Last Updated on 06/24/2026 by Ethan Sawyer
What Makes a Successful College Application? 5 Qualities + 2 Real Student Case Studies (With Annotations)
Hannah arrived at her first coaching session with a completed draft. It was about her dormitory room—the light through the window, the sounds in the hallway, the particular atmosphere of that space.
It was well-written. And it wasn’t going to work.
Not because it was bad writing. She was a strong writer.
But because after three paragraphs about her dormitory, an admissions officer still wasn’t going to know what Hannah valued, how she thought, or what she’d bring to a campus community.
The writing was lovely. But it wasn’t a college application essay yet.
So Ali, her coach, asked a simple question: “What are the values you’re actually showing about yourself here?”
Hannah thought for a moment. Then she said: “I guess I’m not really showing that stuff.”
That realization—that a college essay isn’t primarily about beautiful prose, it’s about demonstrating who you are—is the thing this guide is going to walk you through.
We’re going to use two real students (Hannah and Asher) to show you what a successful college application looks like from the inside. Not just the final essays. The process, the decisions, and the specific qualities that made both applications work.
The Framework: 5 Qualities Selective Colleges Are Looking For
College Essay Guy’s team analyzed more than 200 college websites—strategic plans, mission statements, admissions pages, supplemental essay prompts—looking for what schools consistently say they value in applicants.
Five qualities showed up again and again.
CEG calls them the admission nutrients.
Intellectual curiosity.
Your nerdiness. The questions you can’t stop asking. This shows up in your transcript (did you take hard classes?), your activities list (what do you dig into?), and often most powerfully in your essays—the specific things you choose to write about, the connections you make between ideas, the moments when you go deeper than the assignment required.
Service to others.
How are you a change-maker? How have you worked to make things better for the people around you—your team, your school, your community. Activities list is the primary place this shows up, but essays can reinforce it and illustrate the values that drive you.
Leadership or initiative.
Colleges generally describe this in two ways: being a catalyst (starting things) and being proactive (improving things that exist). You don’t need a formal title. You need evidence that you moved something forward.
Collaboration.
This is the one students most often forget. Colleges are building a community. They want to know you play well with others. If your application is full of individual accomplishments with no evidence of how you work alongside people, especially those who are different from you in some way, something’s missing. (Lot’s of colleges are seeking bridge builders.)
Consistent engagement.
Not a one-time thing. Something you’ve shown up for, again and again, over time. Depth over volume. Often covered by the activities list, but essays can show the why behind the what.
The reason CEG calls these nutrients is deliberate: they’re not commandments. They’re qualities worth developing—not just for the application, but because they’re also connected to living a more meaningful life.
They also happen to be what employers say they want. The overlap isn’t a coincidence.
Action takeaway: As you read the case studies below, you’ll see how Hannah and Asher each demonstrated three or four of these nutrients through their essays—not by listing them, but by showing specific moments from their lives that made the qualities real.
The Case Studies: Two Applications, Annotated
Case Study 1: Hannah’s Application (Williams ED)
Hannah wanted to do a double major in physics and math. She was also
- a dancer
- a robotics team member
- a dorm RA
- an assistant bookseller who knew her customers’ reading tastes by heart
- and a teaching intern at an immigrant learning center.
Meaning she had a lot going on. Her draft wasn’t capturing any of it.
Ali’s first move: She asked Hannah to identify what values she was showing about herself. After a beat, Hannah said: “I’m actually not showing that stuff.” That realization unlocked everything.
Hannah agreed to try a new topic.
The personal statement.
Hannah shifted her college essay topic to use card games as a framework—Uno, Burrow, Solitaire—each card game introducing a value and then extending it into her real life.
The Uno section is about empowerment and mutuality.
She connects the electric feeling of calling Uno to speaking up with her robotics teammate about the lack of female representation in STEM, and to organizing Women’s History Month events.
The move that makes it work: she shifts from empowerment to mutuality—“while I fight tooth and nail every game, I simultaneously revel in watching my competitors experience the joys of declaring Uno.” That shift from personal achievement to collective joy is what makes the insight less common.
The Burrow section is about intellectual curiosity.
She writes about a chess game using specific player names to help build the world for the reader (“Fabiano Caruana’s nine-move checkmate against Alireza Firouzja”), the Lego Death Star, the Schrödinger equation.
