We made it! We broke down the first six prompts and we’re concluding this series by diving into our favorite prompt #7. Let’s get right to it:
Share an essay on any topic of your choice. It can be one you've already written, one that responds to a different prompt, or one of your own design.
Share an essay on any topic of your choice – how freeing and terrifying. But wait, there’s more. “It can be one you’ve already written.” Stop right there! It cannot be one that you’ve already written. Absolutely not. Sadly, getting into your dream school will take a lot more effort than resubmitting your mediocre English paper on Hamlet. We want something fresh, new, and exciting! Plus, your common app essay is about your personality and it’s quite difficult to discern what you’re like IRL if all you send Stanford is your rendition of what you found on the spark notes page for Huck Finn.
Moving on! We have written so many blog posts on this, and we’ll link them below. But this time, we’re going to simplify things in a different way. Try framing it like this: Share a story that helps us understand you better.
We love how open-ended this prompt is, and we also get that it might scare you. But read the above again. Share a story that helps us understand you better. It can be, literally, any story. Here’s how you might go about the process:
Make a list of 10 things that make you, you. Maybe you love to read, spend hours doing research on organic farming, have been working since the age of 12, love animals, you name it. Don’t limit yourself – just make a list that feels true to you.
Text your friends and ask your family to describe you. They can use adjectives or phrases.
Compile your list and the list of your loved ones and do a bit of brainstorming. What’s standing out? Remember, you want to explain what it’s like to hang out with you on a random Tuesday. So no, your service trip is not a good things to write about. The smaller the story, the better. We understand the urge to write about ~big~ things that seem impressive, but you’re going to dazzle the college admissions with your academic achievements elsewhere. Now is the time to write about your personality in the form of a story with a beginning, middle, and end.
Interrupting our list! When working with TKG clients, we’re constantly battling against ideas to write about school and awards. We like to think of it like this: assume that every single person that applied to your dream school has the same exact grades and test scores as you. And by the time they’re reading your essay, all they need to know is what your personality is like. Helpful, right?
Take a look at everything you’ve got and start to pair things together. Your goal is to decide which personality trait you want to focus on, and then find a story that exemplifies that characteristic. You’re not going to be able to distill your personality into one 650-word essay, so don’t even try. Just pick something that feels genuine!
At this point, you’ll have two things: a characteristic and a story. If you’re deciding between a few, it’s fine to draft out multiple essays. In fact, that’s often the best way to decide what’s ultimately going to work out. And this is important: your first draft is not going to be that great. It will probably include some kind of 100-word explainer at the end of the story that tells the reader what you want them to take away from the essay. And that explainer should be deleted immediately. You have nothing to prove and you’re not making a legal argument for yourself. You’re just shedding light on one of the many aspects of your personality in the form of a story with a beginning, middle, and end. Keep revising and reworking until you’re happy with the final product and don’t be afraid to play around with tone, structure, and form.
You can search our blog for more ideas, and you can find inspiration here, here, and here.
Drop us a line if you need help crafting your essays, we’d love to help.