How College Applicants Can Brag (Modestly)

In Cosmo magazine polls of qualities that women most dislike in men, one almost always tops the list: arrogance. As with romance, the same rings true  with just about every other type of relationship. Until you get to be Donald Trump, arrogance is rarely an asset. Good kids, like other good humans, are generally modest.

Say you finish third in the regional Intel Science Competition. Say you're first chair cello in the countywide youth orchestra. Say you've written a novella. In verse. Say you're class president, basketball team captain, or community service champion. Or maybe you've done some babysitting, earned some merit badges, and run in Relay for Life.

They're all nice assets for your college application and grist for application essays, right? Sure. For unsteady writers, though, they present great opportunities to trip over the line between confidence and arrogance.

So what's an accomplished student to do?

Authorship

Being confident is the opposite of saying you're confident; saying you're a leader is the opposite of leadership; declaring oneself to be passionate is not the same thing as writing with passion. Shakespeare had a phrase for these faults: "doth protest too much."

The difference between a recommendation letter and a personal essay depends, obviously, on authorship. Students can, and should, build a case for their virtues in their essays. They should refer to accomplishments while discussing and analyzing them thoughtfully. But they cannot assert their own greatness. 

By assert I mean that writers make a subjective claim without actually advancing an argument or providing facts to support the claim. Students have to trust that thoughtful discussions of their accomplishments will implicitly impress college readers. And, they must trust that their school report, counselor letter, and teacher recommendation letters will do the explicit bragging on their behalf. 

The School Report

Probably the most mysterious element of the college application — so mysterious, in fact, that most applicants don't know it exists — is the school report and the counselor letter. 

Different from, but complementary with, teacher recommendation letters, school reports are usually written by college counselors (or, sometimes, by a school administrator or class dean). These reports aren't as intimate as teacher recs, but they're wider-ranging and more objective. They summarize students' academic careers, compare students against the standards of the school, and describe activities that students have participated in. 

Conveniently, counselor rec letters also highlight students' accomplishments. It is in these letters that an authoritative third party can confirm what students have accomplished and include a bit of commentary to explain the magnitude and significance of those accomplishments within the school and local context. When students write essays knowing that their school counselors and teachers are going to cover this important ground, they can relax and dispense with the urge to brag. 

(I am referring to school counselors. Independent college counselors, who also can play a crucial role in students' application processes, rarely communicate with colleges and never write recommendation letters.)

Building A Case

A student who writes that he's the "best" debater in the school comes off as a prig; the "best" hip-hop dancer comes off as too cool for school. Same for the student who congratulates herself on winning a class election or for attributing her A in history class to her superior critical thinking skills. The counselor who writes the very same things offers an authoritative evaluation, from one adult to another.

A student who has a reasonable idea of what her counselor will write, therefore, has all the freedom in the world to write great application essays. She doesn't need to brag or anxiously highlight herself because someone else is already doing it for her. That leaves her to write about the nuances of her accomplishments. She can describe the process by which the accomplishment arose or analyze the significance of the accomplishment. She can demonstrate great empathy, acute critical thinking, or self-starter leadership by outlining the why or how that drew her to the projects or passions she has chosen to pursue. She can reveal what was going on in her mind and heart when she was conducting the experiment, arguing in Mock Trial, or planting the community garden. Or she can write about something else entirely.

Of course, students never know exactly what their counselors are going to write. That's one reason, among many, why students should get to know their counselors and help their counselors get to know them. By keeping their (tactful) bragging to the confines of the counselor's office, students can focus on substance in their applications and leave the superlatives to counselors and recommenders.