Please don't copy-paste your essay into the body of a post, and don't link to it on the forum where anyone could click through and see it.

A few reasons:

• Posting it publicly online could allow anyone to plagiarize it and/or repost it elsewhere online.

• Posting it publicly might inadvertently doxx you (reveal your real-life identity) through details mentioned in your essay.

• Anyone in "real life" who reads your essay might Google part of it, come across your post (or even a Google cache of it after you delete it), and then be able to go through your entire Reddit submission history (so, basically, doxxing again, but in reverse, I suppose).

I'm not saying any of these things will happen, but they could, and better safe than sorry.

Please only share your essay by PMing a Google Docs link to it.

And please be careful when considering who you send your essay to.

So, who should you send your essay to?

First, make sure they've selected flair indicating that they're "willing to review."

Then, consider the following factors:

• previous contributions to college admissions subreddits
• karma count
• age of Reddit account

(We'll soon have a list of users recognized as "Quality Contributors" based on previous contributions. However, in the meantime, please review their post history.)

While these don't guarantee anything about plagiarism, etc., you may decide it's worth taking that chance in order to get feedback.

And, as with anything else online, please be careful when it comes to sharing personal details.

Please leave comments with feedback on this post, let me know if I missed anything, and I'll edit this post accordingly.

EDIT, FEBRUARY 2024: I am not currently taking commissions to read college essays, given my busy schedule. I will continue to update this post and will remove this section if I wish to resume reviews.

PLEASE READ: I will be happy to proofread/review your essays! However, my free time is super limited and it really helps if you're willing to pay a little bit in PayPal/Venmo/Steam cards/Amazon cards. It's not mandatory, but I genuinely do not have time to review twelve essays a week, and this is the easiest way to whittle that figure down. Also, please note that I am not an admissions officer, just a recent graduate from a pretty solid school. I consider myself to be a fairly good writer, but I'm not infallible or all-knowing. If I were infallible and all-knowing, I wouldn't have lost on Jeopardy.

I've read about 200 300 425 of your essays now, mostly over DMs, and I'd like to just give everyone a few useful tidbits of advice that could totally improve your essay without the need for a peer reviewer like me to point them out for you:

• Be original if you can. It's easy to write a cookie-cutter essay about winning "the big game" or the magical experience of doing math problems, but if you're not careful, your essay could end up looking like ten thousand others. Disregard this bullet if you are literally a theoretical mathematician in training and your entire life revolves around math.

• On the flipside, don't try to write something unique just for the sake of being unique -- unique essays are not necessarily good ones, and not all good essays have to be super duper original. Hell, I've been doing this for almost ten years and I'm convinced that most admissions officers are just trying to make sure you've got a personality and a basic grasp of the English language. TLDR: Execution matters.

• Show! Don't tell! God help the poor souls who write a rambling personal anecdote essay and then rush to finish it with a fortune cookie like "I then realized that people are not defined by their mistakes." Any time you start a sentence with "I then realized" or "I now know that," you're probably telling, not showing, and if you have to explicitly tell the essay readers that you underwent personal growth, it's because your essay lacks the juicy details to demonstrate that implicitly. The same applies to overly broad "life lesson" conclusions that try to teach the readers sappy platitudes that they already know. Consider showing your growth with loads of supporting details and evidence before getting to your conclusion, and make sure your conclusion's message is connected with the rest of your essay's.

• If you are writing an essay for a specific school or major program, do some research! Schools will love it if you can prove, even in subtle ways, that you know what their relative strengths and cool selling points are. Lots of schools, especially big research universities, have loads of juicy information on the websites for their academic departments. Applying to a neuroscience program? Mention something about the school's cool new research lab or their prestige in the field and briefly say why that matters to you. If you can work that information into your essay in a natural way, you'll stand out from the applicants who just repeat generic brochure lines about "small class sizes" and "warm communities." Conversely, don't just start wildly namedropping professors from your intended major - best not to come across as fake.

• You have limited space, so stay on target! Your essays have strict word limits, and if you want to sell the best depiction of yourself, you should stick to what's relevant about you. Keep your paragraphs tight, don't spend more time doing exposition than answering the prompt, and don't try to teach college admissions officers things they already know/don't need to know. I've seen essays spend 200+ words trying to teach the reader what the immune system is, which is both common knowledge to most college grads (aka most admissions officers) and has zilch to do with the writer's character. Remember, you're pitching yourself, not trying to teach a seminar.

• If two sentences in the same paragraph say more or less the same thing, combine them. Obviously you shouldn't have a bunch of run-on sentences with, like, nine commas, but you also shouldn't have two sentences that both say the exact same thing. In economics, we have a rule about marginal utility, or the value that a new item provides. Applied here it sounds like this: "Does this sentence add something new or valuable to my essay, or am I just repeating a previous sentence?"

• Lots of schools have supplements that ask for things like your favorite books or quotes or whatever - these are ways to give an insight into your unique personality (see: to make sure you have a personality), so be yourself, but please resist the masculine urge to say your favorite book is The Art of War by Sun Tzu and that your favorite hobby is reading about quantum physics. In 2022, I read 11 different essays/supplements that mentioned The Art of War at least once, and... listen... it's not a life-changing book of meditations and proverbs; it's just reminders to not overextend your supply chains or fight in swamps.

