Hi. So I was brainstorming ideas in the middle of math class when I came up with an ingenious idea to do a tierlist of how much I liked (or disliked) writing all of my college essays. I wrote essays for about 13 different schools (I’m counting all the UC’s as one big school) in addition to the common app, and like many others, I did not have that much fun with them at the time. But now that decisions are back and the journey is over, I thought this would be a good way to reflect on a frankly awful experience. 

The criteria for ranking high is based on my a.) difficulty of the prompt(s) b.) the amount of essays I had to write c.) how fun/unfun the prompts were d.) how well I think I did with the essay e.) how much I spited the process of writing the particular essay. Whether or not I got admitted will not be considered (because then the salt factor would take over). The tiers will be ranked from A tier being the best to “Punch Me” tier being self explanatory. Contrary to most traditional lettered tier lists, there is no S tier because, in a vacuum, all of these essays were horrible and I never want to do them again. 

POV: Me going to sleep on 12/31 after hitting submit for my final college

A Tier:

This tier basically consists of all the schools whose essays were really easy. Wisconsin and Michigan both had very long form essays, and the content was very similar, so in reality I only had to write one then reuse it for the other. I thought that the actual content of the essay was also pretty good thanks to the increased amount of space. Then, I used the exact same format and content in my Cornell, UIUC, and Northwestern essays so that’s why they are in A tier as well. Finally, Emory was also really simple and short and I quite enjoyed the second essay asking about witnessing a historical event so I also put it in A. 

B Tier:

I only have one school in the B tier and that is Yale. Now did I get into Yale? No. But I did think Yale’s essays were pretty good overall. Many of the short answer questions were pretty fun and I managed to pump them out in a day. The long essay for Yale was also pretty easy because it was a “change the community” type essay of which I wrote like a bajillion times. Now the reason why Yale is not in A tier is because of their really awful “Why Us” essay. Now “Why Us” is pretty common, so why couldn’t I just copy and paste? Because the limit was 125 words. So while it may seem easy considering it’s short, I actually very much disliked this limit. I think that it’s such a pointless limitation because what am I supposed to express in 125 words that adds any sort of substance to my application. So I thought really hard, didn’t come up with anything meaningful, and eventually just wrote something down because the deadline was coming up. Thus, B tier.

C Tier:

This tier are essays I thought of as “mid”. I did not enjoy these essays, but when looking at some of the other ones I had to write, these honestly weren’t too bad. The major issues with these essays were either length or difficulty. The UC applications were 4 separate 350 word essays which in my opinion, was a lot, and their weird deadline meant that I spent most of November grinding out these essays. So while I think my essays turned out alright, I did not enjoy having to spend a whole month writing those essays (also really didn’t like having to fill out an entirely different application). UPENN was my ED school, so maybe it’s in C out of spite, but honestly, the essays were pretty short and honestly not that complex. However the amount of stress that these essays caused me because it was my ED school was so immense. In addition, I was pressured by my parents to change these essays drastically in the last hours before I turned them in, so honestly I didn’t feel very confident about them, so UPENN gets a C. Finally, UChicago. UChicago was the first essay that I wrote because I initially was going to ED there, but then I saw their “special prompt” question, and I immediately switched up. Overall, once I actually sat down to write the essays, they weren’t too bad, but the bogus factor puts UChicago in C.

Me staring at the UChicago prompts having no idea what to write for 2 months.

D Tier:

These essays I have bone to pick with. The first and most problematic was the Common app. I started my Common App in July and I didn’t finish until November because I was switching things up so much. I had to do so much for this awful essay that I think I would literally bleed from my eyes if I had to read it now, so D. University of Washington is also there because I applied last minute (I was very scared I was just not going to go to college so I just threw it in). Considering the time crunch in addition to the fact that I chose to write the Honors Program essays which were absolutely awful in a day definitely puts it in D (definitely not my fault). Finally Stanford. Now I would have really liked to go to Stanford, but my essays were so booty. My parents (a common theme), also really wanted me to go, so they put a lot of pressure on me to make these good, and just like Penn, I changed a lot of them up last second and the stress and the pure amount of writing I had to do for Stanford was not fun at all so D.

Punch Me:

Harvard was so bad. Of all the essays that I chose to write, I regret picking to apply to Harvard the most. Now some of the questions were ok, but I really didn’t like how they hid them in different sections of the common app when they should have just been listed all together, and I didn’t even notice some until the last couple days so that was not fun. My biggest bone to pick is the fact that they just have a completely open ended question. Maybe Harvard thought they were being so clever with their decision to make a long open ended question, but this stressed me out so much. I remember being in total shambles for weeks on end, eventually just writing something down, then reading it again then going back into a vegetative state because of the absolute atrocity that was my essay. So a month passed and eventually I had no choice but to hammer the essay out, and it was the very last essay that I chose to finish, so overall a very bad experience with Harvard all for me just to get rejected. I would rather have Mike Tyson sock me in the face than do that all over again. 

Final Comments:

So despite all my hatred for all of my college essays, I’m happy that I’m done. I’m happy with where I ended up, and honestly, I quite appreciate the time to take a look back at all that I did (even though it felt hopelessly inadequate at the time), and I will most definitely use this awful experience to make sure that I enjoy the next couple years of my life so when I look back, it isn’t as hopeless as it was this time around.

Final List

Link if you wanna try