There’s a big joke between Jon Reider and the other admissions officers at Stanford University, and sometimes they can’t help but chuckle when they read applications.

They call it the “building-a-schoolhouse-in-Costa-Rica essay.”

“We get all these essays where somebody says ‘Kids there are so poor and then I bought one a Coke and he was so happy and we’re so materialistic here,’” said Jon Reider, the associate director of admissions at Stanford from 1985 until earlier this year.

But lately, Reider and his colleagues haven’t been chuckling. In fact, they’re starting to yawn. And it’s not just them. Admissions officers at universities like Tufts and Harvard see so many “Costa Rica essays” that they have started to caution students against them in information sessions.

None of these universities tracks the popularity of essay themes, but Susan Ardizzoni, the director of admissions outreach at Tufts University, said community service in a cross-cultural setting has “definitely become a more popular topic” in the last five years. And admissions officers from universities around the country are tired of yawning as they read about how a student smiled as he gave a small child that can of Coke.

“It’s so corny,” Reider said. “It’s a canned topic. People are just thinking in terms of how they’re supposed to think.”

But that’s not what the applicants believe.

Rebecca Scharlach, a senior at Athenian High School in Alameda, Calif. started writing her application essay this summer. The first essay she wrote was about her favorite fictional character, but came out “lofty, intellectual and not reflective.” So Scharlach started over and wrote about her two-week community service trip to Vietnam.

“From what I’ve heard, colleges want a well structured essay, but they also want to know who you are,” she said. “My first essay didn’t seem very real, so I thought this one would work better.”

The reflective, unique essay Scharlach is striving for is exactly what colleges want. But so many applicants write about community service in cross-cultural settings that these essays are actually blending applicants in with the rest of the pool.

“If everybody’s writing ‘Costa Rica essays,’ then everybody’s the same,” Northwestern’s assistant director of admission Aaron Zdawczyk said. “The point of the application is to stand out.”

According to EssayEdge, an online editing service for college essays, admissions officers spend one-third of their time reading the essay portion of an application. And as the competition to get into a few very selective schools increases, the essay becomes a way for students to shine in a crowd of other applicants with 4.0 grade point averages and perfect 2400s on the SAT. But the way students are using the same ideas these days is making it even harder for colleges to make admission decisions.

Even so, the essay is an important part of the admission process.

“If you can use the essay to convey the intangible, you’re doing a lot,” said Dwight Miller, a senior admissions officer at Harvard. “We’re not just interested in grades and test scores.”

And community service programs know this too. Putney Student Travel, for example, posts college admission essays on its Web site as a way to market the program to high-school students. Authors of the essays attend schools including Pomona, Harvard, Williams and Dartmouth.

“Certainly as our participants make their decision that issue comes up,” said Kelsey Burns, the associate director of Putney Student Travel. “Certainly people think, ‘Can I use this for my college application?’ But once they come to the program, that reasoning falls away.”

Programs like Putney Student Travel organize summer community service trips for teenagers in countries like Peru, Nicaragua, India and, of course, Costa Rica. And they have also been growing. Putney started in the early ‘90s with two programs and only 32 students. Now it runs 20 community service programs for about 320 students.

Burns said more students are interested in helping others and making a difference, but there is another reason behind this growth.

“Kids think colleges like to see evidence of altruism,” Reider said. “It can be hard to find underprivileged people under your nose when you live in an affluent community.”

Teens themselves admit that college is usually behind their community service motives.

“I’d like to think I’m doing this because I want to help people,” said Laura Van Oudenaven, who will spend one week on an Indian reservation in North Dakota this summer. “But mostly it looks good on your college applications. A lot of kids our age do it because of the college thing.”

Van Oudenaven, a senior at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Md., said she will apply early decision to Davidson College.

“Just the fact that I’m going to do community service on an Indian reservation in North Dakota shows I have a strong personality, because most people wouldn’t be willing to do that,” she said.

The “Costa Rica essay” can often reveal a lot about a person and impress admission officers, Reider said. But the hard part is giving the essay a “personal touch” so that it stands out among the others.

Jeremy Zorn, the manager of operations at EssayEdge, said many of his clients who write about their community service experiences use “the same cliché terms.” Essay advisers at EssayEdge work with students to eliminate clichés and make their stories unique.

“It’s virtually impossible to eliminate this essay topic,” Zorn said. “There are a limited number of experiences that people will have before they turn 18, and if somebody goes to Costa Rica for the summer and has a profound experience, that’s what colleges want to hear.”

And, frankly, students feel safe writing about a topic that has brought so many people success in the past.

“Once people get admitted with a certain profile, others think, ‘Oh, that worked, I should try that,’” Zdawczyk said.

Nadia Tykulsker, a senior at the New York City Lab School for Collaborative Studies, went to Costa Rica last year with The Experiment in International Living.

Tykulsker is not sure whether she will use her experiences to write her college admission essay, but one of her friends from the summer wrote her essay about her time in Costa Rica and was admitted to the University of Pennsylvania. Because of this, Tykulsker knows she will consider using the topic.

“I’m definitely going to ask to see her essay for an example,” Tykulsker said.

Like the other applicants who write “Costa Rica essays,” Tykulsker is reaching for a safe topic. As the essays on the Putney Student Travel Website show, applicants who submit these essays get into some very prestigious schools.

But Reider said the topic has evolved into an easy way out for applicants.

“If you’re out on a date and you go out with somebody you don’t know, you try to be proper and it’s artificial,” Reider said. “There are certain things you don’t talk about like abortion, god and premarital sex. And that’s why these essays are so bad; because they’re written from a first-date point of view.”

Still, Reider said, not all “Costa Rica essays” are bad. He wouldn’t yawn, for instance, if he read an essay about a student who realized how complex poverty really is and who recognized that programs like his are not making a significant difference.

“Now that would be interesting because it shows the kid is thinking,” Reider said. “Professors don’t want kids who have it all figured out, they want kids who are thinkers.”

Debbie Lehmann