How Visiting an Orphanage Made Me Better Appreciate My Own Life

Crystal's feedback:

"You’ve picked a great topic for an optional essay because it allows you to highlight an experience that transformed your thinking in some way. You also write very well in terms of writing mechanics (there’s just a few minor punctuation and/or grammar errors) and have a good sense of how to ensure good transitions. However, you heavily focus on explaining, in great detail, the events that occurred at the orphanage rather than keeping the focus on the impact and/or transformation that resulted from the experience. You do highlight that at the beginning and in your concluding paragraph, but that aspect—how it transformed you—should be the focus of the essay, with details about the actual visit woven in, as needed. You could also create a stronger hook to draw the reader in by starting with a super-vivid narrative detailing the visit to the orphanage as your opening paragraph. In the current details about the visit, you are mostly telling the reader about the events instead of showing the reader. Instead, you want to use more descriptive, emotive language that draws the reader in and makes the reader envision what you’re writing about. One spot you especially captured “showing, not telling” was with this sentence: “Their faces shared the same shade of sorrow.” I would suggest rethinking your approach to really focus on the transformation/impact. You can use the narrative about the orphanage to draw the reader in (and refer back to it in your final takeaway/closing lines to create good cohesion), but it shouldn’t be so heavily focused on. The admissions committee wants to know about you and how the experience affected you because detailing that in more depth will give them insight into who you are and how you would fit into their community. If you can shift the focus of your response more toward the transformation and what you realized through the experience, it would create a more powerful narrative that reveals much more about you and that stands out more."

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