: College Application Essay Opening and Help I currently have to write an application for college that I wish to go to over the summer. I have no idea where to turn and what to write. The

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There is nothing you "should" do, besides of course addressing the prompt. A million people could give that prompt a million different excellent answers with none of them having anything in common with one another.

I think the key to writing personal essays is simple: speak from the heart. Be honest. If technology does sincerely interest you, think about how and why and maybe find an example or two to sew into your response. If you get stuck on a basic idea such as "I like understanding how stuff works" and can't think of anything else to say, then don't worry, you're encountering a common problem.

The trick is to start asking more specific questions. For instance: when did I first start developing an interest in technology? what was I doing at the time that led to the interest? what was my first venture in technology? For me, the kindergarten I went to had a special activity called "take-apart": all of us little 7-year olds were handed screwdrivers and pliers and led to a pile of discarded computers and electronics parts, and allowed to roam free. I loved meticulously dismantling each component to see what I might find inside it. It was like performing surgery on Matryoshka dolls.

Once you've got something to say, @ $%)@# spit it out. Just write. Afterwards, run through it and rephrase things as you see fit. Ask someone you know is decent with words to look through it and edit it also.

If you consider yourself to be a bad writer, i.e. you write down a sentence and then shout UGH THIS IS GARBAGE and crumple it up/ctrl+a+delete, then here's the best tip I can give you: I often find that people who are poor writers are nonetheless perfectly well-qualified speakers. So just talk. Explain it out loud as you would if you were telling them in person. Write what you're saying.

And don't mix up their/there. Looks bad.

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