SPEAKER_00 0:00

You're listening to the Support Ed Learning Podcast, where we challenge the status quo of education and reimagine what learning should be. I'm Dr. Joe Sebastian, and in every episode we dive into critical thinking, Bloom's Taxonomy, educational innovation, and how AI is shaping the future of learning. Whether you're a teacher, parent, policymaker, or lifelong learner, you're in the right place to rethink, reshape, and revive education. He wrote for the Wall Street Journal and The Economists, and now he helps high schoolers write the most important essay of their lives. With ChatGPT and AI flooding the missions offices and high stat applications all looking the same on paper, Chris Hunt has built a methodology to help students sound like themselves, not like a robot, and not like every other Val Victorian. Let's get into it. Welcome back to the Supported Learning Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Joe Sebastian. Families often ask me how to navigate the maze of college emissions without spending thousands of dollars or months of time. And the answer usually involves finding people that have cracked the code that the schools aren't telling you. And that's why I'm thrilled to have Chris Hunt here today. He is the founder of College Essay Mentor and a former journalist with bylines in the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and he's spent years bringing newsroom level rigor to the college essay. He's helped students translate their real lives into authentic, high-impact personal statements. He's also one of the most followed voices in the space on TikTok and YouTube, where he's been demystifying the writing process for students and parents. So we're going to dive into all that today, how to write an essay that actually stands out, and how to maintain authenticity in the age of AI and what every parent and student needs to know about the most stressful part of the college application. Chris, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Absolutely. So you get 650 words on that personal statement. And most parents have no idea what's in store for them and what colleges are looking for. So where do you start? Like how for like before we get into that, let's let's go back to how did you make the transition from the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, to doing what you do today? It was a total accident.

SPEAKER_01 2:23

So I had stopped working for newspapers and magazines. I wrote a couple of books, and then I was mostly a dad for a while. And then along the way, a classmate of mine from Dartmouth, who lives here in Boulder, said, Can you help my son with his college essay? And I said, No. My kids were still in elementary and middle school. I had never even looked at college essays. But she said, Well, my kids think you're a good guy because you drove a motorcycle around Vietnam and you used to be a journalist to the right. So I think you can do it. So I gave it a shot. And what I found when I started to look at it was that a lot of the things I had learned and actually done every day as a journalist, and some of the narrative writing did when I wrote my books, which were both first-person narratives, were really applicable to college essays. And 12 years later, it still works pretty well.

SPEAKER_00 3:28

So when families look at the college essay, what's something that basically, where do you start with them? If they come to you looking to like, I, you know, we need, we need help writing an essay. Where should every student or every family start with this process?

SPEAKER_01 3:45

Well, I think what you're saying cuts to an important point, which is it is the student who has to do this. Parents, of course, want to be supportive, but it's very hard to be supportive without doing it or being involved. So the first thing that I do is probably to try to strike that balance and accept that your kid's going to lead the way, you're going to get them the resources, and maybe get their back. So it is probably helpful as a parent to know how to help well. So the first thing that I think is helpful for both the student and the parent to know is that there's a lot of stuff out there. There are books that you know, there's a 300-page book on how to write 650 words. It's a little disproportionate, right? So uh I personally try to make it simpler and a little more methodical just because there's so much noise out there.

SPEAKER_00 5:02

And what is like describe that when you say noise, what do you mean by that? In terms of like what a lot of marketing and sales is telling families they need to do versus what is actually worthwhile?

SPEAKER_01 5:14

I would say that the real noise comes from social media because most kids are watching TikTok and they're watching they've got Instagram, and parents are on Facebook, and there are a lot of people who are, first of all, trying to get views. So they're trying to scare you. And there's a lot of kids who just finished high school and they got into Harvard or Stanford and they want to tell you how they did it. And there's plenty of good information there, but there's also a lot of noise or bad information. So it's very difficult to figure out what's the noise and what's the signal, right? And it's very easy to get confused. And certainly if you're a teenager who wants to do well in the admissions process, it's also easier to freeze up, to feel paralyzed.

SPEAKER_00 6:08

And so when we get to the college essay, where should a kid start in that process? Because application season is right around the corner. Kids work through this over the summer. Walk me through the process. Like kids sit down the brainstorm, they start just staring at a blank page. What's step one?

