Some guidelines around AI and application essays

Should you be using AI at all, in any way, for your college application writing? Not really.

Your application has many pieces: your transcript, which is just a list of classes and grades; a list of your activities, maybe with short descriptions; possibly some test scores; maybe some letters where teachers and counselors can talk about you. It’s all pretty impersonal, and the writing portions are your clearest and best possibilities to show colleges who you are as a person. So it’s completely counter-productive, counter-intuitive, short-sighted and just plain nuts to outsource that task to a literal robot! It’s one of the most desperate and self-sabotaging things you can do with your admission. Don’t do it.

(And spend some time figuring out why you were tempted in the first place. Is it a problem with confidence? With time management? Are you too caught up in social pressure to get into the “best” school that you become wiling to take shortcuts and make bad decisions if you think it will help you get accepted? Do you cynically believe that everyone else is doing it and that it’s the only way to keep up? If you’re letting AI write your entire essay for you, there’s a problem. It’s worth looking into.)

But you probably—hopefully—aren’t actually tempted to let AI write your entire response for you. If you are tempted to use AI, it’s probably as a tool to help you write, not a tool to write for you. There’s a difference.

I’ve used ChatGPT to help me with a few blog posts, just to experiment and try it out. My own writing process is very segmented. I begin with a fairly detailed outline, and I usually let days or even weeks pass before actually writing it out. The writing itself is mostly just typing—there’s very little though involved. And then I spend a lot of time revising and editing. So I’ve entered my outline into ChatGPT and asked it to do the typing for me. My outline and prompting are detailed enough that even the first draft of the AI-generated text only comes up as 10-15% likely to be written by AI when I run it through ZeroGPT. And then I go through the same revising process I normally do. The few times I’ve done this it actually took me more time and attention than usual. ChatGPT doesn’t write the same way I do, so the editing takes much longer. But it was interesting to try it out, and I don’t feel like I “cheated” in any way. I did all the thinking, and by the time I finished editing I even did most the writing. If you also keep your pre-writing, drafting, and revsision completely separate, and if you don’t mind spending more time and energy, then you may also want to use ChatGPT the way I have. You probably don’t.

The way I’m thinking right now about how a student can ethically, efficiently, and effectively use AI is to treat it as a person—a knowledgable but dull person. (I’m a knowledgeable but dull person, so no offense to AI.) Only use AI in a way you would use some knowledgeable but dull person. When I made the shift from being a public high school English teacher to being a college admission consultant, I gave myself a rule for helping clients with writing: I don’t do anything as a paid consultant I wouldn’t do as an English teacher. That’s the same advice I’d give a student: don’t let AI do anything your English teacher wouldn’t do.

Brainstorming. I love helping students think about topics to write about for their main Common App essay. I especially love the moments—they’re surprisingly common—when a student tells me a story, I say “that would make a great essay!” and the student says they wouldn’t have thought of it without our conversation. I did that sometimes during lunchtime or after-school discussions with students when I was a teacher, and I do it now with all my clients. This is a fine use for AI. I gave ChatGPT the prompt “I want to write my college admission essay. What are some good questions I should ask myself or exercises I should do to brainstorm good topics that may not be obvious?” It gave some pretty good starting advice, even if I’m skeptical that current Large Language Model AI can give advice that’s not obvious.

Giving commentary and suggestions. As a teacher I gave tons of suggestions to students on their drafts, and that’s now one of my primary jobs. I never rewrite anything, and I never insist that my suggestions must be followed, but I try to give thoughtful comments. This is something else that AI can do very quickly. I tried this out by inputting a never-followed-up-on first draft from years ago. And I told ChatGPT: “Here's a prompt and first draft for an application essay. What can I do to make it stronger? I'm trying to emphasize my multi-cultural background, my attention to detail, and a willingness to talk about things outside academics. Don't rewrite anything, just give me hints about what to focus on for my next draft.” The response I got was much better than I expected. ChatGPT didn’t give any feedback I wouldn’t have come up with on my own, but it put it succinctly. And it was instantaneous, which a live person can’t do. If you’re doing something similar, it’s really important that you spell out what it is you’re trying to make clear. You can’t just ask for ways to “make it better,” or “make it stand out.” That’s too vague and will only get you vague responses. I always read student writing with a focus on what qualities they’re trying to highlight, because by the time they’re writing essays we’ve already discussed that a lot. AI can’t do this unless you specify for it. It’s also extremely important, with AI or a real-life person, to explicitly say that you don’t want them to write anything, just to ask questions and give suggestions.

Give suggestions for grammar, punctuation, and style. This is the simplest and most obvious place to let AI give you a hand. It’s not significantly different from the spelling and grammar checking that most software has been doing for decades. So all I’ll say is to make sure that when you use AI for this, you make sure to only get suggestions, not to let it rewrite anything. And the more complex or vague the issue, the less confident you should feel in its suggestions. Simple comma or semicolon problems, no big deal. But when it starts suggesting ways to change sentence structure and tone, the more likely it’s trying to make you sound like an AI program and not like you. Watch out for that!

