3 Spectacular Smith College Essay Examples
What’s Covered:
- Essay Example #1 – Lesbian Jesus
- Essay Example #2 – Music and Inspiration
- Essay Example #3 – Music, Unstoppable
- Where to Get Your Smith Essays Edited
Sophie Alina, an expert advisor from CollegeVine advising, provided commentary on this post. Advisors offer one-on-one guidance on everything from essays to test prep to financial aid. If you want help writing your essays or feedback on drafts, check out CollegeVine advising to book a consultation with Sophie Alina or any of our skilled advisors.
Smith College is liberal arts women’s college in Massachusetts. It is one of the Seven Sisters colleges, which is a group of highly selective and historically women’s colleges in the Northeast. As a member of the Five Colleges Consortium, students at Smith also have the opportunity to enroll in courses and participate in extracurriculars through the other colleges in the consortium. Since Smith is a moderately selective college, it’s important to write strong essays so your application stands out.
Please note: Looking at examples of real essays students have submitted to colleges can be very beneficial to get inspiration for your essays. You should never copy or plagiarize from these examples when writing your own essays. Colleges can tell when an essay isn’t genuine and will not view students favorably if they plagiarized.
Essay Example #1 – Music, Lesbian Jesus
Prompt: Music means so many things to so many people. It can bring us joy, inspire us, validate us or heal us. Please tell us about a song or piece of music that is particularly meaningful to you and why. Please include the name of the song/piece and the artist.
Standing in line at a Hayley Kiyoko concert, I knew I was surrounded by girls who had a shared experience with me. Not a single person in the concert hall was heterosexual. That was confirmed a girl asked me, “So, how did you discover our lesbian Jesus?” (a playful nickname fans gave Hayley). I meekly responded that one day, the music video for “Girls Like Girls” showed up in a YouTube sidebar, and the rest was history. Before I came out to my family, I remember feeling impassioned when my father said, “why don’t lesbians just wait for the right man?”. I marched around my house, blasting the chorus at full volume from my phone’s speakers: Girls like girls like boys do, nothing new! The girl told me in response that she found comfort in Hayley’s music when her strict east Asian parents refused to accept her sexuality. “Girls Like Girls” is an anthem of empowerment, and after standing in a concert hall with 2,000 other fans proudly waving small rainbow flags, it became a song that offered a feeling of safety and made me feel comfortable in my sexuality.
What This Essay Did Well
The writer connects music to a song that brought them joy, safety, and empowerment. By including several images (the concert, the conversation with the other girl, the marching around the house), the writer gives the readers rich visuals which help the reader connect to the story.
With the first sentence, the author has us wondering– what’s the shared experience here? By separating the second sentence from the first (“Not a single person in the concert hall was heterosexual”), the writer brings your eye towards one of the big ideas of this essay: community. The writer then includes a play on words (“our Savior Jesus”) with “our lesbian Jesus,” connecting Hayley’s identity as a lesbian to her role as a liberator and empowerment for this student (“lesbian” was also usually capitalized in several Google search results). The writer also cleverly includes a quote from the song, with an exclamation mark, to further highlight their defiance and the contrast of their beliefs to their father’s views.
What Could Be Improved
The quote, “So, how did you discover our lesbian Jesus?” could have been included at the beginning of this essay. It’s an intriguing quote, has a clever play on words, and could have led to the writer’s reminiscences about seeing the video on the YouTube sidebar. I would also have separated “The rest was history” into its own sentence or at least with a semicolon to add more import to this idea of the video as the origin story.
The story about marching around the house could also have been separated into a second, following paragraph. Subtracting the details about the other girl would have allowed the writer to focus more on their own experience– what was their father’s response to the writer’s coming out? How did this response relate to a lyric in the song, if it did? And then how did the song buoy the writer if the response from their father wasn’t the same as they had hoped? It’s important in essays to think about how you can talk about yourself – other details may be interesting, but remember, it’s your story!
Essay Example #2 – Music and Inspiration
Prompt: Music means so many things to so many people. It can bring us joy, inspire us, validate us or heal us. Please tell us about a song or piece of music that is particularly meaningful to you and why. Please include the name of the song/piece and the artist.
The Lumineers’ “Sleep on the Floor” plays as I run down Franklin Street on the beautiful, sixty-degree autumn day.
The indie-folk vibe of the song reminds me of my cousins, sister, and I as we trudged through the rapid, chilly water of the Saco River earlier this summer. We sat on the rocks in the middle of the river, and the warm air juxtaposed my freezing legs. I smiled, remembering us singing this song by the water.
“Take all of our savings out. ‘Cause if we don’t leave this town, we might never make it out.”
“We should hike the Appalachian trail sometime in our lives,” I say. Grace agrees. We love short hikes, but perhaps we should expand our horizons. Hiking the Appalachian would be challenging, but if we trained and researched, we could accomplish this.
“Sleep on the Floor” inspires me to explore my passions: hiking, running, cooking, and math. While running, I love listening to my music, talking with friends, and processing my thoughts. Often, I think about my future. I want to run a marathon, be a teacher, travel, and be a mother. Music helps me think about and get excited for what my future entails.
What the Essay Did Well
The writer gives us so many details about the experiences here – the day is “autumn,” the temperature is sixty degrees, and the water of the Saco River is “chilly.” Details about seasons, temperature, color, and feeling can enrich the essay. I can almost see the writer and their cousin, just hanging out and dreaming.
By including dialogue, the writer also lends their literal voice to the essay; first, this creates an inherent visual similarity with the quote, juxtaposing the dialogue with the quote effectively. Secondly, this also creates a way for the writer to connect with the reader– the reader can “hear” the voice of the writer. (However, the quotes don’t exactly line up in sentiment, though we’ll get to that a little later).
