I am finsishing my college essays and I am having a hard time would some tell me how mine is!

The topic is
A. Discuss how your family's experience or cultural history enriched you or presented you with opportunities or challenges in pursuing your educational goals.

OR

B. Tell us a story from your life, describing an experience that either demonstrates your character or helped to shape it.

This has been rewritten so many times and I am stressing out over it because I do not like it no matter what way I write it so some feedback would be much appreciated I only have the weekend to finish it. Thanks much!

Growing up I have lived quite dramatically. My parents were only 19 when they had me and not even a couple. I was thrown back and forth between them. My mom would move us from apartment to apartment and always had some kind of bad boyfriend. School became the only constant thing in my life. School had always felt like an escape and I enjoyed going every day. In every class I tried to get the best grades so I could make my parents proud. By the time I got to high school things were very different. One year my mom was not around and the next she took me away from my father. By the time I was a junior I was working 30-35 hours each week while trying to keep my grades up, but I had to help my mom pay the bills. Suddenly though my mom decided to move my sister and I away from everyone. It was late December and I was still sick after having a severe case of Bronchitis and Influenza. After missing a bunch of school and the last thing I wanted was to leave the town I grew up in.

The holidays were over and I got enrolled in a new high school. I was frightened. A week and a half is all I had to prepare for all my new classes finals. I knew I had to do well because my grades were low from missing so much school before the move. But I was motivated even though the change was having a big impact on me. My grades ended up being as good as I could get them. The move was hard, but I learned a lot from it.

My favorite class during this time became chemistry. When summer started approaching I wanted to find a job that was related to the science field. After a visit to my counselor I found ACS Project Seed and after reading what about it I knew it is what I wanted to do. I applied immediately and waited for a response. A week later I received an email from professor Rasmussen at NDSU. We arranged a time for me to start and that is where my research in chemistry began. It was then I decided what I wanted to go to college for, but without the move I would have never had the experience to do this project and for that I am grateful.

Kaitlyn, unfortunately, the essay that you wrote does not respond to either prompt at this point. It is just too scattered in terms of central theme and discussion development. This problem affected the direction that you wanted to take the prompt in. Actually, the prompt seems to try to answer 3 different prompts with each prompt partially responded do in each paragraph. I don't know how to tell you this after you have told us that you revised this essay many times already but, you really can't use this essay and you need to develop a new one in order to respond to the correct prompt. Don't worry, I won't leave you hanging. I'm going to guide you towards responding to one of the prompts based on the more dominant information in your current essay.

From everything that I read, it seems that we can really direct this prompt to properly respond to prompt B. You have all the elements to tell "a story from your life, describing an experience that either demonstrates your character or helped to shape it." The elements of an interesting essay along this prompt is just under developed in your current essay. For starters, you can open you essay with something like;

"I was born to parents who were not romantically involved with each other. Yes, I am the product of a one night stand." That kind of introduction is eye catching enough to reel in the reviewer. From that point, you can develop the paragraph further by continuing with " My parents were only 19 ... when they had me". Continue your story of being shuffled around from there and how the constant shuffling affected your frame of mind and made you develop questions about your parent's love for you or something along those lines.

Then explain how you ended up in your father's care for a year. Move on to talk about how all of these events in your life helped you develop certain positive traits or characters, I am sure you can decide which positive influences you can discuss. Just focus the essay on your relationship with your parents, it's ups and downs, and the lessons you learned from it.

Close the essay on a positive note, thanking your parents for the way that your upbringing taught you how to rely on yourself and not have to look to others for constant support and assurance, make your personal journey a learning and empowering experience. Then close the essay. Delete the part about your choice of college major as it does not really connect with the story of your life and how it helped you shape the person you have become.

Katlyn, I can see that you have a following here already, it's not so good feedback but at least you have them help you out with your essay.

I believe you spent a lot of time thinking of a lot of ideas and somehow you put them in paper and you think this is the best you got, but you can

definitely enhance it. Sometimes this happens when you rush in things so you can get over with it and close it to move on.

Now, I suggest you tackle essays one step at a time, you're not sure what you want to take on first and that is not good at all.

Be determined and refine your actions towards these essays and meeting deadlines, believe me if you learn to work with this now,
you will be better in the future.

I hope to see your revised essay posted here on EF so we can assist you further.