my library experience essay

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Essay On Library

Library means a house of books. But its true meaning is the centre of precious knowledge. It's a treasure trove of new and old ideas and insights. People who come here not only spend their time, but also expand their wealth of knowledge.People spend their whole day in library to gain knowledge in different subjects to enhance their skills. Here are a few sample essays on the topic “Library”.

100 Words Essay On Library

Our college has a really big library. There are over 10,000 books. I regularly read in the library. This place is the quietest and calmest place in the college. I feel really good when I'm there. There are two librarians who manage all the data. You can issue any book home. The library is constantly catalogued by trained staff. They are catalogued to meet community needs. Since the catalogue is also entered and saved on the computer, searching becomes easy.

You must become a member for a small annual fee to issues books and use the computer for educational purposes.There are many different kinds of books in the library.I read mostly science and history books. I am a big book lover and love reading these books at the library.I love to check out new books which come in our library every month.

200 Words Essay on Library

A library is a storehouse of books. It offers a variety of sources to read on the premises or borrow to take home.Library's collection includes books, manuscripts, journals, magazines and videos, audio, DVD, and various other formats of information. A wide variety of books are stored in the library and arranged in order on the bookshelves. You can't have that many books at home as you can have in a library. You can access various genres of books and other resources in a library. Libraries also eliminates the need to purchase expensive books and resources. Without libraries, many students who love to read would have been deprived of reading.

Importance Of Libraries | A library is a building filled with piles of books and resources. Modern libraries are also made up of electronic resources. Libraries provide a wealth of knowledge, resources, space and environment to discover and learn about the world of books, or just read for fun. Libraries have countless benefits as they play a key role in helping people by providing access to information, knowledge and entertainment resources. Libraries are an important part of educational institutions such as schools, colleges and universities. Such libraries are open to students of the institute to which they belong. As such, it contains a wide range of resources that are important to students. Libraries attract students to read new books and novels. They increase your thirst for reading and broaden your knowledge. Libraries are also essential for all types of research on various subjects. Libraries are therefore important for research, information, knowledge and the enjoyment of reading.

500 Words Essay on Library

Libraries are treasure troves of knowledge. A well-stocked library is an asset to any school, college, university, or neighbourhood. A library is a place where not only books but also magazines and newspapers are available.

Purpose Of Library

A school library is a place within a school where students, teachers, and other staff can access books and other resources. The purpose of the school library is therefore to provide all members of the school with equal access to books, resources and information technology. Throughout history, libraries have played an important role in imparting knowledge.They facilitate the social, educational and cultural growth of students. A school library differs from other public and private libraries in that its primary purpose is to support and enhance the school curriculum. School libraries support student learning and helps with the student academic performance.Teachers and students need library resources and services to enhance their knowledge. School libraries support both teachers and students and are essential to the teaching and learning process.

My First Library Experience

If you want a quiet place to work, the library is a great place. I like going to the library because it enhances my existing knowledge and the books there interest me a lot. A walk to the library clears my head and allows me to see things more clearly. In addition to this, there are many books there that are accessible to the public and can be issued home. Libraries make for a great quiet workplace.

I like reading about physics so I always start browsing from the physics section first. A library is the place where I can read peacefully and research on a particular topic. Most of the time I prefer to study in the library because it’s peaceful and less crowded. I like reading fictional novels and engineering books and the library near my place is stocked with all the books that I need.

Importance Of School Libraries

School libraries provide quality fiction and non-fiction books that encourage more reading for enjoyment. They also contribute to our intellectual, artistic, cultural and social development.The atmosphere of the school library invites you to study undisturbed and make the most of your time.This makes it easier for us to learn faster and understand better.

It provides teachers with access to professional development, relevant information, and reference materials for planning and implementing effective study programmes. School libraries provide education and entertainment to students, professionals, and other members of the school. No matter what your financial situation is, you can come here and have free access to books that will inform you and change you for the better.

The use of the school/university and research library is limited to that particular school. Although restricted to college students only, state and local libraries are open to all, and anyone can use these libraries during working hours. It is no exaggeration to say that a library is a place where books of all kinds and subjects are kept under one roof.

Need For Libraries

It is important to get into the habit of going to the library regularly. School libraries are the place where we can study a lot of things.Library is the place where students learn new things. Libraries provide each student with easy access to essential resources and learning materials for a smooth learning process. It plays an important role in student’s life. Education and libraries cannot exist in isolation, they are two sides of the same coin. Libraries are an integral part of the education system.

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School Education /

Essay on Library: 100, 200 and 250 Words

Updated on
Apr 24, 2024

A Library is a place where students and people interested in reading books visit very often. It constitutes several collections of books of variable genres to please the reader. The library is the in-person source of information. It is an easily accessible place for students and raiders. Every school and college has a library with multiple books. Besides that, it is economical for the students. This article will provide an essay on library for students and children studying in schools. Enjoy Reading.

Table of Contents

1 Sample Essay on Library
2 100 Words Essay on Library
3 200-250 Words Essay on Library
4 Short Essay on Library

Sample Essay on Library

The library is an important place for the community. It includes books, newspapers, magazines, manuscripts, DVDs, and more such informational sources. It plays a significant role in the kid’s learning phase. Despite the advancement in technology , the library still plays a critical role in everyone’s life. One can borrow books from the library. There are two types of libraries one is a private library that is controlled by the school and college authorities, whereas the other is a public library that is open to all.

100 Words Essay on Library

A library is a place where books belonging to different subjects and genres are stored. My school also has a very big library next to the computer lab. Our timetable is designed in such as format that we could visit the library twice a week and explore books apart from our syllabus. This practice of visiting and exploring books in the library induces a habit of reading in all the students.

My school library has autobiographies, picture books, comics, novels, fictional books, books on culture, art, and craft, and many other materials. Students can borrow the desirable book to read for one week and then, on a specific date we need to return that book to the school library. Thus, the library teaches us the value and importance of books and inculcates the habit of reading and imparting knowledge.

200-250 Words Essay on Library

The library is the place where people come together to learn and gain knowledge. Books are arranged on large bookshelves. Books belonging to similar genres are arranged on the same shelf by the librarian. The librarian is in charge of the library.

Some libraries have digital software to keep track of books issued and received to and from the library. Owing to technological advances, books are nowadays available on online platforms. Readers can read the book on apps like Kindle. But still, the library has its role, it is easily accessible plus it will provide a trustworthy source of information.

Good raiders prefer books to read in their physical form as they cherish the quality of pages, type of writing , and the authenticity of book covers. Thus, the library plays an important role in the student’s as well as adults’ life.

Every school allots specific hours for students to visit and read books from the library so that they can induce reading habits from childhood itself. Students also refer to books from the library to complete their assignments or summer vacation homework.

There are set rules and regulations of the library. Generally, we are not allowed to talk so that readers won’t get distracted and lose their pace of reading. Besides that, if any book issued from the library gets misplaced, damaged, or lost from the borrower then, he/she has to pay a fine to the librarian.

Thus, the library is an excellent resource for books that spread knowledge and information along with entertainment .

Also Read: One Nation One Election Essay in 500 Words

Short Essay on Library

Also Read: Speech on President of India for School Students in English

A. The library plays a critical part in every individual starting from the school itself. It helps in developing the overall personality because reading books and gaining knowledge help people to make a good career.

A. Include points like what is a library, why books are important, and the importance of a library in the life of students and children. Divide your essay into three parts introduction, body, and conclusion. End the concluding paragraph on a positive note.

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Essay on My School Library for Students and Children

500+ words essay on my school library.

A school library is a structure within the school that houses a collection of books, audio-visual material and other content that serves common use to meet the educational, informative and recreational needs of the users. The chief objective of libraries is to meet the academic needs of the particular educational institution which it serves. Besides serving students in their studies and teachers in their research school, libraries aim at creating interest in reading amongst the students who get the best of resources and environment here.

Types of Books

The types of books we can have access to in school libraries are fiction books , non-fiction books, reference books, literature books, biographies, General Knowledge books, Fables and folktales, cookbooks and craft books, poetry books, books in a series, and wordless books.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Importance of School Librar y

It provides us with quality fiction and nonfiction books that encourage us to read more for pleasure and enrich our intellectual, artistic, cultural, social and emotional growth. The ambiance of the school library is perfect for learning without getting disturbed.

This makes it easy for us to learn and grasp faster. It provides teachers the access to professional development, relevant information and reference material to plan and implement effective learning programs.

Thus. School library is helpful to every member of the school community whether its students, teachers or any other staff member. It helps gain skills and knowledge for personal development .

