By Edward Humes

College Essay 101: When you’re done, no one but you should be able to put a name at the top.

“How honest should I be?” Angela asks, without preamble, and I am momentarily perplexed.

“I need to know how honest I should be on my essay,” she explains. “I’m really afraid of screwing everything up. Is it possible to be too honest?”

Angela’s concerns abruptly slip into focus with the magic word “essay,” which is often enunciated around here as if accompanied by a noxious taste. Much of the Whitney High School senior class is in an obsessive panic over this late autumn ritual – the final, procrastinated step in the college application process. More than finals, more than college boards, more than Advanced Placement exams, or calculus Saturdays, or even Mr. Bohannon’s notorious history make-up tests for the attendance-impaired, many students of Whitney High fear and loathe the personal essay.

“Why don’t you show me what you’ve written?” I ask Angela, playing it safe, meeting question with neutral question. “Then we can talk.”

Her eyes widen at the mere suggestion. “Oh, no, I can’t show it to you! I ripped it up as soon as I finished. It was too personal.”

The personal essay shredded for being personal: This is the third time I’ve heard that same odd complaint since the start of the school year, when the principal first recruited me as a volunteer for an after-school, essay-writing workshop. The kids wasted little time letting me know how few other milestones in their college application marathon rival the stress induced by the abhorrent task of crafting a well-written (or at least passably readable) autobiographical page or two or three. Even some of the straight-A students at this top-ranked public high school in Cerritos, California, confess they don’t feel up to the task of hinging their future on 750 well-chosen words. They are supremely capable test-takers in an era when standardized exams dictate everything from a child’s educational future to a school district’s future budget, but such tests are all about reading, not writing. Constructing logical beginnings, middles and ends is no longer a schoolhouse priority (which may be why Harvard University, among others, requires all undergrads to take a course in expository writing). Yet college admissions offices continue to up the essay ante with portentous guidelines, such as this typical advisory from UCLA, a favorite Whitney destination: “Your personal statement is the best tool you have to show us the individual gifts you have to offer… a two-page opportunity for us to see the real you.” So much rides on these essays — or so Angela and her peers seem to think — that the large, blank sections of their college applications have become a focal point for all the angst, insecurity and pressure pumped into college admissions since their parents’ generation ambled through a much more relaxed version of the process.

Tom Brock, Whitney’s congenitally upbeat psychologist-turned-principal, somehow failed to mention the minefield nature of all this when he signed me up. “They’ll love having you,” he assured. “Have some fun with it.” When I parroted this notion to the kids, suggesting they look at their essays as a chance to relax and have fun with otherwise extremely formal applications, they stared at me as if I were insane. “Why don’t you just ask us to take off our shoes and have fun walking on broken glass?” one young man finally replied. It would have been funnier if were smiling when he said it.

Essay anxiety seems particularly intense at top academic settings such as Whitney, where the kids rank among the nation’s highest achievers (familiar refrain: My life will be over if I don’t get into Harvard/Yale/MIT) and where ultra-ambitious parents harbor the highest of expectations (How will we face our friends and family if you don’t get into Harvard/Yale/MIT?). The school’s college counselor runs an information-gathering network the CIA would envy, keeping everyone primed with up-to-the-minute admissions-office intelligence on how to construct (on paper, at least) the ideal applicant. Such knowledge is intended to help ease the pressure, but this year it’s having the opposite effect, as the most recent ivory tower intell makes toast of some long-held assumptions. Foremost among these is the mantra that the Ivy League and other top schools covet something called the well-rounded student; the revelation that this is no longer the case has reduced to jelly all the basketball-playing, band-marching, church-volunteering, soup-kitchen-staffing, math-tutoring students like Angela with their inch-thick résumés and over-scheduled lives. These are the kids who spent years amassing bone-crushing hours of extracurricular activities in order to appear triumphantly well-rounded in their personal essays, only to learn the same colleges that demanded all this have suddenly realized they had created an exercise in joyless resume padding. Now the counselor is telling everyone that the ideal applicant is supposed to pursue a great passion – one deeply loved activity, two at the most, mastered with dedication and verve, with some room left over for having a life. The sense of betrayal at this turn-about is painful to behold in kids whose march to college began, in some cases, with after-school academies while still in kindergarten: “I gave up having a life because that’s what they wanted us to do,” a student in my workshop agonizes, as he tries to select one of his many passionless pursuits as a new great passion. “Now they say, never mind?”

A second buzzword at the top of the college counselor’s intell list is challenges: Many admissions offices have let it be known they now welcome essays less about triumphs and more about difficulties students have faced in life (other than the exhausting rigors of appearing well-rounded). In a post-affirmative action age, this is one way colleges can still advantage the disadvantaged. But how, Angela wants to know, do you walk the line between a tale of challenges and a plea for pity? “Or is that what they want,” she demands. “A pity party?”

A few of her friends have reached deep in grappling with this one: Budding filmmaker Sharleen writes of having a serial abandoner for a father, a man who time and again raised and crushed his daughter’s hopes for a reunited family, ultimately forcing her to find comfort in a soaring imagination. “Now I could be imprisoned in an empty, pure white room and enjoy it,” she writes. “A lot can happen in that room.” Cecilia writes gorgeously of her nervousness about volunteering to teach an arts and crafts class at a nursing home, where the determination of an arthritic old man named J.T. helped put her own artistic struggles into perspective: “I walked behind him and slipped my fingers through the large loopholes of the scissors to guide him through the lines of the pattern, and he rewarded me with a smile that turned his lips up and crinkled the crow’s feet around his rheumy brown eyes.” But those glimpses of life and heart seem to be the exceptions. Most of the kids come to my workshop desperately veering between numbing cliché — I love to face challenges in life. That’s what makes life interesting! — and the foolhardy confessional — I started stealing things, but I got careless… I knew once those handcuffs were on me that I was done.

Angela has struggled as much as anyone. She shared her first draft with me a few weeks earlier, a sad little recollection of all the times she had to wait until after five o’clock for a ride home from school, left to doodle comic strips while sitting on the carpeted hallway floors outside locked classrooms. When she was old enough to drive, she made a point of offering rides to younger students who were similarly stranded by busy working parents, and much of the essay is spent telling one of their stories instead of her own. She titled the piece, “Rescue Me,” yet wrote in a dispassionate, clinical voice, as if her life were a lab experiment, revealing few of her own thoughts, feelings or motivations. Reading it, you would never know the writer played violin, piano and drums superbly, or that the art teacher considered her one of the most gifted students at Whitney, or that she makes many of her own clothes, or that she had spent the summer in an impoverished Mexican village, teaching in Spanish and staging plays for the children. She spends hours of her own time hanging student artwork around the school building, showing off the accomplishments of others. She lives a kind of daily culture war, the American teenager with the immigrant parents, the artist in a school of scientists and mathematicians – keeping up by studying long into the night, then maniacally painting until dawn. Yet she had reduced herself in this essay to a whiny teenager whose only assets are a grudge and a set of car keys.

I had suggested she start anew, that she needed to put more Angela into Angela’s essay, which momentarily seemed to surprise and please her, though a short time later she frowned and said, “Be careful what you wish for.”