 What's up guys, it's Josh from Back Again with yet another video. Well it's that time of year again, yet another class of nervous high schoolers are about to enter the seemingly impossible gauntlet of the college application process. Oh the joy. Well, it's been about two years since I was in your shoes, stressing about college essays, slaving over every single word until it was absolutely perfect. Two years and I'm still making videos about it on the internet. Aren't you proud of me mom? Anyways, it's been a while since the old Josh Beasley channel has been dedicated to some wholesome college application related content, so I'm ready to go. Why? Well, half of my audience still seems to be high schoolers, so gotta appeal to them. So I'm coming back at you guys in style with a little bit of a PSA. I don't know if you guys have kept up with current events, but last time I checked the common application had opened on August 1st and released all of the essay prompts for this coming application season. So I don't really know how to say this, but start your college essay now. You see, I have a younger brother who's also in your shoes right now. You've seen him in videos before for you real fans out there. He was actually featured in vlog number two way back in like April, so go check that out if you haven't yet, please. I've been observing his behavior and he also seems to be in a similar situation as a lot of you guys in the comments section. He hasn't started his essays either. Is this video just to remind him to start his college essays? Maybe. But for the most part, I wanted to publicly announce that you guys should be starting as soon as possible. Unless you want your senior fall to be a very unenjoyable experience. So with that, this video is going to be dedicated to why you should start your college essay as soon as possible and my tips for doing so. Including brainstorming some topics and ideas since I know that is often the hardest part of the whole process. I know I mentioned this in other videos before, but I recommend that you finish your Common App Essay before the end of August so you can finish all your supplements for your early applications in September and October. Now by finish, I don't mean completely finished. I mean about 99% complete. You've done a fair number of edits to it, but you still want to run it by some of your friends, run it by your English teacher and make those final touches. For the most part, it's pretty locked in. Why? Well, if you're anything like me, your senior year is going to be super busy and you're going to barely have enough time to work on college applications because if you're heavy course load, your extracurriculars are your leadership positions. So get cracking early. You're going to have a lot of big commitments and you're going to find out very soon that you're not going to have enough time to work on college applications. Just to reflect on my own senior fall, pretty much no free time at all and I'm being completely honest with that. It was all into school extracurriculars and college applications. All right. So you decided you want to start. You sit down in front of your computer, you open Microsoft Word, you got the little cursor blinking at the top and you just sit there and you have no idea what to write. No worries. I got you. This is what I tell all my old high school friends. Everyone has a compelling story in their life, whether this be a tough challenge from high school or maybe a life changing event. The hard part is finding it. First, I recommend asking yourself the following questions and physically writing out your responses on a piece of paper. It's not limited to these questions, but think of your answers for these questions and think of the answers to some similar questions within this vein. You'll see in a second. What do I like to do? What are my passions? What are my favorite memories from my childhood? Any moments that really stick out? Is there a specific moment or moments in my life that I would consider a major turning point? Something where like my life kind of switched directions or I became a new person? Has there been a deterrent or a challenge in my life? Something that has changed who I am on a deep level. Keep in mind for these questions and when I say finding your story, this mainly relates to your common app essay or your personal statement. This is your big main essay. Although you can use this to help with the supplements, your common app essay is the big guy. That's where you want your main story to be going because that's the first thing the admissions officers looked at in your essay packet. These are just some questions to get the ideas flowing, but the point is at the end of the day, your common app essay isn't going to be something that's a simple, straightforward story. If you've watched my video where I go and I read my common app essay, you'll notice several things. And first of all, a disclaimer before I start talking about this. I know that my common app essay isn't perfect. I know that it's not top tier college essay material and I'm not the greatest writer, but I feel that it's a very solid example of what a good college essay is. I mean, it is like the most viewed video on my channel right now, and there's a lot of love in the comments and there's a lot of hate. So take it as it is, but I think it can help you guys out a lot. You'll notice that there's a couple of big ideas that kind of interweave throughout the essay. There's my struggle trying to keep up with the competitive baseball culture of Texas. There's conflict with me reflecting on my past, specifically how I dealt with the constant moves and nomadic military lifestyle that I was living at the time. And there's my relationship with one of my best friends and how we helped each other become better people and fill in each other's gaps throughout our relationship. It's complicated. There's a lot going on. It's not just one simple, I did this, I did this, I did this. There's a lot of ideas. There's a lot of big themes within the essay. And I hope you'll notice that. Also, I want you guys to realize you're not going to be able to get that on your first draft. If all of this is a little overwhelming for you at the moment and you feel like you might need a little extra help with your college essays or your entire application for that matter, I recommend that you check out the sponsor of today's video, Crimson Education. If you've been watching my videos for a while, I guarantee you you've been recommended at least one of their phenomenal videos that are created with the student in mind to help them get into their dream school. Crimson's main goal is to connect students with a team of strategists, mentors, and tutors to help them get into a top-ranked school that is a good fit for them, whether this be extracurricular and leadership projects, SAT prep and tutoring, or college essay topic brainstorming and editing. The best part is that it actually works and they've had over 460 offers to top 50 colleges just since 2015. And if you're an international student, don't worry about it either. They have 25 offices across the globe. So no matter where you are, you can get help. If you have ever felt lost in your college applications or just want some help standing out in the growing competition, I know it can get tough these days, I recommend getting in touch with Crimson. They will help you find an affordable plan that is a perfect fit for you. I will leave the link down in the description below. Highly recommend even if you just want to fill out the form and get in touch with them and find out more information. All right, on to the rest of the video. So we talked about the fact that your final essay is going to have more than just one simple idea running through it, and you're not going to get this on your first draft. What I recommend doing instead is taking a simple idea, a simple story and building upon that. Right now you have this piece of paper sitting in front of you with a bunch of ideas, a bunch of moments from your life that you can work with. Find one that interests you, one that you think you could write an essay about, one that you remember vividly or you just feel the most comfortable with. I know that may sound hard, but right now you have an idea. Get back in front of that keyboard with that blank word document and start typing, just free write anything you can about this idea. Don't try to structure it into an essay. The goal of this exercise is to get all of the ideas, even the ones locked back, way in your head about this specific topic onto the page all in one place. Don't worry about grammar, don't worry about structure. We just want it all on the page where we can see it. Now if you're struggling doing this or you can't get more than a page, or you can't even fill up the page talking about this specific idea, you might want to reconsider what you're writing about and go to another one of the topics on your list. So at this point you've brainstormed multiple topics from the list that we wrote earlier. You've chosen one and then you wrote everything that came to mind about this topic. Here's where the real work begins. You can now sift through all of these ideas that you've written and begin assembling a story. I made way too many other videos about college essays, but I just wanted this one to be focused on the brainstorming process, how to get your ideas out on the page and start creating your own personal story and finding your story. This is my favorite brainstorming exercise, but it may not work for you or you may decide on a completely different topic. But the point of this exercise is to start getting you thinking in the college essay mindset so you can develop a cohesive story later. All right, that's about it for this video. If you enjoyed, if this was helpful, if you're going to use some of these tips and you're going to go get a piece of paper and start brainstorming ideas as soon as you're done with this, drop a thumbs up down below. That means I did my job. It helps me and supports the channel a lot more than you think. If you have any questions, comments, concerns about the college application process, about me, about Yale, about college in general, drop them down in the comments section below. I will try to respond to everyone. If you're new and you have not subscribed yet, what are you doing? And with that, I'll see you guys in the next video.