by Catharine Beale

Created on: December 16, 2008   Last Updated: October 15, 2011

It was time at last for my teenage daughter to apply to college, and we were counting on her essays to vault her over the top. She had a 3.6 average, and played varsity singles on the high school tennis team. Her SATs were average. But she was ambitious. In this economy, you have to be.

Increasingly, elite schools don't care about average SATs.  Some don't even care if you skip the tests. For them, your college essay is almost everything.

First came her essay to our Congressman. She wanted to apply to a U.S. service academy - the Naval Academy at Annapolis and the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point. You don't just apply to these places. You have to be nominated. They want an essay. For our Congressman's application, that meant mesmerizing his nomination committee with the answer to "Why I want to attend ..."

This was easy. Every other candidate would be gushing over their love of country, defending the nation from the forces of evil, rhetoric we've heard a thousand times. Everyone's a devoted American. My daughter should be that, and more.

And so instead, she wrote about what she might achieve with USMMA or Naval Academy experience. How would this change her life?

She poured out her heart, writing passionately as if to a close friend, about her volunteer work in an AIDS hospital overseas. Living for a month in a Third World country, my daughter held a baby boy with AIDS.  It broke her heart to think about it. With a great education, there would be opportunities to go back to that clinic, and change everything.

She wrote about her fellow students at her public high school. We live in a wealthy community, but few do any real volunteer work to meet their community service quota for graduation. While my daughter was holding an infant with AIDS, the other students were shopping, tanning and boozing away their free time. It sickened her. She wrote about that, too.

By the time she was done, she had a sincere, wrenching letter that would hit any reader right between the eyes. And of course, she was nominated.

But what about the other essays for other colleges? Ones that care only about your GPA, your Honors Classes, and your essay?

A modified version was posted on the Common Application. Some colleges had additional guidelines. One posed a question.  One gave applicants a problem to solve.  One wanted to know "all about you."

Many essays are simply forgettable.  Sure, they make a sound argument, they address questions, they're

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