Authenticity Is the New “Hook” 🪝
Every year, millions of high school seniors sit down to write their college essays and ask themselves the same question: What story will impress them?
They think about the mission trip that changed their perspective, the sport they played for ten years, the hardship they overcame. They search for the moment that sounds the most compelling—the one that will make an admissions officer stop mid-scroll and think, This kid is extraordinary.
🔔 Here’s the twist: that strategy is exactly what holds so many applications back.
The Myth of the Perfect Narrative
Admissions officers at selective colleges read anywhere from hundreds to thousands of applications each cycle. After a while, certain story shapes become familiar.
The athlete who learned humility from a game-ending injury.
The student who traveled abroad and “gained a new perspective.”
The young leader who founded a nonprofit and changed their community.
These stories aren’t bad. But when every application is optimized for impressiveness, they start to blend together. The dramatic arc loses its power when it’s everywhere.
What actually cuts through the noise isn’t the most cinematic story: it’s the most genuine one.
What Colleges Are Really Looking For 🔍
The shift happening in college admissions isn’t a secret. More and more, admissions teams are vocal about what they value: self-awareness, intellectual curiosity, personal growth, and honest reflection. These aren’t buzzwords. They’re the qualities that predict how a student will contribute to a campus community, handle academic challenges, and grow into adulthood.
Self-awareness is rare and hard to fake. A student who can clearly articulate not just what they did, but why they did it—and what they actually learned, including the uncomfortable parts—stands out immediately. It signals maturity. It signals readiness.
Intellectual curiosity shows up in unexpected ways. It doesn’t require a student to have discovered a passion for astrophysics or Renaissance art. It can look like a student who spent three months obsessively researching the history of fast food because they couldn’t stop wondering about it. The subject matters less than the genuine engagement.
Your Voice Is Your Hook
One of the most common pieces of advice students get is to “find their hook”—the unique angle or achievement that makes them memorable. And while differentiation matters, the framing misses something important. Chasing a hook often leads students away from themselves, toward what they think colleges want to hear.
The better frame: your voice is your hook.
An essay written in a student’s actual voice—the way they really think, the phrases they actually use, the humor or earnestness that’s genuinely theirs—reads completely differently from a polished, optimized narrative. Admissions officers read both all day. They can tell the difference within a paragraph.
This doesn’t mean an essay should be unpolished or unedited. It means the goal of editing should be clarity and authenticity, not transformation into someone else’s idea of “impressive.”
Thoughtful Beats Flashy, Every Time
There’s a student out there right now who thinks their essay topic is “too small”—too ordinary to be worth writing about. They made their grandmother’s recipe every Sunday. They got really into bird watching during the pandemic. They can’t stop rereading the same three books. They’re worried no one will care.
Those are often the best essays.
A small topic explored with genuine depth and reflection tells an admissions officer far more about a student than a grand achievement described in hollow terms. The question isn’t what happened to you—it’s how do you think?
Your application doesn’t need to sound impressive. It needs to sound like you: curious, specific, self-aware, and real. The students who understand this don’t just write better essays. They experience the whole process differently. Less performance, more discovery.
That shift makes all the difference. 👍
