Essay Questions You will be Asked All Your Life

We think of college entrance essays as just a school requirement. But as an adult, holding my 10th job, I began to see them as one of those tools that can help us succeed later in life. But students seldom think of them that way during this critical time in their lives when more reflection and self-knowledge are needed.
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“Who are you?” - Students should understand the relevance of this question in their lives.
This personal essay question is commonly phrased as, “How do you describe yourself as a person? What are your strength and weaknesses? Are there any significant experiences that shaped you? What personal characteristics do you want to strengthen? What do you want to change about yourself?”
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Millions of self-help books are being sold to adults to increase their self-knowledge, find their passion, and help them find the right jobs. How many adults have gone back to school because they took the wrong courses because they only thought of income potential? How many are unhappy with their jobs?

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Your college entrance essay is not just a requirement. It is also tool to help you to reflect and grow into self-awareness. Believe me, living a thoughtful life will give you the power to direct your life and achieve your goals.
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“What are your achievements? - Essay Question that Keeps You Focused in College
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Why should we accept your application? What have you done? What have you accomplished? Why should we hire you? You will be asked these questions all throughout your life. You will hear this question in your personal life when you are dating someone or meeting their parents. You will hear this question in your career when you want to get hired, ask for a pay increase or a promotion. You may even need to answer this question when the company is downsizing.
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Of course you will party and go to dates, but focus on what is important. You are the one paying for your time in college with your student loans. You will work you ass off to pay these loans, so manage your time well. Build your critical thinking skills, team work skills, essay writing skills, presentation and social skills. Am I focusing my time on developing my talent? Am I building skills that are highly demanded in the marketplace?
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“Why choose this school?”- An important life skill to learn is how to make informed decisions.
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When you look for work, you will also be asked “why choose our company?” This means you need to research and evaluate your options before making critical decisions in your life. In college entrance essays, the school wants to know, how you were able to arrive at your decision to pursue your chosen degree and apply in their school. Your answer will show how serious and committed you are about your choices. Most significantly, this question will reveal whether you have a plan for your life.
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In college you need to constantly try to find the answer on what do you want to do with your life.
Some people are able to answer these questions easily, while many of us need to explore further. What is your purpose? We need to constantly make plans and change them according to what we discover in ourselves (talent, qualities) during our learning and exploration time in college. To guide your planning, also check out employee requirements of the companies that are highly ranked in your chosen field. What can you do to fit their profile?
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Final thought
As young adults, you need to learn to think critically, write and express yourself well. Start writing personal essays in journals and fill it up with your discoveries about yourself, your questions, your goals, and plans for your life. This will give you direction and help you avoid the frustrations and regrets of an aimless, unexamined and wasteful life. (This will be a valuable document when you become a significant person later!)
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Living your life with self-awareness and goals will help you lead a significant and fulfilling life. I wish, somebody guided me when I was in high school. Hopefully, teachers would go the extra mile and not only teach their students the literal and technical skills on how to write their college entrance essays.

Essay Writing Follows Human Reasoning

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A strong conclusion will boost the quality of your essay, while a poor conclusion will just turn your essay into a disaster. Yet, some college students just hurry the last part, for the sake of finishing their essays. They fail to wrap-up their essay and leave their readers uncertain and unconvinced. So below are tips on how to write the conclusion for  your college essays.
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Structure of the Conclusion
Classic essay structure is that the conclusion begins narrowly and ends expansively (Payne, 1965). It starts with a specific summary of your key points and arguments. Next, your thesis statement is restated, in the form shaped by your arguments. Finally, the conclusion is closed by a final statement that imparts a generalized understanding of your essay topic.
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An English teacher once gave me this advice in my personal essay, “You do not have to end your personal essay with a life lesson all the time. You can also look forward and end your essay with a statement about your future. You can use statements about possibilities and not just about past learnings.”
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Don’t Panic, Don’t Get Lost
If you are starting to panic in writing your essay conclusion, it means that you’ve gone off the limits of what is being required of you in your essay question. Remember that you are only asked to write a conclusion for “your particular thesis statement” and not a conclusion of the topic itself.
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Also remember that you are only required to sum up “your essay and your arguments” and not the thousands of complex arguments, other experts may have about the issue. This is why some students get so stressed about writing for essays topics such as abortion essay or global warming essay because they feel that they need to present all the arguments ever written about the topic. The scope of your essay is limited by your thesis statement, so focus on that.
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Good Essay Writing, Follows the Structure of Human Reasoning
If you think about it, essay writing follows the way we humans find answers or understand the events in this world. We begin with questions, which is usually included in the essay introduction. We don’t start with a blank slate. We have our assumptions from our past experiences and learning. We also love to guess and hypothesize. Then we investigate and research arguments and evidence and this becomes part of the body of the essay. Next, we evaluate and form our findings.
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Finally, from this specific essay question and finding, we don’t just stop and think that it only applies to a specific instance. As humans, we naturally generalize our understanding and experiences. Our brains evolved that way, so we can function and survive in this world. We may have a specific experience about a certain cat, but our understanding of this cat, is used as a general understanding of all cats. We may not even find the answers, but each pursuit of the question, leads us to another path in investigating that question.
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Conclusion- A Better Understanding or Passing the Torch
How to write an essay conclusion? Satisfy your reader’s need to understand your thesis statement. You may not even have the answer to your question and conclude that more research is needed. Your conclusion, however, has led to a better understanding of the phenomena you were investigating, and opened a new path where others may continue the pursuit of knowledge.