Just For Laughs: The Murder of ‘Eddie The Ready’

Eddie CommonApp was alive when he left my office on Tuesday evening. More than alive, actually. At 647 words, he was in excellent health: lean, coherent, mildly eccentric, emotionally intelligent, and blessed with a very clear sense of purpose. Eddie had a strong opening, a middle that actually went somewhere, and a final paragraph that knew when to leave the room. He had no unnecessary achievements dangling from his neck, no passion for making an impact, and not once did he claim that a childhood incident had taught him the true meaning of resilience. For a CommonApp essay, Eddie was doing remarkably well.

His student loved him. I loved him. More importantly, Eddie sounded unmistakably like the student. That had taken weeks. We had begun not with What are your biggest achievements? but with far more dangerous questions. What irritates you? What makes you laugh? What do your friends think is strange about you? What do you notice that nobody else seems to notice? What belief do you have that your parents think is completely absurd? Somewhere in those conversations, an idea appeared. We pulled at it, rejected the obvious version, chased down a strange childhood memory, researched a reference, rearranged anecdotes, and deleted one beautifully written paragraph because, beautiful though it was, it didn't give. Draft One was awful. Draft Two had a pulse. Draft Three developed a personality. By Draft Five, Eddie could walk without crutches.

At approximately 6:17 p.m. on Tuesday, the student and I agreed that Eddie was ready. At approximately 8:40 p.m., the student showed Eddie to his mother. This was Eddie's first serious mistake. Mother read slowly, carefully, and with the expression of a senior surgeon who had just discovered that her patient had arrived at the operating theatre without enough extracurricular activities. “Where are the achievements?” she asked. The student explained that the achievements were already listed elsewhere in the application. Mother remained unconvinced. What about the internship? The Olympiads? The tabla certificate from Grade 7? And surely the grandfather should appear somewhere because, after all, the grandfather had been very inspiring. By 9:15 p.m., Eddie had acquired an internship, two awards, a grandfather, a sentence about gratitude, and a new lifelong commitment to giving back to society. He was shot, and ready for the ER room.

The following morning, Eddie was taken to the school counselor. The counselor examined his opening and immediately declared it too indirect. Admissions officers were (apparently) busy people, the student was told, and therefore the essay needed to announce its intentions more efficiently. The opening that had taken us three meetings to perfect was removed. In its place appeared: “From a young age, I have always been passionate about engineering because I enjoy solving real-world problems.” Eddie's vital signs began to collapse.

The final assault came that evening when the essay was forwarded to Cousin Rohan at Wharton. Rohan was twenty years old, studied Finance, had completed one summer internship at an investment bank, and had recently discovered the phrase - value creation. The applicant, unfortunately, wanted to study Mechanical Engineering. This presented no difficulty whatsoever. Rohan read the essay and immediately identified what he considered a catastrophic weakness: Bro, where's the entrepreneurial angle? There was no entrepreneurial angle. This alarmed Rohan. A perfectly charming paragraph about an eleven-year-old dismantling a bicycle because he wanted to understand why the chain kept slipping was swiftly transformed. The student was no longer dismantling a bicycle; he was optimising an inefficient mechanical system under resource constraints. The missing spanner became a logistical bottleneck. Asking the building watchman for help became stakeholder engagement. Putting the bicycle back together became “execution,” and riding it downstairs presumably represented go-to-market strategy.

Eddie did not survive the night.

When the student returned to my office three days later, I barely recognised the body. The Google Doc contained 146 comments in six colours. Mother was purple. The school counselor was green. Rohan was orange. An uncle had mysteriously appeared in blue. Someone called “Dad Office Gmail” had left a single comment beside Paragraph Four: “Needs punch.” The student looked at me with the expression of someone who had spent the weekend attending his own essay's funeral and asked the sentence every IEC eventually hears:

Can we just start again?

This, I have come to believe, is one of the great occupational hazards of college counseling: the death by committee of the college essay. Parents want more achievement. Teachers want more clarity. Counselors want more structure. Cousins at selective universities want more of whatever they believe got them into their selective university. Family friends want more impact. Someone wants more emotion; somebody else thinks there is too much emotion. Your building watchman is smirking away at the lack of hook in para one. One reader wants dialogue in the opening, while another has recently read an article declaring that dialogue is a cliché. Everyone is intelligent, everyone is well meaning, and almost everyone is solving a slightly different problem.

The result is what I call ‘The Admissions Khichdi’. The ideal scenario (read with caution now), however, is not to ban outside feedback or to tell students that mine is the only opinion that matters. That would merely replace one committee with one dictator. The better approach is to teach students that feedback is data, not instruction. “I became confused here” is useful. “This paragraph does not sound like you” is useful. “I lost interest at this point” is extremely useful. Those comments identify a problem. “I would write the essay differently,” however, usually identifies something about the reader. Of course you would write it differently. It is not your essay. I guess that is one of the counselor's most important jobs during application season. We do not merely help students create essays; sometimes we have to protect them once they are created.

RIP Eddie The Ready.