Who are admissions officers? And what are they looking for?

When you are writing your college essays, you are writing for a very particular audience: admissions officers. The problem is that who these people are and what they want often feels mysterious and intimidating.

I get the sense that many of my students have a stock image version of an admissions officer in their head, someone who wears tortoiseshell glasses and tweed and want to see "leadership qualities."

Maybe this stock admissions officer looks something like this:

I asked ChatGPT to create an image of "an admissions officer at a highly selective college."

But here's what an actual admissions officer looks like:

This is Dan, an admissions officer at Tufts who posted an "Ask Me Anything" on Reddit back in 2013.

Interestingly, the AI admissions officer kind of looks like a Patrick Bateman version of Dan. Whereas actual Dan looks like a fun, older cousin.

It’s not just Dan who doesn’t fit the stock image version of an admissions officer. It’s Rachel, who loves long-distance running and has a pet pig. Or Irena, a mother of three who is dealing with her son’s recent autism diagnosis. True story: all of the people I just described were actually admissions officers. 

Admissions officers read applications in the oak-paneled rooms of universities but they also read them while they wait for prescriptions at the pharmacy and while they munch on Twizzlers to get through their mid-afternoon slump.

It's hard to say that admissions officers are just one type of person because they are in fact a diverse bunch. According to Becky Munster, a former admissions officer at Dartmouth College, they are "a mix of people who were young, old, skinny, chubby, Black, white, Native, gay, straight, left-handed, and pigeon-toed.”

And yet at the end of the day, according to Harold Bauld, a former admissions officer at Brown University, admissions officers can be generally sorted into two types: the temps and the lifers. Temps are usually young, recent college graduates, sometimes working for the school they graduated from, and are in this job as a transition to something else. They might be like Aidan, an admissions officer I interviewed who was working in admissions while he applied to med school. Or they might be like our friend Dan, who went on to work in the tech industry after his time at Tufts.  

Lifers, on the other hand, are the “big guns who run the show and set policy” and have worked in admissions for a long time, often decades. They may have been reading applications from the same region for 20+ years. 

In addition to the temps and the lifers, admissions offices also hire readers who process files, read, and take notes, and can also make decisions about an applicant. These readers could be grad students at the university, the spouses of deans, or remote freelancers who never set foot in the admissions office.

The admissions process differs at every school, but it is likely that your essays will be read, commented, and discussed by a mix of people with varying levels of expertise and authority. Very rarely will a decision about your application fall into the hands of just one person.

And the truth is, you don't have any control over what kinds of people will be reading your application.

This is why, when people ask, "What are admissions officers looking for?" it is an inherently faulty question. Because it assumes that admissions officers are a monolithic group of humans with the same tastes and priorities. Here's what Harry Bauld, former admissions officer at Brown, had to say:

“Different readers, even in the same admissions office, look for different things. I remember epic battles with admissions colleagues over whether an essay showed a student was a potential scholar or just a nerd, a future physicist or just a pre-med. How can you please them? You can’t. Say what you have to say. The same exact essay, placed in the files of two different students with comparable academic credentials, might lead to different results.”

The journalist Jeffrey Selingo, who spent a year observing admissions officers at work, pretty much agreed with Harry Bauld's assessment:

“[T]hey are human beings, not machines programmed to make decisions. They each bring their own bias to the table and they learn as the process unfolds, especially readers new to the job. They work with incomplete and imperfect information provided by applicants and high schools. They review an ever-increasing number of files under immense time pressures and sometimes with different colleagues. And they struggle with the same human frailties as any of us—they get distracted, tired, hungry, and sick. It’s not that their choices are arbitrary, but their reasoning for those choices is sometimes unclear.”

Thankfully, there are some checks and balances built into the decision-making process. So it's not like the fate of your application rests on the fluctuating blood sugar levels of one admissions officer. However, the point remains: you don't have much control of the process.

But over and over again I see that a sense of false control leads applicants astray. They make a wager: if I write what I think an admissions officer wants to hear, then I will be more likely to get in. In other words, applicants think that if they play it safe, they'll win.

I cannot stress this enough: this is the biggest and most frequent mistake I see in college essay writing.

I see this approach all the time with my students and their parents. It's frustrating. One of my students will finally make a breakthrough and write an essay in their own voice, an essay that's unusual, intriguing, and funny. Then, during our next meeting, they'll tell me they don't think it's a good idea to take that risk, usually they cite the need to show more "leadership qualities" or "personal growth" in their essay. Sometimes the parents themselves have gone in and directly edited the essay into something that resembles a PR statement from a corporation in trouble: "I will continue to work hard and persevere to solve this world's problems."

It's such a tragedy. Because they haven't correctly calculated their wager. They haven't realized that a safe essay is risky.

Remember our friend Dan? Back when he was in admissions, he wrote an article for the New York Times about choosing what to write about:

Being honest and forceful about yourself may make some adults around you nervous; it’s not “safe.” They will worry that you are being too controversial or informal. You should listen carefully and try to see your writing from their perspective. But you should feel comfortable ignoring advice that does not feel right.

If you are not interested in thinking about the big issues (or the small ones) around community service, here is some radical advice: Don’t write about it.

If you love your sport, but it isn’t what you are itching to talk about when you get out of bed, don’t write about it.

Writing about service or determination reflects important qualities, but no one in our applicant pools writes about how quickly they quit or how much they hate helping society. If you write the “safe” essay, how will you stand apart?

Dan is not alone in this opinion. In fact, if you really start listening, you'll see that admissions officers are practically begging students to stop trying to impress them. In fact, that's exactly what a Purdue admissions officer said: “Don’t try to impress us. Speak from the heart.”

And an admissions officer at Earlham College tells us that, “The biggest risk for the writer is to try to assume what an admissions staff wants to read or to learn about you, that is, to risk losing your voice in the process.”

So, rather than trying to write an essay that will please the stock image admissions officer in your head, turn the question around. Don't ask, "What do they want to hear?" Instead, ask, "What do I want to write about? What do I care about? What do I believe in?"

It's easy to roll your eyes when someone tells you to "Be yourself!" But in my experience, the less students try to fit into a template of "what admissions officers want," the more unique their applications can be.

An admissions officer at Emory said she initially took the job with the goal of later becoming a life coach so that she could share advice with future clients on how to be more competitive when applying to the school. However, after just her first committee meeting she said, “I saw how many awesome students didn’t make the cut,” and she added, “It completely changed my mind about the advice I give to students. Now I tell them to do the best you can, pursue your genuine interests, and let the chips fall where they may.”

It turns out that's the safest bet.