Why You Should Ignore the Common App Essay Prompts
In Ecclesiastes, it is written: “There is nothing new under the sun.” So what in the world is a college applicant supposed to do if all the good stories have already been taken??
No doubt about it, coming up with the topic of your essay is the hardest part. I hear students say over and over that they don’t know what to write about. They worry that they’re not very interesting, or they haven’t done anything important.
Well, I am here to tell you two things: I have yet to meet an uninteresting 17 year old, and I have yet to meet a teen who has discovered the cure for cancer – just to level set things a bit.
What I have met are teens with odd quirks and worries and hates and hobbies. And these personal details make for the best essays. In fact, it’s these personal, granular moments and memories that should be your starting place, not the Common App essay prompts.
Just for kicks, let’s look at some of these prompts. The Common App asks students to reflect upon lessons learned from obstacles, gratitude, personal growth, beliefs they’ve challenged, or ideas that were incredibly engaging. Yikes! These are lofty topics. And I see students trying to fit themselves into this grandiosity. Which leads to generic essays written in the voice of a junior philosophy professor … not to mention an anxiety attack.
I encourage students to turn this paradigm around. Write about something specific, something that matters to you. Tell the story that no one else can tell, in your voice, with all the wacky details and embarrassing truths. Don’t look at the Common App; rather, look inward – so that you’re not pondering the meaning of life, but pondering your life.
I used to work in advertising, writing what we hoped would be award-winning print ads and commercials. But the question we always asked ourselves was this: If we put another company’s logo on this ad, would it still make sense? If the answer was yes, we knew it wasn’t a good campaign. It may have been clever, but it wasn’t going to sell the product.
The same is true for the college essay. If another student could put their name on your essay, and it works, it’s not a good essay.
So, what makes a good essay? Here are a few topics from some of my favorites (shared with permission from my students):
Why Bridgerton is an awful show
An Afghan sport called buzkashi, where men on horseback drop goat carcasses into their “end zone”
Cardboard boxes
LARPing
A Kris Letang fathead
The time they dyed their hair blue and hated it
Very different (and surprising!) for sure. But what they all have in common, is that in telling these stories, the students shared something deeper about themselves. They didn’t write about a universal, grand topic and attempt to stuff themselves into it. Rather, they wrote about something very particular to them, and extracted some values or understandings out of that.
So, I’m really serious. Ignore the Common App prompts. And if you need help exploring the perfect topic for you, let’s talk!