Your Admissions Application Should have Thesis
We've discussed in depth different ways to set you admission application essay apart from the competition, however I don't know if anyone has fully explained the importance of following proper essay formatting even when your writing something personal and narrative such as an admissions piece. You know what I am getting at... it is time to talk about your admission application's thesis.
The common misconception about personal writing is that you can throw away everything you know and write the composition free form to suite your purposes. Unfortunately, along with seeing who you are, and what your values are the admissions officers are also going to look at your skills as a writer and what level you are at as far as composing essays are concerned. They want to see how you will tackle this kind of essay writing and if you know how to properly format a paper for academic purposes. For this reason it is not appropriate just to "do your own thing" when tackling your admissions piece, instead you have to apply the rules of essay writing to a personal narrative.
The good news is that writing a personal thesis is easy because it is based on your own opinions. For example if you were writing your admissions paper about your summer internship:
" My summer internship at a law firm taught me a lot about myself about what I could expect to deal with if I was to become a lawyer. After many long days at the office I learnt that becoming an attorney isn't at all like they depict on TV in fact it involves a lot of hard work, cooperation and well-rounded people skills"
This would be a fine thesis for a paper about your internship because it states what you learned and three things that you can cover in your body paragraphs. You could then complete the paper by including some antidotes from your internship.
If you are still having a hard time writing a personal thesis, try to brainstorm some different ideas and see if any of them can be summarized into one or two sentences in a strong statement. With this kind of writing assignment it may be a good idea to let the thesis form itself by working backwards. What do you want to write about? Then determine your thesis based on that instead of trying to come up with content to suite your thesis.
Hopefully this approach will make the admissions application writing process go a bit smoother.