School library has a positive impact on the academic performance of the students. It helps us develop the overall skills necessary to succeed in the modern-day digital and social environment. It is important to develop the habit of visiting the library regularly.

Role of a School Librarian

Librarian has an important role to play in the effective functioning of the school library. Librarian has the essential skills to guide and support the library users learning, and help them develop into independent readers and learners. School librarian mainly performs the role of a teacher, information specialist, instructional partner, and program administrator.

Librarians are not merely the caretakers of books anymore they are the consultants, information providers, instructional readers, curriculum designers, and teachers. They can help students in achieving their goals.

The setup of the libraries has also changed into more like classroom setup. The role of the school librarian is to empower others with resources, information, skills, and knowledge and establish flexible learning and teaching environment .

School librarian is like teaching staff and has a vital role to play in supporting literacy and impact students’ learning in a positive way. School librarian supports the learning of the students and helps them develop into efficient independent learners and readers.

Library and Education are Interrelated

Education and library are interrelated and fundamentally co-exist with each other. Education is the process of gaining knowledge, values, skills, habits, and beliefs. It is the social process in which children are subjected to the influence of the school environment to attain social competence personnel development.

Education is the outcome of the knowledge and experience acquired. Library, on the other hand, is the source and storehouse of knowledge, information, and resources vital for the leap in the advancement of knowledge. Libraries enhance the cause of education and research.

A library plays an important role in meeting the growing needs of people in literacy. The library is essential for self-education, a means of information and knowledge. Education is the complex social process of gaining knowledge and experience formally. In involves a system used for the development of the students. Library provides spiritual, inspirational, informative and interesting reading experience.

The library facilitates each student with access to essential resources and learning material for a smooth learning process. It plays a vital role in a student’s life. The design, modern tools, and strategies of the school libraries change with the changing times. The library is thus a leap in the advancement of the literacy provided in classrooms. Education and library cannot exist alone and are inseparable. The library is an essential part of the educational system.

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Are you redefining the library experience?

Karen Hinton
24 January 2023
Community engagement
Librarianship

Next blog header image for Global Council area of focus post

Change has been a constant for libraries around the world for many decades now. But during the past few years, the pace has clearly accelerated. How do these changes, and our responses to them, shape library experiences?

This year’s OCLC Global Council area of focus explores this important question. We’ll take a deep dive into how experiences have shifted and how library workers are purposefully redefining resources and services.

As we prepare to gather your insights related to this year’s area of focus, “Redefining the library experience,” we asked our 2022–2023 Global Council leaders to provide some personal perspectives—especially with what they, and we, can do to be more intentional about identifying and innovating around these changes. Below are some of the highlights from their discussion.

Communication is critical

The library as community and research hub

Matthijs added, “The pandemic has brought to light issues about accessibility of public services, trust in institutions, and social injustice. In my opinion, libraries are qualified to take the lead in dialogues about public values. Library virtues—like reliability and trustworthiness—are more important than ever beyond the context of traditional library services.”

Supporting users’ changing needs

Some of our leaders’ reflections made it clear that pre-pandemic trends—like the growth of virtual access and importance of open content—have accelerated. Even those who preferred physical collections learned to navigate parallel digital options once the need arose, and that shift may well become permanent for many.

Michael added, “I believe that academic librarians have realized that we should have been thinking about course materials more intentionally. I’m excited that we’re now often the leaders on campus in championing open educational resources (OER).”

Join the conversation

A survey on this theme —open to anyone working in a library, anywhere in the world—is available until through 28 February, 2023. If you haven’t already, please provide your important perspective. Later in the year, we’ll consolidate responses and provide an overview of how you and your colleagues are helping to redefine library experiences.

I also invite you to attend one of our webinars , where we’ll discuss changing library experiences and related topics in more depth.

We relied on the framework presented in the New Model Library: Pandemic Effects and Library Directions when designing this year’s area of focus. It’s a helpful way to think about changes in your own library. We encourage you to review the report and the learner guide .

Share your comments and questions on Twitter with hashtag #OCLCnext .

Tags: Change Management , Community Engagement , Leadership , Librarianship , Membership

Academic Librarian

On libraries, rhetoric, poetry, history, & moral philosophy, a career in a life.

In addition to a lot of time to meditate, my last year of serious illness has given me a lot of time to think, including about my job and career. I seem to be of the age where people start considering what they’ve done with their life so far, and evaluating whether it was worth doing and whether they were successful at it. What does it mean to have a successful career? The question can’t really be answered until the end of a career, since even thriving careers can end badly, but there are at least two ways to evaluate success before the end: inner-directed and outer-directed. (One can think of these perspectives as based on authenticity or conformity, but those terms are much more loaded.) I have adopted the inner-directed approach where success depends partly on how you interpret your own career, on the story you can tell about your career within the story of your life.

The outer-directed evaluation is the most common and the hardest to escape given that we’re individuals within a profession and professionals within a broader society of professionals. Both of those social contexts can provide criteria for evaluation. How do we rank compared to other academic librarians, especially ones of our own age/experience cohort? And how do we as academic librarians compare to other professions, especially those to which we might have aspired?

Like many people who become academic librarians, I started out on a more traditional path to academia. Had I not decided during my graduate study in English that the chances of getting a tenure-track job I would want were extremely small, and if I had continued on the track I was on, and if I had despite the odds been successful, I would have become an English professor, probably of early modern British literature. Would I have been happy in that career? Probably as happy as I am now. But I decided my chances of gainful employment were too slim to make it worth the effort, so I left grad school after my M.A., and the world lost the opportunity of getting another Shakespeare scholar. I’d already decided in college that my chances in English were better than in my other love philosophy, so the world had already lost the opportunity of getting another philosophy professor. The world doesn’t seem any worse off.

Would my career have been more successful as a professor than as an academic librarian? Certainly professors are higher in the academic hierarchy than librarians (I’m skipping the faculty librarian debate). They generally make more money and have more social prestige. However, as a professor I would still have had others with which to compare myself, since professors are far from equal. Had I ended up at a small state university, I could still have thought, “if only I were a professor at Harvard or Princeton, then I would really be successful!” Or I could have been a moderately paid English professor looking at my colleagues in the business school and irritated that I wasn’t paid as much as them. And, possibly, I just wouldn’t have been very good at it.

However, an honest comparison of my prospects might not be between English professor and academic librarian, but between academic librarian and adjunct writing instructor. Here the story changes considerably. I understand the motivation of people who would rather teach for low pay without benefits or job security, who would rather identify as a professor than anything else despite their tenuous employment. I love teaching, even the academic grunt work of teaching writing, and most of my years as a librarian I’ve also taught either in a writing program or in a library school. Discussing difficult texts with interested undergraduates is a great pleasure, but I would rather be an academic librarian with a full time job and benefits than an adjunct writing instructor with neither, and those were probably the best options within the competing careers I was likely to achieve while remaining in academia. So am I more successful or less than I might have been?

The other outer-directed evaluation is with other academic librarians. A frequently used criterion is moving up, where “up” always means into administration. It’s an objective fact that in any library there can be only one library director, and at best only a handful of high level middle managers even in a large organization, and those librarians are at or near the top of their profession in an easily measured way. So attractive is this model that librarians often uproot their lives and move every few years to advance in their careers. By this standard, my career so far hasn’t been too successful. I’ve spent my 18 professional years doing variations on the same kind of work, and 16 of those years doing it at the same library, because I like what I do and better opportunities haven’t come along.

There are other ways to measure the success of academic librarians in an outer-directed fashion, ways in which I’m not such a loser I guess. I could compare institutional prestige, for example. I moved up in a sense when I moved from Gettysburg to Princeton, but like a lot of liberal arts colleges in small towns Gettysburg has its attractions, and had I not been locked in a professional battle to the death with my then supervisor, I might have stayed a lot longer than I did. And my first few years at Princeton weren’t much easier than my fraught time at Gettysburg, so I learned early on there’s no library workplace utopia. Besides, the institution doesn’t confer value on the individual; the individual creates value for the institution.

Academic librarians also have the opportunity to compare themselves via their scholarship, reputation, professional service, etc. Here I fair moderately at best. I’ve published some, and I’m pleased with what I’ve published, but it’s out of the mainstream of library science publications and my impact has been minor. I’ve presented some, but not much compared to more prominent academic librarians. I’ve been active in professional organizations, but I’m unlikely ever to be president of ACRL, so how successful could I really be? Within my own institution, I’ve earned two rank promotions, but what difference does that really make? I’m surrounded by smart, capable people on the same route. By these standards, I’m more successful than some other librarians, but much less successful than a lot of others. And yet, I’m very satisfied with my career, so whence comes my professional satisfaction?