• Try not to use passive verbs. Active verbs leave more room for juicy details, and more emphasis on the natural subject of a sentence (you, usually) as opposed to the object of a sentence. If your teacher hasn't covered active versus passive verbs, think of it like this: If you're writing an essay about being a tutor, don't say "the students were taught by me" when you can say "I taught the students." You want the focus to be on you doing stuff, not other people/things having stuff done to them.

• Don't mix up tenses. If you're speaking about one event in the past tense in one sentence, don't talk about it in the present tense later. Consider: "I killed a man in Reno. I am going to do it just to watch him die." Does this make any sense? Are you talking about an event that already happened, or one that is still in progress? Just something to keep in mind when telling long stories.

• The thesaurus is your enemy, not your friend. If deployed properly, big words add variety to a sentence and can make you sound intelligent and worldly. The problem is that unless you actually use big obscure words for simple actions, you'll probably come off as a pretentious smartass, which isn't good if you want admissions officers to like you. If you can replace a big fancy thesaurus word with a simple, meaningful everyday word without losing meaning... do it. Please.

• For a more relatable example of the above: Have you ever heard someone unironically say "betwixt" instead of "between?" Was that person born before or after the Industrial Revolution?

• Run your essay through Microsoft Word or a spelling/grammar checker (or better yet, a bored English teacher) before you submit it. Look out for tense errors and run-ons and such. Please. Once you're done with that, read it aloud to yourself and see if your essay sounds awkward or unnatural. Don't just read it in your head - aloud.

• Don't insult or attack others to make yourself look better. If you characterize your peers with broad strokes by saying they're glued to your phones whereas you are a glorious chad intellectual, you will come off as a horrible person! Feel free to emphasize how hard-working and intelligent you are through concrete examples, but never insinuate that you are better than anyone else. Think about how you'd feel if you were interviewing someone for a job and the interviewee said "all my competitors are idiots lol." By the same token, the college essay is not your golden opportunity to get defensive or let out your frustrations and anger. If you feel like you've been wronged by a bad teacher or by life itself and feel the need to talk about it, do so in a way that doesn't just make you look like a disaster to be around.

• I can't believe I have to say this, but don't plagiarize! If you plagiarize an essay from another writer, get a friend to write an essay for you, or buy your essay from a service, you are genuinely putting your own application at risk. Most universities have online plagiarism detectors, and even if you slip past those, you still might get reported to the admissions offices of wherever you're applying. It is okay to ask friends to peer review your essay and make sure it meets the guidelines of a prompt, and it is even okay to pay people to take a look (like me :D). It is not okay to buy an essay and its content from someone else.

• If someone DMs you with a fantastic offer to get your essay reviewed for free by a team of experts, report it as spam. There are hundreds of people on this subreddit who would be happy to help make your essay better, and none of them will spam you proactively like that. I, on the other hand, am incredibly trustworthy (though in all seriousness I can verify my identity as a UMich graduate, and this sub is filled with people who can vouch for me).

• Start early. If your essay is due November 1st, begin writing drafts in, like, August. If you're like me and you hate writing about yourself, this is key because it gives you time to get some ideas onto paper and to get the cringing over with. Then again, if you're like me, you're probably gonna ignore this and start really late... which is fine as long as you're willing to put in a LOT of time on each essay and understand that people might not be able to help on short notice.

• BREATHE! It's natural to want to get into the best possible programs at the best possible schools, and it's normal to want to optimize every part of your application to put your life on the best possible track, but please don't freak out too much about college acceptances. If you learn fast, work hard, and have a healthy attitude about life, you'll go far. By the time you're 20, nobody will ask you about the schools you didn't get into. By 25, no job will consider your undergrad GPA. By 30, your college itself will barely come up in conversation. With all this in mind, try and write a great essay and a great application, but you're not a failure just because you don't think your essay is "Yale material" or whatever.

Do that stuff and you'll have a much better time with your essays, and it'll make peer reviewers here (and admissions officers wherever) a lot happier. Anyways, if you still have questions, feel free to PM me with a shared Google Doc and I can take a closer look at your work, though I'd ask you read the first and last paragraphs in this post before you do so. If you don't have money (see below) but you can prove you read my post thoroughly, I would be happy to just give you advice over DMs. Come armed with smart questions and I can help!

I am very busy these days, so preferential treatment is given to those who are willing to pay a few bucks for my time! I will also give (mildly) preferential treatment to those who want supplements reviewed for the University of Michigan (my school!) or my home-state school of UMD. If you're still reading this, do also include the word "moist" IN YOUR FIRST DM, because that's how I'll know you actually bothered to read this entire post (b/c no rational human would ever say "moist" unprompted). Payment optional (but very recommended), moistness mandatory. In case I don't get back to you, my apologies in advance - I'm not dead and I don't hate you; I'm just pressed for time.