SPEAKER_01 6:28

I mean, I will tell you the blank page is the scariest thing for a writer at any level. Smartest high school kids in the world, professional journalists, novelists, nobody likes looking at that blank page. So, if nothing else, you can feel that you're not alone. And then the question you're asking is how do you approach that? So I'll skip past what I consider to be the bad information, and I'll tell you the approach that I recommend for students. So I can't say this is the only way to do it, because clearly lots of people succeed different ways, but I can say that this works pretty well and it's easily understood. So for me, your starting point is to have a message. Now, what's a message? A message is something that if an admissions officer who's never met you reads it, they'll say, Hey, I have a little bit of a sense of who this applicant is. From the perspective of the high school student, you can ask yourself, what do I want to be really sure somebody knows about me before they make a decision on my application? And I think when you start there, thinking of your message, you're not doing brainstorming, which is a word I hate because I think brainstorming means spraying out 20 ideas and then figuring out which one works. I think that's a lot harder than starting narrower with a narrow question is give me one theme, one message. I can connect that in a way to what I learned at the Wall Street Journal. So when you write a story for the Wall Street Journal, and it's it's the same at the New York Times, the Washington Post, this is what they teach in journalism school. They have something called the nut graph. Graph means paragraph, the nut means the heart of the matter, the thing that this thing is about. And so that nut graph, knowing what this is about and making that clear to your reader, is actually one of the things that I imported from journalism to college essays. Know your message, know what you want to say, and be sure it's very, very easy for a college admissions officer to understand you.

SPEAKER_00 9:01

So, like, so a student comes to you, and you basically, I don't, you know, they they have a bunch of stuff that they've done. How do you pull a great essay out of ordinary experience? A summer job, a sibling relationship, a hobby. Give me like a real example of how you're able to pull together a great story for a student.

SPEAKER_01 9:22

So the situation you just described, or the starting point, I think is where a lot of people start to get into trouble. Because what happens is people tend to start with the what, what they did or what happened to them. Right? If you are applying to a highly selective school and you want to stand out, people tend to gravitate towards the coolest thing they ever did or the worst thing that ever happened to them. They go to the extremes. Now, what you were talking about was your everyday experience. But my suggestion is not to start with what happened, but to start with more interesting personal questions, which think about the why, why you do stuff, and the who, who are you, and the how, how you experience your life and things that happen to you. So, in that respect, even the most mundane experience, if you can get start from the bottom up instead of the top down, you'll you'll get at some of the values and qualities that define you. Okay, and then build around that by looking for the what second. So to spell it out a little more, when I write about college admissions, when I put it on paper, I say, okay, start with your message, which is going to come from exploring the who, the why, and the how. And then the next core quality of your college essay is experiences that bring that message to life. So basically, my suggestion is always to reverse the order that people typically take.

SPEAKER_00 11:20

So reversing the order. So basically sounding like standing out like something um completely different than what how the traditional approach is.

SPEAKER_01 11:30

I don't I suppose that's true. The the typical approach is to do a whole bunch of brainstorming and all kinds of exercises, and you end up with pages and pages of notes, and it's kind of a mess. And I think you for a little while feel good, like, okay, I'm involved, I'm brainstorming, I'm doing exercises. But it's fairly common for people to get through that and then say, well, hold on a sec. What do I do now? So I consider that sort of like the throw the spaghetti at the wall approach. And if you're willing to spend a little more time on introspection and writing down some of the values that lead your choices, some of the decisions that have been important in your life, that you're just gonna have a have less frustration, and you'll also have sort of a an emotional core to start as your starting point.

SPEAKER_00 12:28

So, what separates a great essay from just a good essay? Hmm.

