How to Ace Your Private School Writing Sample: Be True to Yourself

Between working in the Admission Office and spending a decade facilitating high school creative writing workshops outside of Dana Hall School, I believe I’m in the highest quartile of readers of young people’s writing (non-teacher category) in the country. Whether they’re applying as a middle schooler or upper school student, everyone who applies to Dana Hall School interviews with a member of the Admission Office, and each applicant who interviews completes a writing sample during their time speaking with the team. Afterwards, I read each writing sample and add it to the student’s application. Reading writing samples is one of my favorite parts of the process. Sometimes a student will tell me she’s nervous about doing a writing sample, and the funny thing is, if I could give her one piece of advice, I’d tell her the same thing I tell the high schoolers in my creative writing workshops: write something that only you can write and be true to yourself.

Writing samples are opportunities for us to see another side of a student that’s not otherwise reflected by letter grades, test scores, or a math teacher recommendation. We want to know what’s most important to her. Whether she’s writing a story about her triumphs on the basketball court at summer camp, or how she dealt with the disappointment of not being cast in the play, we in the Admission Office will come away with a better understanding of who that student is by reading her writing sample. The impromptu nature of the writing means we’re not expecting a multi-drafted, edited and revised essay. Instead, we want to hear her off-the-cuff thoughts. Take, for example, a fifth-grade applicant who used her writing sample to propose solar powered jets as an effective aid against climate change. We in the Admission Office understand that there are current limitations (consequences of physics and current-solar battery technology) that make this option unlikely to replace jet travel at the present moment. But from this writing sample we were able to intuit a number of things about the student: she had an interest in the environment, and she was a dreamer. The idea showed she was making connections—if solar energy reduces the amount of greenhouse gases, and jet fuel increases it, then we should replace jet fuel with solar energy. And what’s more, a quick Google search shows there are a number of prototypes of solar-powered aircraft in the nascent stages of development. The idea wasn’t outlandish. It was just early. 

My double life as a writer and a member of the Admission Office means that I am, like the insurance salesman Wallace Stevens and physician William Carlos Williams before me, a poet with a job. Practicing medicine in New Jersey, Williams would famously steal away to his typewriter for 15 minutes between patients to compose his works. We know that every student who completes a writing sample is a multi-hyphenated person—she’s a sister, and a swimmer, and a granddaughter, and a friend, and a person who has experienced disappointment. It would be impossible to say it all in just a few words. But a writing sample gives us a glimpse at another side of a student’s life. Fifteen or twenty minutes might not be enough time to tell us everything about herself, but it might be just enough to give us another window into her life.