When Is It OK to Use AI During the College Essay Writing Process?
I admit it. I love ChatGPT. I use it every day, multiple times a day. My searches include the personal – “Is Celebrex or cortisone better for an arthritic shoulder?” – and pedagogical – “Make me a packet with student questions containing three short, metaphorical poems suitable for middle schoolers.” As a college essay coach, I’m grappling with how applicants might use AI in the college essay writing process. What follows are some do’s and don’ts for high school seniors applying to college in the Age of AI.
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College Essay Coach Tip 1: AI Can Help You Brainstorm and Edit
Not sure what to write about? Feed your Activities List into ChatGPT and ask it for possible topics. Have trouble organizing your thoughts? Ask it for a basic outline. Finished with your essay and want to avoid comma splices? Prompt ChatGPT to polish your finished essay. If you can’t afford a college essay coach, ChatGPT does an adequate job for the beginning and end of the writing process.
College Essay Coach Tip 2: Don’t Ask ChatGPT to Write Your Entire Essay.
Believe it or not, a seasoned admissions officer will have read tens – if not hundreds – of thousands of essays written by humans by the time your essay reaches their eyeballs. They know how a high school senior “sounds.” Your artificially intelligent writing will appear, well, artificial. (How do I know this? In addition to college essay coaching, I also teach for SUNY Empire. As an adjunct professor, I experience the same thing with undergraduates’ history essays.) That ain’t good news for your hopes of joining the first-year class.
A Good College Essay Coach Will Teach You How to Write an Essay That “Pops.”
Recently, a junior at the University of Georgia hired me to help her transform her application essay for PA school. A highly competent writer, this young woman had written the standard “first-I-did-this-then-I-did-that” essay. It wasn’t a bad piece of writing, but – by her own estimation – it was boring. After college essay coaching for a decade, I agreed.
I encouraged her to reframe her encounter with a rural thirty-five-year-old who’d never seen a doctor before as if it were a play. I even wrote “<STUDENT NAME>:” and “PATIENT:” to encourage her to recall their conversation. This 150-word dialogue became her hook and, along with a rearrangement of the paragraphs, completely transformed the essay. Following the advice of English teachers everywhere, she now showed rather than told the story of her medical experience. In just two sessions with me, she accomplished her goal of producing two admissions essays that immediately captured the reader’s attention. While this solution might not work for every essay, it’s one of many that college essay coaches can prescribe for an ailing essay.
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Great College Essay Coaches Will Help You Learn Something About Yourself.
One reason I don’t edit students’ essays without their presence on Zoom is that dealing only with words is boring for me. As a full-time teacher before becoming a college essay coach, I love the “face-to-face” interactions with high school and college students. But during these sessions, I do more than just teach why re-ordering paragraphs or opening with dialogue might yield a stronger essay. I ask questions that force the student to think more deeply about their past.
College essay coaching requires the sensitivity of a therapist and the creativity of an author-editor. Getting a student to show their experience rather than tell the reader about their past means sometimes pushing them to relive moments they’d rather gloss over. When John wanted to write about overcoming social anxiety disorder but struggled to put words on the page, I asked dozens of questions about his experiences on the volleyball team, at the movies, and at home alone to elicit the 650 words that eventually became his Common App personal statement. Often, I’ll type these questions into a margin comment in the shared Google doc so that students can revisit and rewrite later. By the end of a ten-session package, my college essay coaching students don’t just have their main essay and a couple of supplementals done. They’ve gone through a meaningful, emotional journey that helps them make sense of their high school years before they enter their next phase of life.
Now, I ask you: Can ChatGPT do that?