SPEAKER_01 12:34

Well, good probably has the a series of ingredients, okay? Let's say it's it's got that message, it's got the experiences that bring that message to life. I think when you start to get too great, is when you share or reveal character and values, when you give someone insight. So what's really great is if you can write something in the first person, and someone kind of feels what it's like to be you in that situation. So if they're seeing the world through your eyes and hearing it and feeling what it's like to be you, that that's great, not because an essay is a work of art that we want to put up on the wall in frame, but because it's going to help an admissions officer learn about you. And ultimately, that is the goal of a college essay, for a college admissions officer to learn about you. And what do we want them to learn? Well, we want them to learn something that's going to leave them feeling hey, this student is going to make an interesting member of our community. And that's their job. It's it's, you know, people always say, what do they want? They want to find right young people who are going to be great and interesting contributors in some way. Classroom, out of the classroom, use their resources, graduate, and do awesome things. That's their job. And so I think it's also worth targeting that decision and how that gets made.

SPEAKER_00 14:27

How do you see that the college essay has changed over the years in doing this process?

SPEAKER_01 14:32

Let's see. I so I've been doing this now since 2014. So let's say that's 12 years. When I started doing it, I think that it was just coming on the radar as a way to differentiate yourself if you're applying to it in a competitive situation. Okay. And so um what I do a lot of in high school is analytical writing, five-paragraph essays. And so I think people were just starting to get away from that. But as there became more awareness of the need for narrative writing for storytelling, I think there's a lot more focus on kids trying to tell stories, right? And I think that people are getting better at it. However, I think that's led to you know a different kind of oversimplification that is hard for kids because it when you say to somebody, hey, just tell your story. Well, if you could just do it, there'd be a lot more good movies from Hollywood and a lot more good novels. It's hard. And what's really hard about it is they don't actually teach storytelling in high school very much, because high school is about analytical writing. So I I think that the awareness that narrative writing is necessary actually creates a fair bit of stress for kids because we're they're being sent into battle without the training or the weapons that they need. And tell you the truth, that's why um there's a lot more people like me out there. You know, when I started doing this, there were a couple of people who were already pretty active. But at this point, college essay consultant, college essay coach is it's something that a lot of people use. So it's it's become a you know a pretty substantial gig profession.

SPEAKER_00 16:55

This episode is brought to you by Supported Tutoring, where we don't just help students get better grades, we help them become critical thinkers. Whether it's mastering AP exams, maximizing college applications, or building lifelong learning habits, our expert tutors focus on critical thinking, confidence, and real growth. Head to supported tutoring.com to find the support your student deserves. So take me through the methodology because it's it's grounded in specifics and voice. Let's talk about the elephant in the room, like AI. AI, Chat GPT, they're all you know flooding emissions officers. Kids are using them all over the place. What are you actually seeing, and is it as bad as people say?

SPEAKER_01 17:41

So I can't speak for its use in classrooms. I can tell you that I have some awareness of it, certainly in in what I do. And look, the first time I heard about Chat GPT, my thought was, wow, is this gonna put me out of business? And so I tried to write an essay. I put in some prompts. This was a couple of years ago, to ChatGPT, and I found that it was really mechanical, both in the structure of the essay and in the language. So I do think that it's the nature of AI that they want it to get better, right? However, I still don't think that if you want to have an essay that sounds like a person, or more importantly, sounds like you, that it's there yet. So I I'm I'm pretty sure that it helps at some level, but I in terms of writing something that's really good and is going to stand out, it's not there yet. Now, the as you say, the elephant in the room, or the big question is to what extent will colleges find it or they didn't, or they don't necessarily care. So the students that I work with are applying the highly selective colleges. So in that case, essays, both the personal essay and the supplement essays, make a difference. The decision-making process needs them. When you start applying to some, you know, state schools, big state schools. I can't say if it makes as much of a difference, particularly because essays, while required, everyone has to write a personal essay, are not necessarily a big part of the decision process. For example, I live here in Colorado, and admission to University of Colorado is largely based on your grades and your test scores, right? So, nevertheless, even amongst my students last year, it would have a couple, you know, a couple gave me drafts that I read, and I very quickly knew this was not written by them. And more importantly, I could tell, you know, it was written by AI. Now, I didn't need an A AI detector to do that. I could just read it, and I know what high school kids sound like, and I know what they don't sound like. So, and I would say to them, look, I totally get your inclination to do this. And I'm not the cops, I'm not here to bust you. However, I do want to protect you. So I would be concerned if you submitted something like this. Because if I can see it and I'm not even trying, I promise you that someone who does this every day of the week, you know, for half the year, they're gonna see it and they're gonna throw away your application. And more importantly, you can do better. Meaning, if all you really need is you need to sound like a really smart high school student. And if that comes through in whatever language, we're not talking poetry here. We're just talking clear communication that sounds like you're gonna do a lot better. So I know people are using it, I don't think it's necessary, and uh, I don't think it's effective. How many revisions should a student do? I can't give you a number, I can tell you a bad number. How about that? Okay, so I see see people say, Oh, I did 15 drafts or 20 drafts, and it's nuts. I don't think that it should take that many. Now, how do you reduce that number? Is there's there's something that's encouraged in high school sometimes called free writing. Well, just write. Anything. If you just tried anything and it's a mess, well, it might take you a couple drafts to sort through the mess. Okay. So what's typical amongst the students I work with is we do a lot of planning on the front end. So if you I believe that if you think hard about your message and what material you want to put around it and find yourself a beginning and find yourself an ending, but really make a good outline and don't write a single word until your outline makes sense. It's fairly typical for my students to write, let's call it, four drafts. And I'm not saying you couldn't even do six or eight, but I do think that you do yourself a really big favor by thinking hard up front, making a really good paragraph by paragraph outline. And then you you sort of get through the frustration of the multi- you know a zillion drafts.