These are soft examples—moments that don’t appear in her activities list but reveal the texture of her curiosity. Then she extends it: knowledge is only exciting when shared. She brings in the teaching she does at an immigrant learning center.
The Solitaire section is about perseverance—but specifically, perseverance as self-awareness. “Some games simply can’t be won… self-awareness is part of perseverance.” It’s a common value expressed in a much less common way.
The essay went through nine drafts. By the end, Hannah insisted on keeping the final line as “I just hope I play my cards right”—not the more confident “I’ll play my cards right” that Ali had suggested. She knew her own voice.
She applied ED to Williams and got in.
Action takeaway: Notice what Hannah didn’t do: She didn’t write about her biggest achievement. She wrote about card games. The admission nutrients—intellectual curiosity, collaboration, leadership—came through not by being named but by being shown in specific, personal moments that only Hannah could have written about. Show your readers your values and what you bring to a campus and community through small moments, actions, details.
What the activities list revealed.
A few items from Hannah’s list worth noting—not because they’re the most prestigious, but because of how they were written:
Campus tour guide: “guide prospective families through campus, sharing school history, culture, and academics—advocated for supportive dorm environments. Go Cutler Hall.”
The personality in that last sentence is a nice touch.
Assistant bookseller: “encouraged kids’ reading passions with personalized suggestions, shared love of Taylor Jenkins Reid and RF Kuang, familiarized with indie bestsellers list.”
You get a sense of this person. That’s the goal.
AI and environmental studies research: “applied machine learning principles to program interactive games, traveled to learn about Scandinavia’s AI environmental sustainability.”
Gives the reader a sense of how her curiosity works.
Case Study 2: Asher’s Application (Duke, UVA, Carnegie Mellon)
Asher came in with a draft about winning a class election. A legitimate achievement—he’d transferred to a new school and successfully campaigned—but the essay was narrow. One event. One outcome.
Calvin pitched him on trying something broader. “Take some risks, get a little weird,” he said. “If you can get to values and impacts and insights, any topic can work.” Asher agreed to try.
They landed on jazz.
Specifically: the idea that everything in Asher’s life has an underlying rhythm. Jazz as a framework for showing how he thinks, builds, leads, and connects.
The essay opens in a car on a family road trip—dad confiscating phones, mom’s podcast, sister poking him in the ribs. Asher closes his eyes, and the scene shifts to a jazz club he imagined. A bossa nova track starts. Then:
“The music I enjoy is powered by rhythm, as is the rest of my life.”
That line is doing a lot. It takes us from the specific framework (jazz) to the real subject (Asher’s life) in one sentence. Calvin calls this the zoom-in / zoom-out move: framework → real thing → back to framework.
From there the essay shows four facets of Asher through four jazz elements:
Trombone Shorty → leadership.
Trombone Shorty’s confidence and initiative map onto Asher running for class president at a new school. He won, but his anxiety didn’t disappear. So he started just talking to people—and discovered that effective leadership means combining individuals’ strengths toward a shared goal.
Ella Fitzgerald / scat → linguistic curiosity.
Scat singers make meaningful sounds from patterns. Asher thinks about this when studying Hindi or Spanish—how does one set of sounds let him communicate with his grandparents while another creates a barrier? The paragraph works not because it describes an award or achievement but because it reveals a genuinely curious mind making a surprising connection.
Bass saxophone baseline → Model UN.
Asher founded his school district’s first middle-school Model UN club. He frames it as building a baseline—giving younger students skills they could branch out from, eventually outplaying him. His influence fades into the background as they become soloists.
Back to the minivan.
The essay ends where it began (a technique often called bookending). His sister pokes him. He plugs in his headphones, hits shuffle. He settles back as Trombone Shorty flows through his head—“this time, however, I wasn’t imagining.”
“He was really happy that he had put so much of himself into the essay without overwhelming the reader.”
That’s the goal. Every jazz element maps onto something real about Asher—leadership, curiosity, community-building.
The UVA supplementals.
With only short supplemental answers (60 words or less at the time Asher was applying), Calvin used a specific frame to get Asher to get specific for each one: What do I want the reader to learn about me from this response?
For example, a 60-word piece about his car as both a social space (long drives, loud music, stargazing conversations) and a place of solitude (brainstorming startup ideas, an impromptu Taco Bell run). The final line: “It is my portal directly into or out of society.” One sentence, both things at once.
