The Invisible Checklist

The Impression

The person reading your essay is an admissions officer, and they're trying to answer a question: what kind of student would this person be at our school?

Not a grade. Not a score. An impression — the kind you form when you meet someone for the first time. Within a few sentences, the reader starts to get a feeling about you. That feeling is made up of traits. Curious. Resilient. Thoughtful. Or: disengaged. Directionless. Entitled. Your essay is sending these signals whether you mean it to or not.

Think of it as an invisible checklist. The reader doesn't literally have one in front of them, but they might as well. By the time they finish your essay, they've formed a picture of who you are — built from the traits your writing checked off.

What Gets Checked

Let's look at two students writing about the same activity.

Student A: "I play violin for the town orchestra."

Student B: "I'm obsessed with violin. I can't stop playing. I hear violin music in my head."

What does the admissions officer's checklist look like for Student A? Probably just one thing: plays in a high-level orchestra. That's a fact, not really a trait.

Student B? Passionate. Obsessive. Deeply interested. Persistent. Same activity — completely different impression.

Notice that Student B didn't mention the orchestra at all. They didn't need to — that's already on the activities list. What the essay gave the reader was something the activities list never could: a sense of who this person is.

Your Checklist

In Lesson 1, we talked about the question: what do you want the person reading your essay to know about you that they can't learn from the rest of your application?

Now we want to think about it from the other direction. What traits do you think matter in a college student? If you were choosing someone to join your school, your team, your community — what would you want them to be like? And what would make you think someone wasn't a good fit?

Don Dunbar, a college counselor who spent years sitting in on actual admissions committee meetings, wrote a book called What You Don't Know Can Keep You Out of College. His conclusion was straightforward: admissions officers are reading for character. The traits matter.

Your checklist won't be the same as someone else's, because you're not the same as someone else. The impression you want to make depends on who you are and what you want the reader to see.

So: download this worksheet and fill it in. Write down the traits you'd want a school to see in you. Then write down a few you'd want to avoid. Don't look anything up — you already know most of these.

Hold on to that list. We're going to use it.

Previous: Lesson 1 — Your Essay's Job
Next lesson: Coming soon