming guide]​

Until next time...

Nikki