Action takeaway: Asher’s first draft was about an impressive achievement. His final essay was about jazz. The achievement (class president) ended up in the essay—but as one jazz element among four, not as the centerpiece. That shift changed everything. Think about ways you can shift focus in your revisions and redrafting from achievement to personal. How can you make changes that help a reader see who you are and what you value?
How to Use These Case Studies: Three Techniques These Essays Have in Common
Both essays work for related reasons, in ways you can learn from and apply to your own writing. Here are the techniques, named, so you can use them.
1. “Soft” examples.
Ali uses this term to describe details that don’t appear in the activities list—intimate moments, everyday habits, private interests.
Hannah’s essay is full of them: the names of the chess players she watches online, the Lego Death Star she spent hours building, the specific books she loves as a bookseller.
It’s important to see that these aren’t resume items. They’re small details that bring a reader into your world, that help make that world come alive (for a total stranger reading your essay in just a few minutes).
The rule of thumb: if it could go in your activities list, it’s a resume item. If it’s something only you would have noticed or done or thought—that’s a soft example.
Use both. But the soft ones make the whole essay feel true.
2. The pile of stuff.
Calvin doesn’t love blank pages. His approach with students is to generate far more content than will ever make it into the essay.
With Asher, they developed many more jazz elements than the four that ended up on the page. Some were great. Some were not. That was fine.
The goal of the pile-of-stuff phase isn’t quality—it’s quantity and play. You find out what works by trying things. You can’t build a good essay from a pile of nothing.
A variation of this is what Ali describes as “don’t try to build castles from scratch—shovel a lot of sand into the sandbox first.” Once you have a big pile of sand (examples, moments, details, ideas), building the castle is easier.
This is why both Hannah and Asher went through many drafts: Not because their first instincts were wrong, but because the better instincts only showed up after the first ones had been tried and set aside.
3. Zoom in, name the real thing, zoom back out.
This is the structural move that makes both essays feel like they have a point.
The framework (card games, jazz) is just a container (valuable side note that this is an important thing to understand about college essays: your “topic” isn’t your topic; the topic is always you).
The real thing (empowerment, curiosity, leadership, perseverance) is what the essay is actually about. The move is:
- introduce the framework moment →
- name the real thing it connects to →
- show where the real thing shows up in your actual life →
- return to the framework.
To illustrate, Asher does it cleanly with scat:
scat singer makes meaning from abstract sounds → I think about language the same way → why does one set of sounds let me speak with my grandparents while another blocks us? → back to Ella Fitzgerald.
Again, to make sure it’s clear: the jazz is (just) the container. The real thing (curiosity about how meaning is made from sound) is the deeper point and focus, the thing that helps a reader understand who he is, how he thinks, what he values.
Any topic can work as a framework if it’s elastic enough to hold different sides of you. Card games. Jazz. Cooking. Watching your city change from a bus window. The question isn’t whether your framework is impressive. It’s whether it can stretch.
Action takeaway: Pick one of these three techniques and try it on your current draft. If you’re stuck, start with the pile of stuff—generate 10 possible moments or examples without judging any of them, then see what’s there.
What Makes the Process Successful (It’s Probably Not What You Think)
There’s a poem Ethan sometimes shares near the end of workshops. It’s by a Taoist teacher—a line from Zhuangzi—and it goes like this:
When an archer is shooting for nothing, he has all his skill. If he shoots for a brass buckle, he’s already nervous. If he shoots for a prize of gold, he goes blind or sees two targets.
His skill has not changed, but the prize divides him. He cares. He thinks more of winning than of shooting. And the need to win drains him of power.
The brass buckle is the school you’re hoping to impress. The gold prize is Stanford, Dartmouth, Duke. The need to win drains you of power—meaning it gets you focused on the wrong thing at the wrong time, and the essay shows it.
Hannah was writing about card games because card games genuinely held something real about her.
Asher was writing about jazz because jazz was actually elastic enough to carry everything he wanted to say.
Ali and Calvin’s job was to help them use those containers to craft pieces of writing that both felt authentic and achieved the primary purpose and function of your personal statement: To help a college see the values, insights, skills, qualities, and experiences you bring to a campus and community.
When Ali thinks about what makes a process successful, she talks about awe.
“There are moments of awe at how far we’ve come together from beginning to end—a sense of ‘I did that.’”
