Curious Cardinals Blog

The college-essay writing process can be stressful and daunting. It's no easy task to sum up your personality, a major life event, an academic or extracurricular passion of yours, or an impactful story in 500 words or so! So how do you start to tackle the blank document screen before you, and get your ideas down in a way that is compelling and authentic to you?

Fear not! We asked Five Curious Cardinals mentors, now successful students at top colleges, to share their advice on where to begin, and how to make your way through the essay-writing process. Here are their top tips for approaching the dreaded college essay:

When you think of a computer science student at Princeton, you may assume they were born coding out of the womb. But for Curious Cardinals mentor Max Steinert, and many students, that's not the case at all!

Max Steinert, a Curious Cardinals mentor and current sophomore at Princeton University, is one of those students who seems to “do it all” – thriving in academics, sports, and his social life – with ease. Max grew up in Concord MA, where he was a day student, or, as he says “95% boarding student,” at the nearby boarding school, Groton. He excelled there in every department: graduating summa cum laude, a math prize-winning whiz, captain of the Varsity soccer team, and dorm prefect.

Parents often ask me “what do I need to do to get my kid into a good college?” Underlying that question is a visceral anxiety that you as a parent will fail to set your kid up for success before they leave your nest. And the clock is ticking. Wendy, at your kids’ soccer game, said that her kid has straight As, speaks Mandarin fluently, plays three instruments, and is a double legacy at Harvard. I mean, how can you compete with that?

Berfin Karaman, who grew up in Turkey and pursued four years of global education for her undergraduate degree at Minerva University, has had a lifetime of experiences in her 23 years. With expertise in CSS, HTML, and Java scripts, Berfin knows her way around a website, to say the least! But Berfin’s friendly, approachable demeanor and broad worldview lend to her incredible teaching style, in which she makes coding, web design, and blogging intelligible and enjoyable for her students.

A rising sophomore, Natalie R. is an outside-the-box thinker with an entrepreneurial spirit. A longtime Curious Cardinals student and high school Ambassador, Natalie surrounds herself with passionate people and has had close exposure to a startup. So when Natalie contemplates where she wants to be in five, ten years, she’s looking beyond the traditional, well-trodden paths of “lawyer, doctor, engineer.” Through conversations with role models and members of her community, Natalie is scoping out a broader landscape of career paths and opportunities, and wanted to share her insights and wealth of knowledge with fellow high schoolers. “Chatz with Natz” was born.

A ninth grader and Curious Cardinals student ambassador shares how the field has shaped her world view.

Paulina Terrazas, a junior at Panamerican University in Mexico City, Mexico, has always enjoyed learning “a lot about things that make me understand the world better.” She has a boundless enthusiasm to improve her world, bouncing between and connecting subjects of interest: “anything that can lead me through any curious, new thing that I learned, I'll repeat it for like three weeks until I feel like it's enough and then move onto the next thing. And that's a little about what I do with sustainability.”