I have tried never to evaluate my life or career by the standards or accomplishments of other people. Jobs always have outer-directed aspects to them. Part of living peacefully in society is conforming to at least some social conventions, and part of being employed in a capitalist society is pleasing other people. My library has rules and procedures for advancement as do most libraries, and I’ve tried to comply with those rules. I try to fulfill the expectations others have for my work without falling into bad faith, without “playing at being a librarian” in a Sartrean sense, but I conform to those expectations as much as I need to. In other words, I’m not a rebellious outsider chafing against the rules, mostly because I chose a profession where I agree with the rules. Professional longevity, if not success, is inevitably judged by some conformity. You can’t have a career if you can’t get or keep a job.

However, most of the time I conform to the expectations by chance rather than by design. To the extent that I’m successful in my work, I’m successful because I believe the work I do has value and because it fits into a larger life project, and it’s that larger life project from which I derive much of my meaning, purpose, satisfaction, ikigai , or whatever one might want to call it. I’m good at what I do because I like and value what I do and it exploits skills that I would have developed regardless of my job.

The overarching life project that has motivated most of my professional decisions over the years could be described as self-cultivation through the study of humanity, an engagement with Culture as Matthew Arnold defined it, “a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue in following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of following them mechanically.” Academic libraries and the access to scholarship they provide are important for that life project. I want to be able to research any subject that I fancy in any depth I desire.

Furthermore, because I believe in the life-enhancing importance and value of such research, I want to help others to achieve that goal. Hence, building research collections and helping people use them–a significant goal of research libraries and a big part of my work–is satisfying to me. Being a part of a larger enterprise that has given my life such meaning gives my career meaning as well, at least based on my own standards. In an address on the idea of the university , the rhetorician Wayne Booth said that “the academy attracts those who aspire to omniscience.” I’m one of those people. To paraphrase Aristotle, Wayne by nature desires to know, and the academy attracted me like a moth to a warm, bright light.

Thus, it didn’t matter that much for my own career satisfaction whether I became an English professor, a philosophy professor, an adjunct writing instructor, or an academic librarian, although being outside of academia might have been less satisfying. I am not my job. My life isn’t my career. My life doesn’t become meaningful because I’m a librarian; I work as a librarian because it fits well into the larger project that does provide meaning for my life. When I was an adjunct writing instructor prior to library school, I wasn’t dissatisfied with my work. Gladly would I learn and gladly teach. I made considerably less money, and there’s a sense in which I sold out to become a librarian (just as I sold out to go to grad school in English instead of philosophy), but money for me has always been what Stoics call a preferred indifferent. I probably make more in a few years than my parents made in their working lives combined, but I was still pretty happy pursuing my studious life course when I was an impoverished grad student.

This happiness isn’t about the subjective well being that positive psychologists study. It comes from interpreting my life in a eudaimonic sense. Eudaimonia is usually translated as “happiness.” One article on positive psychology I read recently went so far as to claim that for Aristotle, eudaimonia was just the word he used for happiness, but it’s the other way around. I do like a definition formulated by another psychologist, Carol Ryff, who wrote that “the essence of eudaimonia” is “the idea of striving toward excellence based on one’s unique potential,” in Nietzsche’s phrasing, “becoming who you are.” Although I’ve written about the calm and joy when dealing with adversity that Stoic Zen stuff brings, I’ve long understood my life and my career in existentialist terms and interpret eudaimonia within them: facticity and transcendence, authenticity and Bad Faith, anxiety and guilt, freedom and responsibility. Our potential transcendence is always circumscribed by the world we’ve been thrown into, our facticity. Eudaimonia comes, possibly, from making the most of that to shape our lives within values we choose. We might have anxiety facing our possible choices, and experience existential guilt that we didn’t choose other than the way we did, but ultimately we’re free to choose and live better lives when we take responsibility for those choices, even though we had to make them within more or less narrow circumstances.

Regardless of my subjective well being at any given time, or how much of a success or failure I might be by various outer-directed criteria, if I interpret my career in the sense of striving towards excellence based upon my unique potential, I can be happy with it both in itself and in how it fits into my life as a whole. I made most of my major life and career choices not because they made sense by someone else’s standards, but because I understood them at the time either to enhance, or at least not interfere with, the projects and roles I chose to give meaning to my life. Even now, I feel confident I could use my library experience and my rhetorical skills to work in sales and make a lot more money. By the world’s standards, that would make me more successful, but the work wouldn’t align as well with my life projects and so would at best be a distraction. More money, or a bigger house, or a more expensive car, wouldn’t make me significantly happier. I could afford a bigger house or more expensive car than I have now, but the only reason to buy them would be to impress other people whose values I don’t respect precisely because they’re the sort of people who are impressed by big houses and expensive cars. Even if they made me happier in a hedonic sense in the short term, I would probably get used to them eventually and lose that happiness. Such is the hedonic treadmill.

Moving up in libraries would be just fine as long as the work still supported the research mission, but the last job opportunity I explored for that left me so disgusted with the person I would have reported to that I deliberately but subtly sabotaged my interview so that I wouldn’t even be offered the job. If I’m happy, in both a hedonic and eudaimonic sense, with my work, there’s no reason for me to leave just to move up. However, I like it when people I respect and value move up, and I’m glad when they find meaning in their work. I don’t think they’re more successful than others because they’re further up the hierarchy; I think they’re more successful than others because they find meaning and satisfaction in work worth doing. I judge their success by the same subjective standards by which I judge my own. For those of us who find meaning and satisfaction in our work, what objective standards make sense for judging relative success? I do question the motivation of people who move up because they think that’s what they’re supposed to do, to conform with the expectations of what Heidegger calls Das Man, “the They,” or the ones who want to move up because they want to control everyone. They’re the ones who’ll be the most unhappy with their work, and probably make others unhappy in the process.

You can successfully engage in life projects of your own choosing, even within your natural and social limits, and be successful and happy without feeling good all the time, maybe even most of the time, and without achieving what others think you should have achieved. As the Buddha said , “all experience is preceded by mind, led by mind, made by mind.” What matters is how you interpret your career. Think of life as a narrative. In the story we can tell about our lives, a story for all of us not yet finished, does the story make sense? Does it have meaning? Does the main character develop? Do the plans and choices ultimately come together in a satisfying form, regardless of how random or chaotic they might seem at the time? Does the main character learn from mistakes or keep making the same ones? Does it look like the story will end well? And how does the career fit into the larger story? Whether I have a successful career depends partly on the story I tell myself, or at least that’s the story I tell myself.

Descriptive Essay about Library

This descriptive essay will paint a vivid picture of a library, detailing its atmosphere, architecture, and the experience of being in such a space. It will explore the sensory elements of the library, such as the sight of rows of books, the smell of old pages, and the quiet ambiance. The piece will aim to evoke the emotional and intellectual connections people often have with libraries. At PapersOwl too, you can discover numerous free essay illustrations related to Architecture.

How it works

I had just made a step into the library through the unfamiliar large doors. I made my first step in and looked around I saw many diverse groups of students sitting others studying. The windows were huge at the back of the library and it gave a magnificent outstanding look while bringing in a powerful light into the library. Artificial plants and trees stood almost in every corner of the library, giving it a beautiful and unique look. On the floor was a comfy and thick carpet that made the sound of people walking not to disturb students who were focused studying in the library, all the books in the library were properly organized in an alphabetic order.

It was easier for students to find a specific book without wasting their time looking for it. Different types of wooden pieces of furniture existed in the library, each of the wooden pieces served a different purpose, high chairs and tables was for the comfort of tall students and those who used their computer devices, Wide chairs found near the huge windows were meant for those whom they would like to read with a natural light coming from the windows, Along with other diverse pieces of furniture existed and each one served an important duty.

The library smell was different. I could smell new ideas as I stepped in , powerful smell of imagination from the books that lay on different shelves that was to be read, The antique smell of the pages of old books, the untouched books lying on the shelves, the smell of the dust coming from these books, The food that students brought with them to the library, The smell of cologne and perfume of the students walking next to me, the smell of sweat of the students involved in a sport activity, scents from the pleasant to the wretched, The distinct smell of the unwashed clothes along with the cigarette smell made me depressed in no time once it crossed my nose. All these kind of smells mixed together made the library full of life because of different kind of smells, without these smells in the library it would be lifeless, I could not imagine myself being fitted there and smell nothing, that is just impossible.