That can be a much healthier way to approach the application process. Build essays that show how you’ve reflected on who you are and how you’ve become you, why you value what you value, why you want to pursue what you do. Help colleges see those things, and acceptances become a (very nice) byproduct.
Calvin’s version of it is simpler: love your essays.
“When you read them, you’re like, ‘This sounds like me. This is the essence of me.’”
That’s how you control what you can control in your application process. After that, it’s in their hands.
Action takeaway: The goal of the college essay process isn’t simply a great essay—though that’s great too. It’s a student who looks at their final application and thinks: “That’s me. I gave it my best. If I don’t get in, it’s not on me.” That level of ownership is something only you can build. Start there.
Final Takeaways
Hannah graduated from Williams. Asher is at Duke. Neither of them is the same person who sat down to write their first draft.
That’s not hyperbole. The process of figuring out what you actually value, then finding a way to show it in 650 words, changes how you see yourself.
If you’re in that process right now—or about to be—here’s where to start:
- Pick a framework (a topic elastic enough to hold different sides of you)
- Build a pile of stuff (examples, moments, details, without editing)
- And ask yourself: what is the real thing I want to say about each one of these?
The essay will find its shape from there.
Work toward something that only you could have written because it’s got that rich detail that, taken together, gives you voice, gives you character, and helps you stand out.
Both of those things can be true at the same time. You can write an essay that stands out and feel proud of it. You can be strategic and honest. You can write for an admissions officer and write something that matters to you.
Frequently Asked Questions
What do colleges look for beyond grades?
Selective colleges consistently look for five qualities—CEG calls them admission nutrients—beyond academic performance: intellectual curiosity, service to others, leadership or initiative, collaboration, and consistent engagement. These show up primarily in essays, the activities list, and recommendation letters. There are also factors like institutional priorities that are beyond any student’s control.
What is the montage essay structure?
A montage essay uses a framework (e.g. 5 pairs of shoes that connect to 5 different important moments/experiences) to connect different sides of who a student is. Rather than telling one story chronologically, the student zooms in on different facets of themselves through the lens of the framework, then zooms back out. Each section introduces a value (or values) and grounds it in real examples from the student’s life.
What are “soft examples” in a college essay?
Soft examples are details that don’t appear on a student’s activities list or resume—intimate moments, everyday habits, private interests that reveal personality and character. Unlike resume items, soft examples make an essay feel personal and impossible to replicate.
How many drafts does a good college essay take?
Frequently 10+. There’s no magic number—but good essays rarely arrive in one or two drafts. The revision process is where most of the real insight emerges.
What makes a college application “successful”?
A successful college application is one where the student can look at their finished work and feel it genuinely represents who they are—not just a curated resume, but a real person with real values and real voice. Outcomes matter, but students who are proud of their work before the acceptance letters arrive tend to have a healthier relationship with the process overall.
Hannah and Asher’s Essays
Hannah’s essay:
I sat amongst my nine cousins in a tense circle, our eyes darting between one another, as we waited for that one decisive moment. Then, in a flash, my hand lunged forward, latching onto the cold metal, and chaos erupted—but it was all over a simple game of spoons.
But is it so simple?
To me, card games are more than entertainment. Each shuffle of the deck and turn of a card offers lessons on how to approach the world around me.
In a heated game of Uno, I’ve learned when to strike, hold back, and anticipate others’ moves. When instinct and experience converge, leading to my triumphant cry of “Uno!” the electric feeling empowers me to keep playing.
This feeling returns while heatedly discussing the lack of female accreditation in STEM fields with my robotics teammate, emboldening us to speak louder at team meetings. It’s also present while creating women’s history month events, where trivia sessions and female-led discussions on modern day feminism celebrate social progress and accomplishment. This mutuality has shown me that collective success not only amplifies individual achievements but also deepens the joy in celebrating others’ victories. So, while I fight tooth and nail every game, I simultaneously revel in watching my competitors experience the joys of declaring “Uno.”
This summer, a student at the Immigrant Learning Center taught me Burro. Enraptured by a new set of rules, I drew on my experiences grappling with Gin Rummy and Presidents, strategizing which cards to sacrifice to be victorious in the end. In this way, I learn to truly understand–harnessing insights to uncharted discovery:
It’s watching chess games like Fabiano Caruana’s nine move checkmate against Alireza Firouzja that complicate ideas of probability and the almost infinite possible positions (approximately 2.4 trillion after nine moves). It’s also the countless hours spent tediously constructing the Lego Death Star’s Superlaser, seeing how individual pieces enjoin to create a cohesive system. Or how reading about the applications of the Schrödinger equation in quantum entanglement helps me discover how much I still don’t know.