What Could Be Improved
The writer could spend a lot more time talking about how the song relates to adventures the writer has already taken. Where are places the writer has gone? What are hikes they have done, runs they have completed, roles they have played in their lives? One of the biggest things I see with students is talking about what they want to do, without talking about how this relates to things that they have done. Adding more details about what this writer has already done could strengthen this essay significantly.
The sentiment expressed in the song is also about leaving the town now, because otherwise they’ll get stuck. While the author does talk about leaving their town to do the Appalachian trail and explore their passions, the writer does not discuss the sentiment evident in the cited lyric about how these adventures are necessary because otherwise the writer will get stuck. If you’re using a song lyric in an essay to represent you/your dreams/your past, make sure there’s a close alignment between the song and the story that you are telling.
Essay Example #3 – Music, Unstoppable
Prompt: Music means so many things to so many people. It can bring us joy, inspire us, validate us or heal us. Please tell us about a song or piece of music that is particularly meaningful to you and why. Please include the name of the song/piece and the artist.
Dear Sia’s Unstoppable,
Its 2.21am! And I lay down on the front couch, basking in the melody of your beats. More than your beats though, every word in you strikes a chord with my experiences. As a child of a missionary who has lived for 15 years in a community with limited access to essential basics, I go through a lot daily. From taking care of my sick mum to working for hours at the rice field to ensure I remain in school, I have seen the brutality of life in my mere 17 years on earth. Sometimes, I just feel like throwing myself passively back and surrendering my seemingly impossible aspirations to the life my immediate circumstances has determined for me. But during those times, you’ve been a non-stop resource for me.
I am particularly drawn to the lines in you that say, “ I’m powerful, I don’t need batteries to play” because they assure me that despite not having the batteries that typically spur my peers, I can succeed.
I feel in a virtual world with people struggling to succeed despite their circumstances whenever I listen to you.
Thanks for always being there!
PS: I am playing you for the sixth time today❤️
What the Essay Did Well
The first thing that stands out about this essay is the structure. While there are certainly plenty of ways to effectively begin your response more traditionally with an anecdote–like in the examples above–addressing the song directly makes it a character in the student’s life, which underscores just how meaningful it is to them.
The student also includes concrete details that directly answer the prompt’s question, by showing what their love of this song says about who they are as an overall person. With more fun, open-ended prompts like this one, some students can get distracted and forget that they still need to teach admissions officers something about themselves. This student doesn’t fall into that trap, thanks to lines like:
- “More than your beats though, every word in you strikes a chord with my experiences.”
- “Sometimes, I just feel like throwing myself passively back and surrendering my seemingly impossible aspirations to the life my immediate circumstances has determined for me. But during those times, you’ve been a non-stop resource for me.”
- “I am particularly drawn to the lines in you that say, ‘I’m powerful, I don’t need batteries to play’ because they assure me that despite not having the batteries that typically spur my peers, I can succeed.”
Finally, the writer gives this essay a sense of energy and immediacy from the first word to the last one. The lines “Its 2.21am!” and “PS: I am playing you for the sixth time today❤️” make us feel like we are listening to the song right alongside the student, which keeps us engaged.
The heart at the end is another nice touch–the whole point of college essays is to humanize yourself for admissions officers, and typing the way you actually would to a friend is a great way of showing who you are beyond the numbers of your application.
What Could Be Improved
While the first paragraph of the essay does an excellent job of establishing the author’s personal connection to this song, it’s also somewhat scattered. Within just a couple of lines, we learn that:
- The author is the child of a missionary
- They grew up in a community with limited access to basic goods
- Their mother has struggled with an illness
- They have had to work in a rice field to afford school
This is a lot of information to pack into a relatively short essay, as you don’t have the room to provide much elaboration on your points.
Of course, all of these details are clearly important to who the author is. But one of the unfortunate, unavoidable realities of college applications is that they limit how much you can share about yourself. Nobody can capture their whole life story in a handful of essays, a transcript, and an activities list.
Many students feel the urge to cram things in that they haven’t been able to discuss elsewhere. But doing so can actually be counterproductive, as bouncing from one point to another so quickly can give admissions officers whiplash, and cause the essay to feel disjointed rather than like a cohesive unit.
This specific essay, for example, would have felt more unified, and thus could have been even stronger, if the first paragraph instead read something like:
“I have lived 15 years in a community with limited access to essential basics. Sometimes, the night before an assignment was due, I found myself sitting on the roof of my house, grasping at the invisible threads of wifi bypassing my home. Or, during an unseasonable rainstorm, school might be canceled so that we students could help move the crucial food stockpile to dry ground.”
Elaborating on one aspect of the applicant’s experience, rather than rushing through four at once, paints a more vivid picture of their life, which in turn helps us empathize with their struggle more deeply.
Remember, if there is some part of your background that you aren’t able to share in an essay, but that is fundamental to understanding who you are, there is always the Additional Information section. Focus on making your essays unified, and heavy on anecdotes, and use this section to provide any further details that you feel your application would be incomplete without.
Note: The author of this essay is not a native English speaker, so we do not mention the minor grammatical errors. Admissions officers understand that students writing in a second language may make mistakes that a native speaker would not, and thus are unlikely to penalize them for such mistakes.
Where to Get Your Smith Essays Edited
Do you want feedback on your Smith essays? After rereading your essays countless times, it can be difficult to evaluate your writing objectively. That’s why we created our free Peer Essay Review tool, where you can get a free review of your essay from another student. You can also improve your own writing skills by reviewing other students’ essays.
If you want a college admissions expert to review your essay, advisors on CollegeVine have helped students refine their writing and submit successful applications to top schools. Find the right advisor for you to improve your chances of getting into your dream school!