Recommend what to cut out to get it down to appropriate length. If you have a response you’re happy with, but it’s longer than the maximum word count allowed, whether for a 650-word essay or a 100-word supplemental response, go ahead and let AI recommend some ways to cut it down to size. I do this all the time for clients, and I used to do it a lot for students as a teacher. But again, don’t let it rewrite anything, just ask for suggestions that you can decide to incorporate or reject. And never, ever, ever ask it for help making something longer. If you feel your response is too short, you still have some thinking and planning to do. Don’t hand that task over to an algorithm. If your response is too short, don’t feed it into AI, but instead go back to the brainstorming phase and see if it gives you any suggestions that help you think of what more you can write about. Too-long responses are an editing problem; too-short responses are a planning problem.

I asked ChatGPT about the common uses of AI for high school students writing for college applications, and it yielded no surprises. It said 6-10% of high school students report letting AI generate their essay for them (which is probably lower than the real number), but that others use it for…brainstorming and outlining, high-level suggestions, and grammatical proofreading.

Based on my conversations with high school students, some of you are already using AI in very sophisticated ways and will find this advice obvious and unhelpful. Some of you have little experience with AI and can get a lot out of having a way for “another set of eyes” to look over your writing even if that set of eyes is really a computer program. Not everyone has access to outside consultants, and not everyone has access to teachers, counselors, or other adults who can devote time to helping out with college applications. So a free and fast “knowledgable but dull person” can be a godsend. Some of you pretty much only see AI as a cheating tool and will ignore my advice for ways to use it ethically because you’re not concerned with the ethics—apparently around 6-10% of you. And some of you only see it as a cheating tool and will therefore refuse to use it out of your sense of ethics. That’s fine.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post, here are three easy things you can do:

1. Share it on your social media feeds so your friends and colleagues can see it too.

2. Read these related posts:

   Four quick tips for your application essay

   Application essays: don’t forget the middle!

   Supplemental writing: looking forward and looking back

3. Ask a question in the comments section.

Apply with Sanity doesn’t have ads or annoying pop-ups. It doesn’t share user data, sell user data, or even track personal data. It doesn’t do anything to “monetize” you. You’re nothing but a reader to me, and that means everything to me.

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Making a high school résumé

I’ve had resumes on my mind this week. I met with an executive recruiter and career coach who said that a huge part of her job is helping people make bad resumes good. I’ve also helped two clients, both high school juniors, improve their resumes in the past few days.

(Resume or résumé? I think that using the accents looks a little too formal and affected, but that going without the accents makes it too easy to read the word as the verb to resume, which interrupts the pace and understanding of your reading. I go back and forth, because neither seems “right” to me.)

So with résumés getting a lot of my attention, I’d like to re-run this post from a few years ago about putting together a good high school résumé for college application season. Leave a comment if you think I have a good piece of advice, got something wrong, or if you have an opinion on resume vs. résumé. Enjoy!

One of my Five Foundations of Applying with Sanity is to “be a person, not a résumé.” By that I mean to remember to think of yourself as an authentic person with complexity and contradictions, not just a list of achievements and statistics. That’s really important as a metaphor. But often you need a literal résumé. Scholarship applications may ask for a résumé. College applications sometimes (but not too often) ask for a résumé. Teachers and counselors may want a résumé to help them compose a recommendation letter. Potential employers very often ask for a résumé—that’s what résumés were created for. On top of that, it can be a useful exercise to go through and organize your thoughts about yourself and what you want to say about yourself. So with all that in mind, here are some things to consider when putting together, or revising, your résumé.

It’s strangely difficult to explain how to draft a résumé. The first thing I’d tell you to do is simply to do an image search for “resume samples” and notice the basic patterns. Résumés are just lists, but highly structured lists. The basic categories of things you would list are education, experience, and achievements. That’s where you begin your drafting, by listing the major facts of your education, like the high school(s) you’ve attended, your work experience, including volunteer work, and your awards and achievements. There are hundreds of guides and templates out there, but the best one I’ve come across recently is from the career center at Pomona College. It gives the basics, the reasoning for what goes there, and templates for different ways of organizing the résumé. I also recommend this video from a series produced by the Financial Times. (They’re British and use “CV” instead of “Resume,” but it’s the same thing.) Résumés are easier to revise than draft, so just get something written down, and then you can shape it from there.

There are also lots of fill-in-the-blank templates and résumé generators. Don’t use them. It’s important that you build your own from scratch, even if you’re looking at samples or templates as you do it. For one, you need to understand why you’re writing what you are, and why you’re placing it where you are. It’s easy to lose track of that when you’re just filling in information for a program to format for you. Revising and changing your résumé will be much easier and more intuitive if you make your own.

You’ll want to use a simple design. Keep it basic for your first résumé. Yes, there are some pretty good looking and clever templates out there to help you fit more information into the space or add photos or charts. But please understand that when most readers see this from a high school student, they’re not thinking “wow, this high school student made a really impressive design for their résumé!” They’re probably thinking “this kid expects me to believe they made this? They just used a fancy template. I wonder if they know how to make their own.”