But just as Burro is more fun when played with others, knowledge is more exciting when shared far and wide. As I assist faculty children grappling with paper airplanes during a design challenge or teach youth robotics teams how to loop code when programming, I realize that more than learning, the passing on of ideas is how our society evolves. Just as those I teach Burro will eventually outplay me, knowledge gains its strength when shared and transformed by others.
Tirelessly played alone, Solitaire games can last for over an hour. Each game, I examine piles of cards, knowing there is a hidden move for those who look for it. I picture these games during a losing streak at a robotics competition, trying to find the error within a thousand lines of code. Or as I push my shoulders back, point my toes, and remember to smile throughout dance rehearsal.
Although Solitaire has taught me the art of perseverance, some games simply can’t be won. A glitchy program may have to be rewritten. A dance practice needs breaks. Self-awareness is part of perseverance, and I have grown to understand my limits, so when I stop the impossible game of Solitaire, I can triumph in the next one.
As I prepare for college, the first thing I’ll pack is my deck of cards, worn down from years of use. Yet, with every card shuffle comes a new combination, a new hand, and I must adapt to play. When the next game is dealt, I’ll revel in others’ wins as much as my own, learn new strategies, and know when to fold. I just hope I play my cards right.
Ali on What Makes Hannah’s Essay Work
What follows is analysis and structural commentary on Hannah’s essay, organized section by section, using direct quotes from her coach, Ali, on why these pieces were effective and why Ali coached Hannah in these directions.
The opening paragraph
Hannah’s essay opens with a scene—nine cousins in a circle, the lunge for the cold metal, the chaos of spoons. Three short paragraphs, not one dense block. Ali’s guidance about the format:
“You have to realize admissions officers are staring at dense paragraphs all day long. Breaking this intro up into three different pieces helps to emphasize not only craft but things like the rhetorical question, and creates a sense of progression and forward motion.”
On the content of the opening:
“I love the cinema of the opening paragraph. She drops us into the scene of the moment and sort of creates this sense of anticipation. We’re waiting for something. And then she continues that anticipation with the rhetorical question—like we want to know the answer. And then a really clear launch line so that as a reader we understand what she’s going to talk about.”
But is it so simple?
To me, card games are more than entertainment. Each shuffle of the deck and turn of a card offers lessons on how to approach the world around me.
That launch line is clear, direct, not clever for its own sake. It tells the reader exactly what the next 500 words will deliver. Your readers are generally reading really quickly. They’ll thank you for leaning into clarity.
Uno: empowerment → mutuality
The Uno section introduces Hannah’s first value: empowerment. She connects the electric feeling of calling Uno to speaking up at her robotics team about female accreditation in STEM, and to organizing Women’s History Month events.
Ali:
“The frame becomes really clear. She’s going to introduce her first value through the game of UNO and that value is empowerment. And then we’re going to learn about her specific brand, her specific definition of empowerment. She gives examples, she gives nods to things in her activities list—robotics, Women’s History Month—but also the impact: emboldening us to speak louder at team meetings.”
The key move in this section is the shift from empowerment to mutuality. Ali identifies this as the central technique for making a common value less common:
“We shift from empowerment to mutuality—and that is a way to sort of deepen and make your insights a little bit more uncommon. She ends up making a comment on mutuality which is really, really beautiful.”
While I fight tooth and nail every game, I simultaneously revel in watching my competitors experience the joys of declaring Uno.
The shift from “I win” to “we both get something from this” is the uncommon language that makes a common value land a little differently. The student’s specific brand of empowerment turns out to include its opposite.
The final Uno line also functions structurally as what Ali calls “a closing of the frame”—she weaves the insight back into the card-game container before moving to the next game. This is the technique that holds the essay together across three separate sections.
Burrow: intellectual curiosity and soft examples
The Burrow section reveals Hannah’s second value: intellectual curiosity, or as Ali prefers, discovery. She names the specific details Hannah uses—the chess players she watches online, the Lego Death Star, the Schrödinger equation—and gives them a name:
“These are all what I would call soft examples. This doesn’t really appear on her resume—and so that’s how you know this is truly personal.”
