Although you may be tempted to hurry through the process of applying for admission, it’s important to keep in mind that the quality of the items you submit can make a difference, even if you qualify for automatic admission.

UT Austin uses a holistic review to make many admission decisions. Even final decisions for some top 10% Texas applicants include a holistic review when decisions about majors are made. During review, we consider every item submitted by an applicant and compare the complete application of each applicant to all the others in that same group. So the quality of your application may be the thing that makes you stand out from the crowd.

The quality of your essays matter – but maybe not in the way you might think. We don’t read your essays to give you a grade – for grammar, spelling, and punctuation, for example. Although those things matter in the overall picture, we’re looking for quality that is much more a reflection of your ability to make a point in an easy-to-understand and clearly stated manner.

Here are some suggestions about writing an essay that’s not only accurate but may make your essay the one that stands out among the thousands that are read each year:

• Don’t tell us what you think we want to hear. The university’s essay readers don’t have a perfect essay in mind – as a matter of fact essays that sound like all the rest of them – the essay that is expected – is more likely to be overlooked.
• Be yourself. Show us what makes you unique, how you’ve dealt with issues and problems, what you think about the topic at hand. Good writing teachers tell their students to write about what they know. That’s good advice for college essays, too.
• Use a natural voice and style. Although it’s always important to use proper grammar, spelling, punctuation, diction, etc., don’t write to try to impress anyone. Use words and a style that are appropriate for the topic you’re writing about, for someone your age, and for someone who’s trying to communicate clearly and logically.
• Don’t be overly informal either. Your essay will be read by an adult professional. In almost all cases, you should avoid using words or phrases that you might use when texting someone or on a social networking site.
• Develop your ideas. Although the length of your essay alone technically doesn’t matter, developing your ideas completely does matter. If you can do that in a single page of text, that’s good; but if it takes you three pages or so, that’s alright, too (as long as you’re not just adding words to make your essay longer). It’s not realistic to assume that you can clearly communicate your unique perspective about anything in a short paragraph or two.
• Organize your thoughts. All good writing has a beginning, a middle, and an end. That doesn’t mean you should be formulaic in your writing (this isn’t a high school exit exam), but you should introduce your idea, provide interesting examples and details in support of your idea, and come to some sort of conclusion at the end.
• Don’t respond to the prompt as though you’re answering a question. Again, we don’t have a perfect essay in mind. The prompt is supposed to get your mind churning, to make you want to tell us what you think about something that’s important to you. Your essay is your opportunity to do that.

Take the time to develop a list of the activities, awards, and responsibilities that you’ve been involved in during high school. We want to know what’s important to you and how you’ve lived out your commitments. Submit an expanded resume of your high school life if you need to do so to communicate everything to us.

In the same way that you wouldn’t want to take a test without having some idea about what was going to be on it and what it would be graded on, you shouldn’t apply for admission without first doing some research to find out what we consider when making admission decisions.

What’s the best way to make sure you get everything done on time?

Start early.

We do our best to publicize deadlines and to help you keep up with the status of your application, but it’s your job to know when things need to be here and to plan ahead so that the items you need to send our way have time to get here by the deadline. Even things that don’t come directly from you (like high school transcripts and test scores) are still your responsibility.