The touch on the smooth bindings of the ancient and new books offered me a whole new perspective on books, The feeling of overused papers and books gave me a strange new look, even though it was old, the weights differed from each other, there were some thick others were heavier and it made it harder to carry around while the light ones were easier to walk around with. The old tables I sat on had many sharp splinters and rough surfaces and I could see and feel them every time I sat there to study. Being situated in the library I could feel the carpet underneath my feet, it was so comfortable to step on and walk on it. The piece of cloth on the chairs made with the finest material for the convenience of the students, I could sit and study all day long on these chairs and never feel any discomfort on my back, the different wooden pieces within the library were clean and smooth, some had graffiti drawn on them by the students, but almost every piece of wood in the library had individual graffiti.

As I study I could hear nothing but the quiet peaceful sounds of paper turning and minds thinking at their best, the sound of the copying machines kept going all day long unstoppable, the air conditioner turning on and off, the sound of the moving leaves of the artificial trees every time the air conditioner hits it, the students buzzing around like I was near a hive of bees punctuated by a few louder statements from the librarian to make the students lower their voices so others could focus, the whispering among the students, the chairs scraping against the floor each time a student moves, I could hear the snoring of the sleeping students, the different laughs people made.`

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From the President

Recollecting My Library ... and My Self

William Cronon | Nov 1, 2012

For all of us who love books, which I assume includes most of my fellow historians, Benjamin describes an essential truth about the scholarly life. In our efforts to understand the past, we trace a serendipitous journey from document to document, moment to moment, place to place, in which the books we read (like those we write) become milestones in our emerging sense not just of our subjects, but of our selves. Every major research project involves the careful collecting of sources and interpretations—the threads we hope to weave into tapestries—which we assemble into the stories we ourselves tell. Having searched and found the sources that become our raw materials, we make them our own by forging new connections among them in our notes and in our minds, just as the books emerging from Benjamin's crates found new order and meaning on his shelves. Possessing things in this way involves much more than just physical property, which is why Benjamin can say of the book collector that "ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them. So I have erected one of his dwellings, with books as the building stones."

I linger on these volumes from Walter Benjamin's library because they can serve as symbols of the relationships between books and readers that we have not yet fully succeeded in reproducing in the digital world. Indeed, I would go further: it is precisely this collecting of carefully curated, intricately structured, lovingly tended personal libraries—so crucial to the practice of history—that is becoming more challenging as texts that once lived on physical pages bound between the covers of physical books are transformed into virtual e-texts floating ethereally among the virtual shelves of virtual libraries. Again, I am not mainly talking about physical ownership here, though it is no accident that Benjamin's memories were so powerfully triggered by his books as physical objects. I'm concerned instead about metaphorical book collections, the libraries we assemble in our minds in something akin to the rooms of a memory palace—the Roman method of loci —in which texts and ideas gain meaning in relationship to each other by virtue of the mental architecture we create to hold them. It is these mnemonic relationships in our mental libraries that enable us to keep Benjamin's "chaos of memories" at bay. More to the point, it is these relationships we use to write history. At some very deep level, they are stuff of which history is made.

Two features of the digital revolution put this project of building personal libraries—whether physical or mental—at risk. One is the extraordinary new power of search , which makes it possible to rummage the Web for the most arcane information and generally expect to find it with a speed and facility that were inconceivable just two decades ago. This ease in finding information means that even novices can now confidently locate bits of knowledge which only the most skilled scholars would have known how to find in the past, and then only after many years of study.

These new capabilities are in many ways miraculous, and we have all benefited from what Google and other search engines now make possible. But like all innovations, they come at a price. Information so gained is ripped from its original contexts. The very speed with which we find it tempts us not to recognize the work required truly to understand those contexts with all their meanings and ramifications. Furthermore, the power of search means we no longer need nearly so much of the mental architecture without which we couldn't even have found such information in the past, let alone made sense of it. We simply type a few words into the search box, extract the fragment we think we need, and hurry on to the next scrap. Just as the printed book diminished the need for memory palaces, so Google diminishes the need to remember anything but the simplest search strategies. What this means for a discipline like history that is all about context it is too soon to tell.

But there is another feature of the digital realm that poses still subtler challenges. The Roman invention of the multi-paged codex as a replacement for the far more ancient scroll represented an informational revolution that few of us now appreciate. As anyone who has watched the ritual turning of the Torah will understand, finding a single Biblical verse on a scroll is remarkably time-consuming. Finding it in a codex, on the other hand, is as simple as ruffling pages with one's thumb to find in few seconds what would take minutes on a scroll. Although no Roman would have said it this way, the codex remains one of the most powerful random-access devices humanity has yet devised.

Can physical books come close to competing with computers when it comes to search? Of course not. But when one wants to relocate a piece of information in a particular context, and when one remembers that context better than the information itself, then it can be surprisingly difficult for search alone to recover what one wants. What few of us recognize is that computer interfaces have for the most part retreated from the codex back toward the scroll. When we avail ourselves of the astonishing powers of Google, our "search result" comes back to us in the form of a list through which we must slowly— scroll . This is equally true of word processor texts and e-books. When we highlight or make notes in an e-reader and need to find our own annotations again, we do so via a laborious process of search which generates a long list through which we must scroll (often with the most woefully inadequate snippets as our only context) in the hope of relocating what we ourselves wrote. The same annotation or underlining that often took seconds to find in a physical codex can take minutes to relocate using the slow, context-stripping tools thus far available on e-book readers.

This problem of the scroll as a universal metaphor for accessing information is only compounded as we move from the individual text to the virtual library which any scholar must create when working on a large project—or when constructing the metaphorical library of a lifetime. As I sit writing this essay at my home desk, I am surrounded by wooden shelves that contain perhaps a thousand books. The iPad sitting beside me contains at least three times that number in my digital library. But whereas I can reach any of the physical books in my study in less than five seconds, and can generally get to the parts of them that loom largest in my mental library in well under a minute, it can take that long even to locate a single e-book on my iPad, let alone to find a particular passage. Powerful though the iPad may be—and it is the best e-book reader I know—its heavy dependence on search and scroll still makes it a poor replacement for the library Walter Benjamin unpacked from his crates or the one that surrounds me now.

I had intended to write in this essay about the technical challenges that desperately need resolving if scholars are to migrate toward digital libraries without sacrificing what has been most precious about the memory palaces in which we still store our richest and subtlest understandings of the past. I was going to complain about the breathtaking sloppiness with which Amazon maintains bibliographic control of its e-books, so comically awful that one never knows whether a book will sort by its author's first or last name. I was going to narrate the story of my 20-year effort to build digital libraries on handheld devices, and how frequently I've had to reformat public-domain e-books from .txt to .lit to .html to .doc to .pdf to .mobi to .epub, with no hope of retaining my own annotations in the process. I was going to describe how many times I've had to purchase additional versions of the same beloved book in order to access it on a new device. But I must save that conversation for a longer draft of this essay that will ultimately appear—where else?—in a book where I can give the argument the space it deserves.

For now I will simply repeat what I said at the end of my October column. Those of us who love books inevitably gather a library around ourselves that embodies not just our knowledge but our selves. From this metaphorical library emerge the ever more deeply informed intuitions that enable us to filter the chaos of mere "search results" by exercising human judgment to yield genuine insights and even wisdom. This lifelong process of creating a scholarly self by means of an intellectual and emotional journey whose way-stations are marked by passionately remembered texts—many of them so dear that we keep them close to us for our entire lives—is being transformed in the fragmented world of search and scroll that has become our dominant metaphor for knowledge itself. There is no escaping this transformation. But if we are to preserve the virtues of the scholarly life while enjoying the fruits of these new riches, we must join Walter Benjamin in unpacking the old physical crates that once held our books so we can continue to recollect them in the well-stocked libraries of our minds.

William Cronon (Univ. of Wisconsin–Madison) is the president of the AHA.

Tags: From the President AHA Leadership Profession Resources for History Departments Scholarly Communication Digital History

The American Historical Association welcomes comments in the discussion area below, at AHA Communities , and in letters to the editor . Please read our commenting and letters policy before submitting.

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6: The Experience Essay (AKA Personal Essay)

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6.1: The Experience Essay – Using Description and Narration
6.2: Experience Essay Freewrite #1
6.3: Experience Essay Freewrite #2
6.4: Other Experience Essay Topics
6.5: Submit Your Experience Essay (1st Draft)
6.6: Peer Exchange – Getting Feedback from Others
6.7: Submit Your Experience Essay (2nd/Final Draft)

Home — Essay Samples — Education — Reading — My Little Library Analysis

My Little Library Analysis

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Published: Mar 13, 2024

Words: 576 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

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Office of Undergraduate Research

My first research experience: being open to the unexpected, by claire fresher, peer research ambassador.