Soft examples are the details that live inside a student’s life but never make it onto an activities list. They’re the texture of a real person. If it could appear in the activities section, it’s a resume item. If it’s something only this student would have noticed, or done, or thought—that’s a soft example. Strong writing will contain both.
On what the jargon-rich details accomplish:
“I love the use of jargon. She’s talking about probability, giving me some trivia tidbit, naming the Schrödinger equation. But also infusing insight into every single thing. It’s not just about ‘look at all the things I know.’ It’s these things that I know that help me understand this or help me see the world differently.”
The extension of Burrow into teaching at the immigrant learning center came from Hannah herself—not Ali’s suggestion. In one of their sessions, Hannah said she wanted to show that her intellectual depth mattered “only when it helps others, when it lifts others up.” That motivation drove the second half of the section, where her intellectual vitality spreads through her community:
Just as those I teach Burrow will eventually outplay me, knowledge gains its strength when shared and transformed by others.
The insight isn’t “I’m smart.” It’s “being smart only matters when shared.” That’s the uncommon version of intellectual curiosity.
Solitaire: perseverance → self-awareness
The Solitaire section uses robotics competitions and dance rehearsal—both resume items—but Ali is specific about how they’re being used:
“Zooming in to some of these resume examples—not in a way that says ‘look at what I did,’ but these are sort of the more intimate moments that I want to show you.”
I picture these games during a losing streak at a robotics competition trying to find the error within a thousand lines of code, or as I push my shoulders back, point my toes, and remember to smile throughout dance rehearsal.
The detail of pushing shoulders back and pointing toes mid-practice is something an activity description would never capture. That specificity is what makes it a soft example even within a resume activity.
The value shifts again—from perseverance to a specific kind of perseverance: self-awareness. Ali:
“Self-awareness and a little bit of balance can be a common value, stated in a really common way. But the uncommon language Hannah uses is really what makes it here.”
Although Solitaire has taught me the art of perseverance, some games simply can’t be won. A glitchy program may have to be rewritten. A dance practice needs breaks. Self-awareness is part of perseverance.
“Self-awareness is part of perseverance”—that’s the uncommon version of a value every other student claims. The shift from a general virtue to a specific, personal understanding of that virtue is the technique.
The closing line
For the ending, Hannah chose “I just hope I play my cards right.” The hesitation, Hannah felt, was more honest than “I’ll play my cards right.” It’s a small difference that captures everything about how the student arrived at ownership of her own voice by draft nine:
I just hope I play my cards right.
Ali’s read: Hannah “really knew what she wanted by the end of the process.” The small hope is more truthful than the big declaration—and in a college essay, honesty is what makes a voice irreplaceable.
Ali’s four key takeaways for writing the essay
These apply to any student, any topic.
1. Sandbox before castle. Generate more examples than you’ll need. A pile of sand first, then you build. The selection is what makes the castle good—not starting with a perfect blueprint.
2. Go through many drafts. Don’t be afraid of revision. Nine drafts is not failure. It’s how the real insight gets found. The first version is just the beginning.
3. Play with formatting and punctuation. Admissions officers read dense paragraphs all day. Breaking an opening into three short pieces, using a rhetorical question, leaving white space—these signal craft and create forward motion. Go beyond the five-paragraph essay.
4. Details make it deep. Pack in specific examples from the activities list—but also the “softer moments” within those activities: the private interests, the everyday habits, the things that reveal personality without appearing on a resume. Both kinds of examples are necessary. The soft ones make the whole essay feel true.
A note on making common values uncommon
One of the hardest parts of the essay process is reaching for insight that doesn’t feel generic. Ali’s advice for students who feel stuck:
“Start with the common value and then try to say it in as many different ways as you possibly can—and that can really help you to develop more uncommon language around an insight. That’s kind of what Hannah did. She said the really common insight and then played with it until she found sort of like a right combination.”
Perseverance becomes perseverance-as-self-awareness. Empowerment becomes empowerment-and-mutuality. The common value is the starting point, not the destination.