Your résumé doesn’t need to have everything! It’s meant to begin a conversation, not be the conversation, so you want it to be concise and short. You’re trying to show off the things that speak to your finest abilities, and that’s different for everybody. Some students ask “should I have my GPA on my résumé?'“ If you’re proud of it, yes. Should you put your SAT or ACT scores on it? If you’re proud of them, sure. Should you list AP exams you’ve taken? If there’s more than one and you have room, absolutely. Should you list every class you’ve taken? No.

Similarly, you may decide not to list every tiny volunteer project you’ve ever done, especially if they were only a few hours total. If you house-sit for a number of families every year and it shows off your responsibility, then put it in the experience section. If you house-sat once for your aunt, there’s no need to put it on there. Everybody’s résumé will be different and list different things. There’s no precise formula. Make sure you’re listing, as concisely as possible, the broad outlines of your education, your experience in the world, and the achievements you’re proud of.

Two pages are fine if you need two pages. Many people will tell you that your résumé should never be more than a page, and they’re not completely wrong. Many readers—essentially the same ones who say a résumé should never be over a page—will not read past the first page. And if your résumé is over a page because you’ve failed to prioritize the important things or have weird formatting, then that’s a problem. But if you’ve got a reason to go onto the second page, it will be ok. Several studies have now shown that a second page doesn’t make you less likely to get hired. Watch out, though, for waste or sloppiness. If your résumé only goes a few lines into the second page, that looks odd. A second page should be at least half of the page. Otherwise, find ways to cut and condense.

But if it’s only a page, that’s great! Better, really. Don’t feel like you need two.

People tend to read résumés (and most things, on the page or on the screen) in an F pattern. They spend most of their time looking at the top, along the left margin, and at headings as they work down. Knowing this, make sure you put the most important section of your résumé at the top. Which section is going to be the most important for this particular audience? Put it first, even if your templates or examples don’t show it first.

Likewise, make sure the most important information in your lists is along the left. Say for example that you were on the swim team all four years of high school, and you were the team captain your senior year. If you write

2016-2020: high school swim team. 2020 team captain.

then you’ve got the least important information (dates) along the left margin and the most important part (captain, which demonstrates leadership and responsibility) all the way over to the right. Organize the section so that you can instead write

Captain, high school swim team, 2019. Team member 2015-2019.

There can be more than one version of your résumé. The information is going to be the same for all versions, but there are reasons to make changes. The most important thing for one audience may not be the most important thing for another audience. A résumé for a college may need to emphasize your academic credentials, so the education section will be at the top. But if you’re supplying a résumé to a teacher who is going to write a rec letter, then you may want to emphasize experiences that demonstrate your character. Besides, the teacher is already likely to know about your grades and obviously knows what school you attend. So for that version, the experience section will go higher and the education section will go lower.

I’d also advise using slightly different fonts for your résumé depending on whether or not you expect it to be read on a screen or on paper. Graphic designers and font nerds will debate these things for days and days, but for our purposes: san-serif fonts are generally more readable on a screen. However, even if they’re not less legible on paper, sans-serif fonts often look strange when printed, because we’re so used to seeing serif fonts used for printed materials. So consider making a sans-serif version for the screen and a serif version for printing. And please don’t use Times New Roman or Calibri—no matter how good they are, they’re associated with “default” and therefore “didn’t really bother.”

It has to be perfect. Not a single typo. As someone who is very successful told me once: “If you can’t make even one page perfect, when you’ve had lots of time to work on it and it’s all about you, then I don’t want to see you for an interview. You’re done.” She’s right. This one needs to be perfect.

Beware sending someone a résumé unless they ask for it. Remember that the point of your résumé is to provide a concise summary of your past four years. It’s meant to start a conversation or get someone to notice you. But if they’ve already noticed you or already started a conversation, then to hand them a résumé can be very limiting. It signals that you want to talk about what’s on the paper, when you have much more interesting things to talk about.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post, here are three easy things you can do:

1. Share it on your social media feeds so your friends and colleagues can see it too.

2. Check out these related Apply with Sanity posts:

   How do I prepare for a college interview?

   How do I handle supplemental questions?

3. Ask a question in the comments section.

Apply with Sanity doesn’t have ads or annoying pop-ups. It doesn’t share user data, sell user data, or even track personal data. It doesn’t do anything to “monetize” you. You’re nothing but a reader to me, and that means everything to me.

Photo by Zoe Herring.

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Giving credit (and sharing) where it's due

I follow College Vine, but rarely actually read the posts. There are too many of them (usually several a day), and they're too specific ("How to organize a high school study session," for example, or "Community service projects for music majors").

Each post in itself is to the point and well-meaning, but when added up they even make me nervous that nobody's doing enough in high school. In several ways College Vine is the opposite of Apply with Sanity.

But you know what? Yesterday's "Eight Tips to Use Your Time Efficiently and Stay Organized in High School" is really good. I sincerely encourage you to read it.

But "Leading your school's chapter of UNICEF club"? There's a very tiny chance you need to read that one.