Many things surprised me when I started my first research opportunity. I didn’t know what to expect. I had heard a few things from upperclassmen about their own experiences and had attended a couple presentations from OUR, which is what got me interested in research in the first place, but I had no idea what my personal research experience was going to be like.

Something I hadn’t expected was how many people there are in a research group to support you and how willing people are to help. When I started my research position, I was introduced to a graduate student that worked in the lab station right next to mine. She showed me around the lab space and set me up on my computer. She was always there to ask quick questions or help me with any problems I encountered, as were the other people using the lab space, even if they weren’t in my specific lab group.

After a few weeks, I was given a partner who was also an undergraduate and I was introduced to the other undergraduates in the lab who I met at our weekly lab meetings where I got to hear what everyone was working on. I personally loved having a partner who could help me on the specific project I was assigned since I didn’t want to interrupt the other people in the lab with every question I had when they had other similar projects they were working on.

There was definitely a learning curve when I first started since I had never seen anything like this before. I started with basic literature research and began getting a better look into the broad topic which made it easier to really dive into the specific project that I was working on. In the beginning the work seemed a little intimidating but once I got comfortable in the lab space and knew I had people that could help me it was a lot easier to really get going and get into the really interesting parts, which is actually discovering new and exciting things!

I think the most important thing that I went into research with was being open to anything, and not being set on one way of learning or doing things. This was beneficial since it allowed me to be able to learn something completely new and be open to doing things differently than I had done before.

Throughout the course of my research experience, I know that I have changed in many ways. I learned how to work independently, how to be more analytical in my work, and how to ask the important questions that led to new discoveries. Research really has taught me to be open to the unexpected, and even welcome it, since being open has made me into a better researcher and student.

Claire is a junior majoring in Mechanical Engineering and minoring in Mathematics. Click here to learn more about Claire.

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College Essays

If you grow up to be a professional writer, everything you write will first go through an editor before being published. This is because the process of writing is really a process of re-writing —of rethinking and reexamining your work, usually with the help of someone else. So what does this mean for your student writing? And in particular, what does it mean for very important, but nonprofessional writing like your college essay? Should you ask your parents to look at your essay? Pay for an essay service?

If you are wondering what kind of help you can, and should, get with your personal statement, you've come to the right place! In this article, I'll talk about what kind of writing help is useful, ethical, and even expected for your college admission essay . I'll also point out who would make a good editor, what the differences between editing and proofreading are, what to expect from a good editor, and how to spot and stay away from a bad one.

What Kind of Help for Your Essay Can You Get?

What's Good Editing?

What should an editor do for you, what kind of editing should you avoid, proofreading, what's good proofreading, what kind of proofreading should you avoid.

What Do Colleges Think Of You Getting Help With Your Essay?

Who Can/Should Help You?

Advice for editors.

Should You Pay Money For Essay Editing?

The Bottom Line

What's next, what kind of help with your essay can you get.

Rather than talking in general terms about "help," let's first clarify the two different ways that someone else can improve your writing . There is editing, which is the more intensive kind of assistance that you can use throughout the whole process. And then there's proofreading, which is the last step of really polishing your final product.

Let me go into some more detail about editing and proofreading, and then explain how good editors and proofreaders can help you."

Editing is helping the author (in this case, you) go from a rough draft to a finished work . Editing is the process of asking questions about what you're saying, how you're saying it, and how you're organizing your ideas. But not all editing is good editing . In fact, it's very easy for an editor to cross the line from supportive to overbearing and over-involved.

Ability to clarify assignments. A good editor is usually a good writer, and certainly has to be a good reader. For example, in this case, a good editor should make sure you understand the actual essay prompt you're supposed to be answering.

Open-endedness. Good editing is all about asking questions about your ideas and work, but without providing answers. It's about letting you stick to your story and message, and doesn't alter your point of view.

Think of an editor as a great travel guide. It can show you the many different places your trip could take you. It should explain any parts of the trip that could derail your trip or confuse the traveler. But it never dictates your path, never forces you to go somewhere you don't want to go, and never ignores your interests so that the trip no longer seems like it's your own. So what should good editors do?

Help Brainstorm Topics

Sometimes it's easier to bounce thoughts off of someone else. This doesn't mean that your editor gets to come up with ideas, but they can certainly respond to the various topic options you've come up with. This way, you're less likely to write about the most boring of your ideas, or to write about something that isn't actually important to you.

If you're wondering how to come up with options for your editor to consider, check out our guide to brainstorming topics for your college essay .

Help Revise Your Drafts

Here, your editor can't upset the delicate balance of not intervening too much or too little. It's tricky, but a great way to think about it is to remember: editing is about asking questions, not giving answers .

Revision questions should point out:

Places where more detail or more description would help the reader connect with your essay
Places where structure and logic don't flow, losing the reader's attention
Places where there aren't transitions between paragraphs, confusing the reader
Moments where your narrative or the arguments you're making are unclear

But pointing to potential problems is not the same as actually rewriting—editors let authors fix the problems themselves.

Want to write the perfect college application essay? We can help. Your dedicated PrepScholar Admissions counselor will help you craft your perfect college essay, from the ground up. We learn your background and interests, brainstorm essay topics, and walk you through the essay drafting process, step-by-step. At the end, you'll have a unique essay to proudly submit to colleges. Don't leave your college application to chance. Find out more about PrepScholar Admissions now:

Bad editing is usually very heavy-handed editing. Instead of helping you find your best voice and ideas, a bad editor changes your writing into their own vision.

You may be dealing with a bad editor if they:

Add material (examples, descriptions) that doesn't come from you
Use a thesaurus to make your college essay sound "more mature"
Add meaning or insight to the essay that doesn't come from you
Tell you what to say and how to say it
Write sentences, phrases, and paragraphs for you
Change your voice in the essay so it no longer sounds like it was written by a teenager

Colleges can tell the difference between a 17-year-old's writing and a 50-year-old's writing. Not only that, they have access to your SAT or ACT Writing section, so they can compare your essay to something else you wrote. Writing that's a little more polished is great and expected. But a totally different voice and style will raise questions.

Where's the Line Between Helpful Editing and Unethical Over-Editing?

Sometimes it's hard to tell whether your college essay editor is doing the right thing. Here are some guidelines for staying on the ethical side of the line.

An editor should say that the opening paragraph is kind of boring, and explain what exactly is making it drag. But it's overstepping for an editor to tell you exactly how to change it.
An editor should point out where your prose is unclear or vague. But it's completely inappropriate for the editor to rewrite that section of your essay.
An editor should let you know that a section is light on detail or description. But giving you similes and metaphors to beef up that description is a no-go.

Proofreading (also called copy-editing) is checking for errors in the last draft of a written work. It happens at the end of the process and is meant as the final polishing touch. Proofreading is meticulous and detail-oriented, focusing on small corrections. It sands off all the surface rough spots that could alienate the reader.

Because proofreading is usually concerned with making fixes on the word or sentence level, this is the only process where someone else can actually add to or take away things from your essay . This is because what they are adding or taking away tends to be one or two misplaced letters.

Laser focus. Proofreading is all about the tiny details, so the ability to really concentrate on finding small slip-ups is a must.

Excellent grammar and spelling skills. Proofreaders need to dot every "i" and cross every "t." Good proofreaders should correct spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and grammar. They should put foreign words in italics and surround quotations with quotation marks. They should check that you used the correct college's name, and that you adhered to any formatting requirements (name and date at the top of the page, uniform font and size, uniform spacing).

Limited interference. A proofreader needs to make sure that you followed any word limits. But if cuts need to be made to shorten the essay, that's your job and not the proofreader's.

A bad proofreader either tries to turn into an editor, or just lacks the skills and knowledge necessary to do the job.

Some signs that you're working with a bad proofreader are:

If they suggest making major changes to the final draft of your essay. Proofreading happens when editing is already finished.
If they aren't particularly good at spelling, or don't know grammar, or aren't detail-oriented enough to find someone else's small mistakes.
If they start swapping out your words for fancier-sounding synonyms, or changing the voice and sound of your essay in other ways. A proofreader is there to check for errors, not to take the 17-year-old out of your writing.

What Do Colleges Think of Your Getting Help With Your Essay?

