Opening Your Essay With A Quote

By David Tian

(Admission Consultant at The Edge Learning Center)

Many students applying to college, when faced with a blank page before their eyes, struggle to come up with an enticing opening line.

Amidst that struggle, students will sometimes attempt to open their essays with an interesting quote.

However, if you take this approach, we recommend that you exercise extreme caution in its execution. Done correctly, it can draw the reader’s attention and make the applicant stand out. Done incorrectly, it can make the applicant look unoriginal, boring, and even lazy, which we want to avoid at all costs.

Let’s first look at the wrong way to do so:

The University of Texas at Austin
Master of Data Science Online
Statement of Purpose

“When you educate one person you can change a life, when you educate many you can change the world.” – Shai Reshef, founder and president of the University of the People

I desire to attend UT Austin’s Master of Data Science program in order to develop the skills and knowledge necessary to combine large-scale data with expanding educational opportunities to people who may not have otherwise pursued further education. Before the digital age, education was often confined to physical books, in-person lessons, and brick-and-mortar institutions. Now, with the advent of the Internet, any person anywhere privileged enough to have access to it can further his or her education on virtually every subject in the world. What was once inaccessible to folks who lacked financial means or otherwise could not disrupt their lives for full-time study became nearly ubiquitous and had the power to disrupt traditional education entirely. Although I graduated from college in 2014 and finished my second graduate degree in 2019, I have not ceased availing myself of the power of the Internet to augment my skills and knowledge.   

Unsurprisingly, this individual’s application to UT Austin was unsuccessful.

There are issues with its first paragraph as well, but for the purposes of this article, we are going to focus on its opening quote. This essay starts with what we call a “standalone quote.” The problem with starting an essay with a quote in this way is that you are literally using someone else’s words and ideas, without having any input of your own. The entire point of writing a statement of purpose is for the program to which you are applying to understand you and your ideas, not those of someone else.

In this application essay, the student does not interact with the quote at all. The reader gets no sense of what the applicant’s thoughts are about the quote, nor does the reader see the connection between the quote and what the applicant wrote next.

Remember, the admissions committee is on your side. They’re looking for reasons why they should admit you. Don’t make their job hard for them! If you start with a standalone quote, all you’re doing is trying to persuade the admissions committee of the program to which you are applying to accept the person you’re quoting instead of you, which is not your goal.

Does all this mean that you can never start your essay with a quote?

No, not at all.

However, there is a right way to do it, and a wrong way. The wrong way is what we have shown you above — a standalone quote. What about the right way?

Here is the introductory paragraph of an individual who was admitted to UC Berkeley for a Ph.D. program in history:

“Luscious fare is the jewel of inordinate desires,” cautions the author of The Gentlewoman’s Companion (1673), one of many early modern conduct books I surveyed this past year for an honors thesis entitled “‘Chaste, Silent, and Hungry’: The Problem of Female Appetite in Early Modern England, 1550-1700.” As indicated by the title, this project explores a provocative but as of yet scarcely studied facet of early modern gender constructions: female food desire. I use the word “desire” here rather deliberately, as early modern definitions of appetite extended well beyond the physiological drive to eat to encompass all those physical (and shameful) longings associated with the body. And, in a culture where women were by definition immoderate and sensual, female food appetite, I argue, constituted an unruly desire that demanded both social and moral discipline. In brief, my research concerns the patriarchal control of women’s bodies in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England vis-¬-vis a cultural idea about food desire and satiation as suggestive and immodest.

Notice how the applicant seamlessly integrates this quote into her first paragraph, analyzes its meaning, and uses it as a springboard to introduce her own research interests?

In this example, the quote is not merely sitting idly by itself doing nothing, but is fully nested into the applicant’s first paragraph. Furthermore, notice how the applicant didn’t just randomly put it in there, but deeply thinks it over, places it within the greater context of her field, and uses it to introduce her own research interests (all while using extremely sophisticated language and skillful word choice)?

Similarly, the opening for this – successful – application essay to Johns Hopkins University for a Ph.D. in political science uses a comparable technique:

Statement of Purpose
The Johns Hopkins University Political Science Department

“And here, at long last, my stomach is full,” writes Eunsun Kim about her resettlement in South Korea in her memoir A Thousand Miles to Freedom: My Escape from North Korea, which I cite in my Master’s thesis. Titled “Scarlet Fever in North Korea: Public Health as a Motivating Factor in China’s Policies toward North Korea Defectors,” my Master’s thesis seeks to answer why, despite severe international condemnation as well as having signed the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, the Chinese government refuses to grant North Korean defectors refugee status and instead repatriates them back to North Korea. Using official government documents and China’s previous responses to threats of a communicable disease as evidence, my thesis introduces a potentially provocative explanation for China’s behavior: North Korea’s heavy disease burden. In other words, I argue that the frail healthcare infrastructure in North Korea renders defectors at an increased risk of carrying communicable diseases, which contributes to China’s decision to systematically deny them entry. “

Notice how the quote this applicant begins with is used to introduce a book that relates to the applicant’s research interests?

In fact, when using this approach, you don’t only have to quote other people – you can even quote yourself!

As an example, please read this snippet of a sample, ad hoc introduction written specifically for this blog post:

“Credits on the left, debits on the right,” I proudly beamed while making this statement to my student — an experienced accountant —, blissfully unaware that what I had just said was akin to trying to impress a mathematician by claiming that one plus one equals three.

[For those without an accounting background, it should be debits on the left and credits on the right. For an accountant, getting this wrong is equivalent to a mathematician not knowing the answer to the question, “What is one plus one?”]

This is an imaginary student’s application essay for MBA programs. Such a quote shows humility and a willingness to learn from mistakes, which should, hopefully, show through in the rest of the essay.

Whenever clients send us their essays, we are very particular about them starting their essays with a standalone quote. Rather than explaining to each individual client over and over again, it is hoped that this blog post helped clarify what a “standalone quote” is and that it provided some useful alternatives to using one.