SPEAKER_00 23:08

So is there a point where it becomes a law of like diminishing returns where you're just you're being too nitpicky, you're being too too many revisions in the process? Is there a sweet spot that most of your students land?

SPEAKER_01 23:23

I believe that there is, but obviously, students who are really focused on getting uh a good admissions result and who are used to working and working and working, it's not always that easy to convince them. So I can never stop someone from wanting to do more because you've got time and you and you sort of fill it. Now, I will personally say, I can promise you that changing this word to that word, that that starting to, when you get to the level of substituting words, that that's not going to be the tipping point between getting admitted and being denied, right? Because what's already baked into the middle of that essay should be uh your message and the experiences and the insights to your character. So it's nice to have clear communication, but I I don't believe that's necessary. And I do have an exercise that I do with all my students to try to show them that what they've got is good. But look, uh you can't fault someone if if they want to keep working, right? I do, if someone gets to the point where they're just really working around with words, I say, well, do that and let's simultaneously do some other work. I would I hate for perfectionism about one essay to get in the way of new and substantial progress on another one.

SPEAKER_00 25:05

So for any parent of a rising senior out there, what realistic timeline should they have going into the summer for their essays? Since Common App opens on August 1st and all their supplementals open up a little bit later, when should they start this process?

SPEAKER_01 25:25

I mean, I encourage students to start once school is out. Now it doesn't have to be, okay, get out of school and sit down and start working on it. I think, you know, junior year is pretty stressful and you want some downtime. But, you know, sometime within the first few weeks, you might want to see if you can find some time to start doing that. And I don't think that this personal essay has become sort of this rite of passage. And people think, well, I'm gonna start in June and it's gonna go all the way to January 1st or November 1st if you're applying early. And I try to say, look, it's 650 words. I don't think that's gonna take you five or six months, right? So I would encourage people to get going on the personal essay. The prompts are already available. I personally recommend that everyone not pay too much attention to the prompts because the prompts or the questions for college essays are not like high school essays. High school essays, you get a prompt, you answer it, and you're judged on how well your answer addresses the prompt. College essay prompts, they're just launch pads. You know, something to get you thinking about yourself so you can write something so admissions officers will learn about you. So I have all my students do prompt number seven, which is write on a topic of your choosing, right? Because then you're not accidentally focusing too narrowly. If you like the other prompts, great. But just keep in mind that you're not gonna be judged on the prompt you answered. You're gonna be judged on whether someone learns about you. Something that I think is important to understand is that the common app, quote unquote, opens on August 1st, right? But you can start on your personal essay right away. If you're applying to University of California, the prompts are already available. Most, if you're applying to highly selective colleges, even though the prompts are not officially released until August, most schools don't change their questions. So if you look at some of the past questions, you can probably get a pretty good idea. I mean, it's hard if you don't do this all the time, but I've got a good idea from doing it for a while. Okay, look, here's a bunch of schools that don't change their prompts. So you can get going on the supplement essays well ahead of August. Because, of course, the goal is to have some critical massive work done during the summer, just so you don't have this hanging over your head senior fall when you've got to focus on classes, right? Right. But for sure, I think you want to go back to school with your personal essay done, and ideally the essays for a couple of applications. There's no reason why you should not have your common application, the nuts and bolts of your address done. And you can also have your activities list done, whether students are self-motivated to do that, or parents can provide a little motivation. Uh, you know, that's about the family, right?