Admissions officers agree: light editing and proofreading are good—even required ! But they also want to make sure you're the one doing the work on your essay. They want essays with stories, voice, and themes that come from you. They want to see work that reflects your actual writing ability, and that focuses on what you find important.

On the Importance of Editing

Get feedback. Have a fresh pair of eyes give you some feedback. Don't allow someone else to rewrite your essay, but do take advantage of others' edits and opinions when they seem helpful. ( Bates College )

Read your essay aloud to someone. Reading the essay out loud offers a chance to hear how your essay sounds outside your head. This exercise reveals flaws in the essay's flow, highlights grammatical errors and helps you ensure that you are communicating the exact message you intended. ( Dickinson College )

On the Value of Proofreading

Share your essays with at least one or two people who know you well—such as a parent, teacher, counselor, or friend—and ask for feedback. Remember that you ultimately have control over your essays, and your essays should retain your own voice, but others may be able to catch mistakes that you missed and help suggest areas to cut if you are over the word limit. ( Yale University )

Proofread and then ask someone else to proofread for you. Although we want substance, we also want to be able to see that you can write a paper for our professors and avoid careless mistakes that would drive them crazy. ( Oberlin College )

On Watching Out for Too Much Outside Influence

Limit the number of people who review your essay. Too much input usually means your voice is lost in the writing style. ( Carleton College )

Ask for input (but not too much). Your parents, friends, guidance counselors, coaches, and teachers are great people to bounce ideas off of for your essay. They know how unique and spectacular you are, and they can help you decide how to articulate it. Keep in mind, however, that a 45-year-old lawyer writes quite differently from an 18-year-old student, so if your dad ends up writing the bulk of your essay, we're probably going to notice. ( Vanderbilt University )

Now let's talk about some potential people to approach for your college essay editing and proofreading needs. It's best to start close to home and slowly expand outward. Not only are your family and friends more invested in your success than strangers, but they also have a better handle on your interests and personality. This knowledge is key for judging whether your essay is expressing your true self.

Parents or Close Relatives

Your family may be full of potentially excellent editors! Parents are deeply committed to your well-being, and family members know you and your life well enough to offer details or incidents that can be included in your essay. On the other hand, the rewriting process necessarily involves criticism, which is sometimes hard to hear from someone very close to you.

A parent or close family member is a great choice for an editor if you can answer "yes" to the following questions. Is your parent or close relative a good writer or reader? Do you have a relationship where editing your essay won't create conflict? Are you able to constructively listen to criticism and suggestion from the parent?

One suggestion for defusing face-to-face discussions is to try working on the essay over email. Send your parent a draft, have them write you back some comments, and then you can pick which of their suggestions you want to use and which to discard.

Teachers or Tutors

A humanities teacher that you have a good relationship with is a great choice. I am purposefully saying humanities, and not just English, because teachers of Philosophy, History, Anthropology, and any other classes where you do a lot of writing, are all used to reviewing student work.

Moreover, any teacher or tutor that has been working with you for some time, knows you very well and can vet the essay to make sure it "sounds like you."

If your teacher or tutor has some experience with what college essays are supposed to be like, ask them to be your editor. If not, then ask whether they have time to proofread your final draft.

Guidance or College Counselor at Your School

The best thing about asking your counselor to edit your work is that this is their job. This means that they have a very good sense of what colleges are looking for in an application essay.

At the same time, school counselors tend to have relationships with admissions officers in many colleges, which again gives them insight into what works and which college is focused on what aspect of the application.

Unfortunately, in many schools the guidance counselor tends to be way overextended. If your ratio is 300 students to 1 college counselor, you're unlikely to get that person's undivided attention and focus. It is still useful to ask them for general advice about your potential topics, but don't expect them to be able to stay with your essay from first draft to final version.

Friends, Siblings, or Classmates

Although they most likely don't have much experience with what colleges are hoping to see, your peers are excellent sources for checking that your essay is you .

Friends and siblings are perfect for the read-aloud edit. Read your essay to them so they can listen for words and phrases that are stilted, pompous, or phrases that just don't sound like you.

You can even trade essays and give helpful advice on each other's work.

If your editor hasn't worked with college admissions essays very much, no worries! Any astute and attentive reader can still greatly help with your process. But, as in all things, beginners do better with some preparation.

First, your editor should read our advice about how to write a college essay introduction , how to spot and fix a bad college essay , and get a sense of what other students have written by going through some admissions essays that worked .

Then, as they read your essay, they can work through the following series of questions that will help them to guide you.

Introduction Questions

Is the first sentence a killer opening line? Why or why not?
Does the introduction hook the reader? Does it have a colorful, detailed, and interesting narrative? Or does it propose a compelling or surprising idea?
Can you feel the author's voice in the introduction, or is the tone dry, dull, or overly formal? Show the places where the voice comes through.

Essay Body Questions

Does the essay have a through-line? Is it built around a central argument, thought, idea, or focus? Can you put this idea into your own words?
How is the essay organized? By logical progression? Chronologically? Do you feel order when you read it, or are there moments where you are confused or lose the thread of the essay?
Does the essay have both narratives about the author's life and explanations and insight into what these stories reveal about the author's character, personality, goals, or dreams? If not, which is missing?
Does the essay flow? Are there smooth transitions/clever links between paragraphs? Between the narrative and moments of insight?

Reader Response Questions

Does the writer's personality come through? Do we know what the speaker cares about? Do we get a sense of "who he or she is"?
Where did you feel most connected to the essay? Which parts of the essay gave you a "you are there" sensation by invoking your senses? What moments could you picture in your head well?
Where are the details and examples vague and not specific enough?
Did you get an "a-ha!" feeling anywhere in the essay? Is there a moment of insight that connected all the dots for you? Is there a good reveal or "twist" anywhere in the essay?
What are the strengths of this essay? What needs the most improvement?

Should You Pay Money for Essay Editing?

One alternative to asking someone you know to help you with your college essay is the paid editor route. There are two different ways to pay for essay help: a private essay coach or a less personal editing service , like the many proliferating on the internet.

My advice is to think of these options as a last resort rather than your go-to first choice. I'll first go through the reasons why. Then, if you do decide to go with a paid editor, I'll help you decide between a coach and a service.

When to Consider a Paid Editor

In general, I think hiring someone to work on your essay makes a lot of sense if none of the people I discussed above are a possibility for you.

If you can't ask your parents. For example, if your parents aren't good writers, or if English isn't their first language. Or if you think getting your parents to help is going create unnecessary extra conflict in your relationship with them (applying to college is stressful as it is!)

If you can't ask your teacher or tutor. Maybe you don't have a trusted teacher or tutor that has time to look over your essay with focus. Or, for instance, your favorite humanities teacher has very limited experience with college essays and so won't know what admissions officers want to see.

If you can't ask your guidance counselor. This could be because your guidance counselor is way overwhelmed with other students.

If you can't share your essay with those who know you. It might be that your essay is on a very personal topic that you're unwilling to share with parents, teachers, or peers. Just make sure it doesn't fall into one of the bad-idea topics in our article on bad college essays .

If the cost isn't a consideration. Many of these services are quite expensive, and private coaches even more so. If you have finite resources, I'd say that hiring an SAT or ACT tutor (whether it's PrepScholar or someone else) is better way to spend your money . This is because there's no guarantee that a slightly better essay will sufficiently elevate the rest of your application, but a significantly higher SAT score will definitely raise your applicant profile much more.

Should You Hire an Essay Coach?

On the plus side, essay coaches have read dozens or even hundreds of college essays, so they have experience with the format. Also, because you'll be working closely with a specific person, it's more personal than sending your essay to a service, which will know even less about you.

But, on the minus side, you'll still be bouncing ideas off of someone who doesn't know that much about you . In general, if you can adequately get the help from someone you know, there is no advantage to paying someone to help you.

If you do decide to hire a coach, ask your school counselor, or older students that have used the service for recommendations. If you can't afford the coach's fees, ask whether they can work on a sliding scale —many do. And finally, beware those who guarantee admission to your school of choice—essay coaches don't have any special magic that can back up those promises.

Should You Send Your Essay to a Service?

On the plus side, essay editing services provide a similar product to essay coaches, and they cost significantly less . If you have some assurance that you'll be working with a good editor, the lack of face-to-face interaction won't prevent great results.

On the minus side, however, it can be difficult to gauge the quality of the service before working with them . If they are churning through many application essays without getting to know the students they are helping, you could end up with an over-edited essay that sounds just like everyone else's. In the worst case scenario, an unscrupulous service could send you back a plagiarized essay.