Asher’s essay:
“Alright, phones up here. Appreciate the scenery.” My dad snaked his hand towards the back of the car to collect our devices. After my dad’s impromptu math quiz, my mom’s beloved boring horror podcast, and constant poking from my sister, I finally had some time to myself. I reclined my seat, closed my eyes, and found myself in a familiar room—the jazz club where I caught my first show. Floor-to-ceiling wooden paneling enclosed intimate fire-lit seating that surrounded a stage. The sounds of the family minivan faded as I imagined the performance of a lifetime.
A Brazilian samba-esque beat fills the air. The band is starting off strong with a Bossa Nova track. Even as vocals and lead instruments begin layering over each other, the iconic underlying rhythm is ever-present, pushing the musicians along. The music I enjoy is powered by rhythm, as is the rest of my life. The rhythm of spinning wheels on robots I build with my teammates. The rhythmic bangs of a hammer as I woodwork products like my mom’s vegetable garden beds, or my longboard. The unpredictable rhythm of oil and spices crackling and popping as I cook adventurous international dishes for my family. No matter where I look (or listen), all it takes is some focus to identify an underlying rhythm powering what I do.
The sounds of Brazil fade. I whip around to see the fireplace’s flickering light bouncing off a trombone—my favorite modern musician, New Orleans-inspired funk jazz pioneer Trombone Shorty. His initiative and confidence are traits I adopted when I ran for Class President after transferring to a new school. Wanting to get involved in my new community, I built up the confidence to campaign, expecting my worries and anxiety would disappear after the election results were announced. I won the election, but my doubts persisted. How could I effectively represent and lead such a large group of people, most of whom I did not know? I started off simple: just talking to people. That grew into discovering beautiful nuances and diversity in my peers’ interests and talents, and culminated in my leadership style of utilizing and combining individuals’ strengths to reach an overall goal, similar to Shorty’s big-band pieces where a multitude of instruments all play specific underlying roles while coming together to create a beautiful overall sound.
Suddenly, a spotlight illuminates scat-singer Ella Fitzgerald, center stage. She begins making seemingly random, yet melodic sounds that blend in my head, creating music. Whenever I study Hindi or Spanish, I think of scat, and am intrigued by how our minds process simple sounds to derive meaning from them. Learning multiple languages has given me a deeper appreciation for the world when traveling with my family, but also sparked my curiosity. How does one set of sounds which I make allow me to communicate with my grandparents, while another imposes a barrier between us? Music’s universality and language’s ability to connect people drive me to continue exploring both.
A bari saxophonist jumps into a mean bassline, hitting low, growling notes. Using that foundation, other musicians play and climb over the bassline’s stable platform. When I founded my school district’s first middle school-level Model United Nations club, I wanted to help young students build vital presentational and collaboration skills – a strong bassline on which they could branch out and explore topics which they had individual interest in. My “bassline” faded into the background as they turned into soloists using their own skills to shine, but the foundation I set for them had a lasting influence on their unique styles and ideas.
I was brought back to the minivan as my sister poked me again. We could have our phones back. I plugged in my headphones and hit shuffle on my jazz playlist. I settled back into my seat as Trombone Shorty flowed through my head. This time, however, I wasn’t imagining.
Calvin on What Makes Asher’s Essay Work
What follows is analysis and structural commentary on Asher’s essay, organized section by section, using direct quotes from his coach, Calvin, on why these pieces were effective and why Calvin coached Asher in these directions.
The opening: family road trip
The essay opens not in a jazz club but in a minivan—dad confiscating phones, mom’s podcast, a sister poking at him. It’s filled with little moments and details that build a small world. Calvin’s read:
“I like this essay’s intro because it feels endearing. I feel like I’m starting to like this student right off the bat. He’s in the car with his family—we’re getting some of that personality, a little bit of the character of his family—and then we get kind of launched into this essay in a way that’s a little surprising.”
I reclined my seat, closed my eyes, and found myself in a familiar room. The jazz club where I caught my first show.
The move from the minivan to the imagined jazz club—without announcing it as imagination until later—creates a small, pleasant surprise. The reader follows him in, then discovers the scene is in his head. That lightness carries through the rest of the essay.
The pivot sentence
After establishing the jazz club, Asher writes the line that does the most structural work in the entire essay:
The music I enjoy is powered by rhythm, as is the rest of my life.
Calvin:
“I love a good sentence that takes us from the framework—jazz, something about a jazz concert—to other parts of his life. That’s the sentence.”
