Can I Use ChatGPT for My College Essays?

First things first: this is your college application process and you can make your own choices.

But honestly, Chat-ing your college essay is a pretty terrible idea. Especially if you are trying to get into selective college or craft essays worthy of merit scholarships.

I’m not anti-AI. In fact, some of my favorite application essays have been written by students who want to study computer science and are genuinely excited about the potential applications of ML and AI on everything from medicine to environmental sustainability.

So why didn’t they just use AI to write those application essays?

Great question. The answer reveals something really important and unique about college essays. Something that makes them fundamentally different than most other writing high school students do.

Unlike trying to grind out a two-page paper about the impact of ambition in MacBeth for your English teacher or a DBQ about 19th century industrialization for your history teacher, writing your college essay isn’t about just getting an assignment done and adhering to a prompt. You’re not being graded based on some strictly prescribed rubric. Your college essay isn’t about checking off a list of required tasks.

It’s about showing and sharing who you are.

How you think. What you care about. How you engage the world.

One of my refrains is “This essay should be something that you and ONLY you could write.” That doesn’t mean that it has to be some super-unusual story or a tearjerker. You don’t have to start a non-profit or have a fancy internship. The actual topic could be something mundane - decorating for homecoming, riding the bus to an away game, a Robotics Club snafu, an unlikely friendship you made at work.

But when you tell the story in your own true voice using your own true words: wow. That’s when it comes alive.

So HOW do you find your own voice? Here’s the good news: you already have it. Try using voice-to-text and tell a story about a time you wanted something and didn’t get it. And have some fun telling it! Pretend that you are talking to one of your best friends and trying to really keep their attention. Using the voice-to-text transcription will allow you to SEE your voice. It will shake you out of the basic, boring writing you typically have to do for school.

The irony is that nearly all of the writing you do in high school is rubric-based and highly structured. I know from experience - I was a high school English teacher for years! I’m not saying this kind of writing is bad. But it’s just not the kind of personal narrative writing that works for a college essay.

When I start brainstorming essay drafts with students, they are often scared to use the word “I” because they have been taught that it’s wrong. Should you be using a first-person pronoun in an essay about economic disparity in the Gilded Age? Of course not. But in an essay that is fundamentally about YOU, “I” is essential.

So that brings us back to ChatGPT.

If your college essay should be something that you and only you can write, then it logically follows that a soulless machine can’t write it for you.

Embody your own story. Tell your truth in your own voice. Don’t let AI take that away from you. Learn more about the essential role that essays play in the admissions process in my Common App Companion course.