Getting recommendations from friends or a school counselor for reputable services is key to avoiding heavy-handed editing that writes essays for you or does too much to change your essay. Including a badly-edited essay like this in your application could cause problems if there are inconsistencies. For example, in interviews it might be clear you didn't write the essay, or the skill of the essay might not be reflected in your schoolwork and test scores.

Should You Buy an Essay Written by Someone Else?

Let me elaborate. There are super sketchy places on the internet where you can simply buy a pre-written essay. Don't do this!

For one thing, you'll be lying on an official, signed document. All college applications make you sign a statement saying something like this:

I certify that all information submitted in the admission process—including the application, the personal essay, any supplements, and any other supporting materials—is my own work, factually true, and honestly presented... I understand that I may be subject to a range of possible disciplinary actions, including admission revocation, expulsion, or revocation of course credit, grades, and degree, should the information I have certified be false. (From the Common Application )

For another thing, if your academic record doesn't match the essay's quality, the admissions officer will start thinking your whole application is riddled with lies.

Admission officers have full access to your writing portion of the SAT or ACT so that they can compare work that was done in proctored conditions with that done at home. They can tell if these were written by different people. Not only that, but there are now a number of search engines that faculty and admission officers can use to see if an essay contains strings of words that have appeared in other essays—you have no guarantee that the essay you bought wasn't also bought by 50 other students.

You should get college essay help with both editing and proofreading
A good editor will ask questions about your idea, logic, and structure, and will point out places where clarity is needed
A good editor will absolutely not answer these questions, give you their own ideas, or write the essay or parts of the essay for you
A good proofreader will find typos and check your formatting
All of them agree that getting light editing and proofreading is necessary
Parents, teachers, guidance or college counselor, and peers or siblings
If you can't ask any of those, you can pay for college essay help, but watch out for services or coaches who over-edit you work
Don't buy a pre-written essay! Colleges can tell, and it'll make your whole application sound false.

Ready to start working on your essay? Check out our explanation of the point of the personal essay and the role it plays on your applications and then explore our step-by-step guide to writing a great college essay .

Using the Common Application for your college applications? We have an excellent guide to the Common App essay prompts and useful advice on how to pick the Common App prompt that's right for you . Wondering how other people tackled these prompts? Then work through our roundup of over 130 real college essay examples published by colleges .

Stressed about whether to take the SAT again before submitting your application? Let us help you decide how many times to take this test . If you choose to go for it, we have the ultimate guide to studying for the SAT to give you the ins and outs of the best ways to study.

Want to improve your SAT score by 160 points or your ACT score by 4 points? We've written a guide for each test about the top 5 strategies you must be using to have a shot at improving your score. Download them for free now:

Anna scored in the 99th percentile on her SATs in high school, and went on to major in English at Princeton and to get her doctorate in English Literature at Columbia. She is passionate about improving student access to higher education.

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What I’ve Learned From My Students’ College Essays

The genre is often maligned for being formulaic and melodramatic, but it’s more important than you think.

An illustration of a high school student with blue hair, dreaming of what to write in their college essay.

By Nell Freudenberger

Most high school seniors approach the college essay with dread. Either their upbringing hasn’t supplied them with several hundred words of adversity, or worse, they’re afraid that packaging the genuine trauma they’ve experienced is the only way to secure their future. The college counselor at the Brooklyn high school where I’m a writing tutor advises against trauma porn. “Keep it brief , ” she says, “and show how you rose above it.”

I started volunteering in New York City schools in my 20s, before I had kids of my own. At the time, I liked hanging out with teenagers, whom I sometimes had more interesting conversations with than I did my peers. Often I worked with students who spoke English as a second language or who used slang in their writing, and at first I was hung up on grammar. Should I correct any deviation from “standard English” to appeal to some Wizard of Oz behind the curtains of a college admissions office? Or should I encourage students to write the way they speak, in pursuit of an authentic voice, that most elusive of literary qualities?

In fact, I was missing the point. One of many lessons the students have taught me is to let the story dictate the voice of the essay. A few years ago, I worked with a boy who claimed to have nothing to write about. His life had been ordinary, he said; nothing had happened to him. I asked if he wanted to try writing about a family member, his favorite school subject, a summer job? He glanced at his phone, his posture and expression suggesting that he’d rather be anywhere but in front of a computer with me. “Hobbies?” I suggested, without much hope. He gave me a shy glance. “I like to box,” he said.

I’ve had this experience with reluctant writers again and again — when a topic clicks with a student, an essay can unfurl spontaneously. Of course the primary goal of a college essay is to help its author get an education that leads to a career. Changes in testing policies and financial aid have made applying to college more confusing than ever, but essays have remained basically the same. I would argue that they’re much more than an onerous task or rote exercise, and that unlike standardized tests they are infinitely variable and sometimes beautiful. College essays also provide an opportunity to learn precision, clarity and the process of working toward the truth through multiple revisions.

When a topic clicks with a student, an essay can unfurl spontaneously.

Even if writing doesn’t end up being fundamental to their future professions, students learn to choose language carefully and to be suspicious of the first words that come to mind. Especially now, as college students shoulder so much of the country’s ethical responsibility for war with their protest movement, essay writing teaches prospective students an increasingly urgent lesson: that choosing their own words over ready-made phrases is the only reliable way to ensure they’re thinking for themselves.

Teenagers are ideal writers for several reasons. They’re usually free of preconceptions about writing, and they tend not to use self-consciously ‘‘literary’’ language. They’re allergic to hypocrisy and are generally unfiltered: They overshare, ask personal questions and call you out for microaggressions as well as less egregious (but still mortifying) verbal errors, such as referring to weed as ‘‘pot.’’ Most important, they have yet to put down their best stories in a finished form.

I can imagine an essay taking a risk and distinguishing itself formally — a poem or a one-act play — but most kids use a more straightforward model: a hook followed by a narrative built around “small moments” that lead to a concluding lesson or aspiration for the future. I never get tired of working with students on these essays because each one is different, and the short, rigid form sometimes makes an emotional story even more powerful. Before I read Javier Zamora’s wrenching “Solito,” I worked with a student who had been transported by a coyote into the U.S. and was reunited with his mother in the parking lot of a big-box store. I don’t remember whether this essay focused on specific skills or coping mechanisms that he gained from his ordeal. I remember only the bliss of the parent-and-child reunion in that uninspiring setting. If I were making a case to an admissions officer, I would suggest that simply being able to convey that experience demonstrates the kind of resilience that any college should admire.

The essays that have stayed with me over the years don’t follow a pattern. There are some narratives on very predictable topics — living up to the expectations of immigrant parents, or suffering from depression in 2020 — that are moving because of the attention with which the student describes the experience. One girl determined to become an engineer while watching her father build furniture from scraps after work; a boy, grieving for his mother during lockdown, began taking pictures of the sky.

If, as Lorrie Moore said, “a short story is a love affair; a novel is a marriage,” what is a college essay? Every once in a while I sit down next to a student and start reading, and I have to suppress my excitement, because there on the Google Doc in front of me is a real writer’s voice. One of the first students I ever worked with wrote about falling in love with another girl in dance class, the absolute magic of watching her move and the terror in the conflict between her feelings and the instruction of her religious middle school. She made me think that college essays are less like love than limerence: one-sided, obsessive, idiosyncratic but profound, the first draft of the most personal story their writers will ever tell.

Nell Freudenberger’s novel “The Limits” was published by Knopf last month. She volunteers through the PEN America Writers in the Schools program.

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The day I returned home after being kidnapped by Islamic terrorists

Beth and Tommy in Portaledge in a tent on the side of a cliff

Beth Rodden is a professional rock climber who, along with three other climbers, was kidnapped and held hostage by Islamic militants in 2000 while on a climbing trip in Kyrgyzstan. The following is excerpted from her new memoir, “A Light Through the Cracks,” about the day she returned home to the U.S.

Amsterdam, August 2000

By the time my boyfriend, Tommy Caldwell, and I made it to Amsterdam’s gleaming, sterile airport, we had been passed along a half dozen times, like an important but increasingly well-worn package. Military helicopters had brought us and our other two climbing partners from base to base. We’d endured a surreal ride on a private jet from the last military base to the capital, Bishkek, traveling alongside the tipsy and jovial president of Kyrgyzstan. He’d patted us on the shoulders like a grandfather and claimed us long enough for a photo op and a speech to local media in a language we couldn’t understand. Then he handed the four of us off to the American embassy, which scrambled to find us flights home. A few days later, Tommy and I drove across the Kazakhstan border, in a hired car with a diplomatic escort, to the international airport in Almaty, and finally a commercial jet took us from Central Asia to the edge of the Atlantic. Now we had just one more flight to go.