It’s the hinge. Everything before it is setup; everything after it is demonstration. In one sentence, the essay moves from “here’s a jazz club” to “here’s Asher.” The reader now understands the contract: each jazz element that follows will map onto something real.
Trombone Shorty → leadership
The first jazz element maps Trombone Shorty’s confidence and initiative onto Asher running for class president at a new school. Calvin identifies this as the zoom-in / zoom-out move in clear action:
“You’re talking about jazz, you’re zooming out to name a real thing that you really want to showcase, zooming back in somewhere else that that real thing is at play, and then finding a way to tie it all together before moving on to a new piece.”
I won the election, but my doubts persisted. How could I effectively represent and lead such a large group of people, most of whom I did not know? I started off simple, just talking to people. That grew into discovering beautiful nuances and diversity in my peers’ interests and talents, and culminated in my leadership style of utilizing and combining individuals’ strengths to reach an overall goal.
The essay says winning didn’t resolve his anxiety—and then shows what he actually did about it. That’s the specific, personal version of a leadership story. The “just talking to people” detail is the kind of sentence that’s only his.
The section closes by tying back to the jazz framework: his leadership style is “similar to Shorty’s Big Band Pieces where a multitude of instruments all play specific underlying roles while coming together to create a beautiful overall sound.” Framework → real thing → back to framework. The button lands.
Ella Fitzgerald / scat → linguistic curiosity
Calvin singles out the scat paragraph as the essay’s most important “non-impressive” moment—the one that does the most work without pointing to any award or outcome:
“This paragraph makes me think this is a really bright, curious, thoughtful student. And it’s not because he won the math competition or got some award. It’s because he’s curious, he’s questioning, and he’s finding connections between things. And I think it just showcases the kind of mind that will do well in a challenging academic classroom.”
Whenever I study Hindi or Spanish, I think of Scat and I am intrigued by how our minds process simple sounds to derive meaning from them. Learning multiple languages has given me a deeper appreciation for the world when traveling with my family, but also sparked my curiosity. How does one set of sounds which I make allow me to communicate with my grandparents, while another imposes a barrier between us?
The question about the grandparents is the best sentence in this section. It’s a genuine question that reveals what kind of thinker Asher is—one who finds meaning in the gap between sounds and understanding. No other student could have written that sentence.
Ethan makes the same point from the process side: this is exactly how essays work for students who don’t have a headline achievement to anchor on. “There’s a way to do this with just uncommon connections—things that surprise, that don’t necessarily involve founding a nonprofit. It could just be connecting to other sides of you.” The scat paragraph is an uncommon connection. That’s its value.
Bass saxophone baseline → Model UN
Asher founded his school district’s first middle-school Model UN club. He frames it not as an accomplishment but as building infrastructure for others:
When I founded my school district’s first middle school level Model United Nations Club, I wanted to help young students build vital presentational and collaboration skills—a strong baseline on which they could branch out and explore topics which they had individual interest in. My baseline faded into the background as they turned into soloists using their own skills to shine.
The metaphor does double work. It shows leadership—and it shows the kind of leader Asher is: one who builds a foundation and then steps back. The baseline fades. The soloists emerge. Tons of other students will talk about Model UN. No other Model UN paragraph would frame it this exact way. That’s what we mean by specificity.
The ending
Calvin has a mild critique of the conclusion and then accepts it:
“If I could go back, I might want to infuse the conclusion with a little more punch. Something that ties it all together again. But I also kind of liked the chill vibe of the end. We’ve thrown a lot at the reader—Model UN, learning languages and music, running for president and becoming a leader. It was kind of okay to me that he wanted to end it in this more laid-back kind of way.”
I was brought back to the minivan as my sister poked me again. I plugged in my headphones and hit shuffle on my jazz playlist. I settled back into my seat as Trombone Shorty flowed through my head. This time, however, I wasn’t imagining.
“This time, however, I wasn’t imagining”—the essay ends where it began, closes the frame, and lands a quiet button. The jazz club at the start was in his head. By the end, the music is real. The essay’s argument is implicit in that shift: these values, this curiosity, this leadership—they’re things playing now in Asher’s life.
Andrew Simpson, CEG’s Editorial Director, has worked as an educator, consultant, and curriculum writer for the past 20 years, and earned degrees from Stanford in Political Science and Drama. He feels most at home on mountain tops and in oceans.
Top Values: Insight/Growth | Truth | Integrity