SPEAKER_00 28:55

Absolutely. So, Chris, let's move into rapid fire. Basically, first thing that comes to mind, no explanation needed. Okay. Okay. All right. So, what is the most overrated piece of essay advice you hear right now? Be crooky. Most underrated.

SPEAKER_01 29:11

I think it would have to be mine, which is focus on your message. Outline, write outlines also. Worst opening line you've as you see over and over again. Oh gosh. It's anything with a number, and then the one that's really appalling is for as long as I can remember, dot, dot, dot. Right? If you've got that phrase, I'm pretty confident nothing good's coming next. How about one book that changed how you think about writing? Oh, I got it right for you. I got it ready for you. Right there. On Writing Well by William Zinzer. This is, what is it? This is like the 50th anniversary that came out when I was a kid. Great book on clear communication, which is, I think, is all you need for high school writing, college writing, college essays, your whole life.

SPEAKER_00 30:08

If you could whisper one thing to every student starting staring at a blank page, what would it be?

SPEAKER_01 30:14

You have something to say. Relax and say it.

SPEAKER_00 30:19

One thing parents overthink about the essay.

SPEAKER_01 30:22

I think that parents feel there should be something dramatic or that stands out, like an exceptional what. And as a result, I think that they might undervalue or be afraid of something small. So there is a really great expression that they used at the Wall Street Journal for what makes a good story. And it is the small story that reveals the big picture. So I would encourage both parents and students not to be afraid of small. And if you want something to be better, don't make it broader. Look smaller and smaller and make it tighter.

SPEAKER_00 31:11

And if a parent could do only one thing after listening to this, what would it be?

SPEAKER_01 31:15

I think I would say encourage your son or daughter to read their essay out loud. Because that's really the best exercise for knowing whether you're sounding like yourself. If you read your personal essay out loud and the words fit in your mouth and you can read through it smooth smoothly, then you have captured your own voice. Now, a kid might not want to read it to their parent, but they can read it out loud to themselves. That's fine. But certainly read it out loud. If you can read right through it without hesitating, you got something.

SPEAKER_00 31:57

All right, Chris, this has been a great conversation. I really do appreciate your time coming on and sharing your expertise. For parents listening who want to go deeper with you, learn about more about what you do, where can they find you?

SPEAKER_01 32:10

I mean, I have a website called college essaymentor.com. On that, I have a free resources section, which a whole bunch of blog posts about how to write personal statements, supplement essays. There's also some admissions advice. Obviously, I have a range of services, but I really, as I hope you saw it, like talking about this stuff and also like to share as much as possible.

SPEAKER_00 32:37

I appreciate that. We'll put all that in the show notes and the description below. Um, and before we wrap, what's one thing you want people to remember from this conversation?

SPEAKER_01 32:47

It's probably something we haven't talked about, which is when you're applying to college, and this is me being an old guy, okay? That we're just trying to find the next step, right? You're gonna get to college. Any college has great teaching, great resources, great people. And that's actually where you start to make your way. So I do try to tell people, try not to get too crazy about it, because kids make their way and they they all they all find something, they find their people, and it comes out okay. But it's easy for me to say, right? Both of my kids, you know, graduated from college and they're completely different, but each found their own thing.

SPEAKER_00 33:36

Well, Chris, thank you for joining. Thank you for helping so many students across your programs. And um again, thank you for your time. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. All right. You've been l watching the supported learning podcast. We will see you next time. Thank you. Thanks for joining us on the Supported Learning Podcast. If today's conversation inspired you, challenged you, or sparked a new perspective, be sure to subscribe and share with a fellow change maker. We'll be back soon with more voices, more insight, and more ways to elevate the future of learning together. Until then, keep learning and keep pushing the conversation forward.