Our tickets were a last-minute mess, and we needed to check on our connection. As we crossed the terminal, I carried a brown paper gift bag from the airport candy shop — despite what we’d been through, I still wanted to bring my older brother a present from this trip. I watched the families clustered around the gates, the lone business travelers perched at the bars, scanning each face around me. I’d been on edge through practically every step of the journey: The embassy in Bishkek had felt almost safe, but at the hotel where they’d sent us to get some sleep, I’d felt vulnerable and stayed vigilant.

In the airport, I was hungry again. When we’d made it to the second army base, the one that felt like a cluster of portable classrooms set down on a vast brown plain, we’d stuffed ourselves with barley and warm buttered bread, but I could not stay full. I had just eaten two chocolate croissants. Still, my stomach felt like a cavern. My brother didn’t really need a present, did he?

I ate half the chocolate in the bag before we got to our gate.

The line at the KLM Royal Dutch Airlines counter felt so orderly. The whole airport did. Just existing there felt like getting a big, soothing hug. When we’d boarded the flight in Kazakhstan, the passengers had formed no line. Everybody just pushed in a scrum toward the plane. Tommy and I stood frozen, like the good, shocked scouts that we were, and got lost in the flood. I felt so fragile, so extremely fragile, and so resigned to that fragile state.

We weren’t safe. That was obvious to me. No line, no order, no rule of law. I loved rules. People smoked openly on that first plane.

“Next,” the flight attendant said as we arrived at the counter. Her voice was as professionally cheerful as her uniform: light blue skirt, light blue jacket, white blouse underneath.

“We’re here to check in for our flight,” I said.

“Wonderful. May I please have your boarding passes?”

I mumbled something apologetic and handed her a few crumpled, dirty sheets of paper. “I think we have to get our seats and stuff from you.”

She pinched her brow as she read our mess of documents. She typed vigorously. I was sure this meant we weren’t going to make it home.

“Can you wait one second?” she asked, flashing a strained smile. She disappeared behind a wall.

I looked at Tommy. He stared into the blank space where the woman had just been. I couldn’t tell if he was as scared as I was, if he was also monitoring the people pooling and flowing around us for any threat. I felt like I had grown an invisible antenna that vibrated continually, never at rest. Never letting me rest. A memory tried to surface inside me: a body in silhouette, sailing off a dark cliff. A crunch, and an exhale. I forced it back down.

Two blond attendants now appeared where there had been one.

“Can you tell me: Was it something KLM did?” the new flight attendant asked.

I looked back at Tommy. Did he know what she was talking about? Did she know what had happened? Tommy shrugged.

“Wait, what?” I said. “What was something . . . ?”

“Well, um, how to say this,” the flight attendant said. “It says on your tickets, ‘Emotionally distressed passengers, please take care.’ So, we are just wondering if it’s something KLM did.” She looked concerned and defensive in her caring, like a hospital billing manager. She didn’t want to know the answer, but she had to ask.

I didn’t want a stranger to try to comfort me, but I did feel the need to comfort her. So I said, “Oh no, definitely not. We were just kidnapped and we want to go home.”

I couldn’t believe how easily the sentence came out. We were just kidnapped . . . I’d never said it so plainly before.

The flight attendant exhaled all her breath at once, stunned and relieved. “Well, good,” she said.

Well, good?

“KLM does our best. How about business-class seats for you two?” She printed our fresh, flat boarding passes. Tommy and I boarded the plane.

We ate every meal and every snack that was offered to us on the long ride home. My hunger was like a portal opened into a galaxy — infinite, absolute. When I was in middle school, I used to watch my older brother, David, eat, stunned by the mountain of food he could consume. Now, it felt strangely freeing to eat with that type of abandon. I hadn’t done that since ninth grade, when I became obsessed with climbing.

I could eat, but I still couldn’t sleep. My anxiety kept me wide awake, and my wakefulness in turn meant I had nothing but space and time for the anxiety to spin itself tighter in my body. I kept wondering if the plane would crash. That seemed possible, maybe even probable, given how the rest of our trip had gone. An appropriate ending, in a way. I wondered if I’d be scared. What would Tommy say to me before impact? Would it hurt? Our backpack, stuffed at our feet, was filled with souvenirs purchased in a blur during our strange interlude in Bishkek, between our flight with the president and our diplomatic drive across the border. I had stuffed the paltry remains of the airport chocolate into our bag alongside the rest of the things we’d acquired: a hand-carved wooden chess set, a wool hanging. Proof that we’d done something major and been somewhere cool. What were we thinking?

The backpack that sat at our feet had been lost in transit when we’d first landed in Kyrgyzstan, full of hope for our climbing adventure, and was waiting for us, perversely intact, at the hotel in Bishkek after our escape. We’d left San Francisco with 20 expedition duffels, and all I had left was this backpack filled with trinkets from a country to which I’d never return. Maybe that was why we’d bought them, with the money Tommy had wadded up in his sock just before we were marched away from our camp at gunpoint. Maybe it was some attempt to fabricate a decent memory of the place.

My hands trembled the whole 12 hours to San Francisco. I knew I needed sleep, but if the plane did crash, wasn’t I supposed to be awake for that? I had no idea how to act, what to do or say or who to be when we saw our parents. I’d left as a 20-year-old girl full of herself, ready for the world, sure I was doing something extraordinary. I was living out the dream I’d stared at in the posters I hung on my bedroom wall: climbing to incredible heights in far-off places. My mother had hardly traveled, certainly not by my age. I’d felt so awfully superior as I’d walked down the jetway when we left. I didn’t even turn back to wave.

My parents had given me everything — pride, freedom, confidence. They trusted me. They trusted my decisions. They trusted the world. Now I was returning home a broken mess. I’d spoken to them a few times from the embassy in Bishkek, the words mainly drowned in my tears. I wanted to be small again, so small I could crawl through the phone into their arms, where they’d hold me and shush me and stroke my head. I wanted my mother to say, “Mama’s here, Mama’s here,” just like she always did when I was a girl. I wanted to shrink back into that little-girl body and lay my head in her lap and cry.

How was I supposed to carry myself getting off the jetway? Was the idea to act strong, like I was fine? I was weirdly good at that. Or should I literally run into their arms?

Now — how to do this? How was I supposed to carry myself getting off the jetway? Was the idea to act strong, like I was fine? I was weirdly good at that. Or should I literally run into their arms, like I had been dreaming of doing for the past eight days? I’d never spoken easily with my parents about feelings. They were so kind, so present, and gently but firmly on my team. But inside, I always felt nervous, like there was a line I was afraid to cross, like I needed to be tougher, solid, unbreakable. And even if I could lay my head in my mother’s lap and have her say, “Mama’s here,” would that still work to soothe me? I was not the same person I had been when I left. My thoughts flapped like the loose end of a film in an old-fashioned movie projector, the front reel spinning empty.

I looked over at Tommy. Maybe he’d know what to do. His head was slumped at a 45-degree angle to his chest, his mouth dropped open, snoring. He was sick. His brain was more lucid and less spastic than mine, but his body was breaking down. He had a fever. I envied Tommy’s oblivion. I felt so alone.

We landed. My palms were sweating, but Tommy’s hands felt strong. That felt like a plan: I’d hold his strong hand and we’d present a united front, though I hadn’t told him about my looping, flapping mind. I was trying to stay composed — for him, for me, maybe for my parents too. We collected our bag of souvenirs from under the airplane seats. The souvenirs promised our trip was normal. We were normal. I grabbed a free chocolate bar and a package of cookies from the plane’s galley as we exited. I never did anything like that, but now instead of saying, “Don’t eat that, Rodden,” I thought, “Just in case we don’t have any other food.”

I didn’t race off the plane like I had seen people do in movies, straight into their loved ones’ arms. Instead I walked so slowly that other passengers started passing us. I was desperate to return home, to the narrow twin bed in my parents’ house, on our quiet block filled with minivans and white Honda sedans, to replant myself in the flat farmland around Davis, California, to recommit to the safe wide sidewalks. I just didn’t know how. I wondered if people could tell we’d changed: if we walked differently or stood slightly less straight, if we’d absorbed so much fear and terror that we now emitted it.

Beth Rodden is the author of “A Light Through the Cracks: A Climber’s Story,” out May 2024.

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COMMENTS

My Experience To The Library
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177 College Essay Examples for 11 Schools + Expert Analysis
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