
Write Your Way to College
Ace Your College Essays and Learn Valuable Writing Skills

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Common App Prompt #1: You Complete Me
Let’s take a close look at Prompt #1 by analyzing the key words and developing key questions we can answer to see how well this prompt might work.
Here it is:
Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.
Why is This Prompt Here?
The real advantage you can leverage in the essay is the opportunity to include things you can’t explain anywhere else on your application. Sometimes, these are the most important things about us. They just aren’t related to school.
A good example comes from a girl I worked with named Izzi. She’s been acting on stage since she was two years old. But she’s always worked in productions outside of the schools she has attended. Sixteen years of work in the theatre and there’s no easy way to explain it in the application.
And yet, this is the one thing Izzi feels has shaped her most as a person, especially one who works hard, tackles complicated things, is a good team player, always makes the best of bad situations, and isn’t afraid to get up on stage and show people who she is.
You can get some advice form Izzi here about her experience of working through the essay process here:
Background Knowledge
What if the thing you value most about yourself has to do literally with who you are? Maybe it’s something about your racial or ethnic heritage, the places you’ve lived, your immediate family, or a special role you play in your family. Maybe you’re active in your faith community. Maybe you’ve created your own community organization to help others.
These are all parts of your background. They may be such big parts of who you are that you really should talk about them in your essay. This is especially true if you feel that your background is unique in some way, has shaped you more than anything else in your life, and can’t be explained through any other part of the application process.
Key Question: What is it about who you are or how you’ve grown up that has shaped you the most?
Key Question: Do you have an unusual family background that is a deep part of your life that isn’t easily communicated through your academic accomplishments?
Your True Identity
Who are you? Yes, you can answer with your name. But we all have multiple identities: writer, artist, athlete, musician, nerd, rebel, superhero, mystery, enigma, magician, philosopher — you can develop anything, literal or figurative, that you feel best describes your true identity.
Key Question: Do I have a way of being in the world that expresses who I am better than anything I’ve accomplished?
Key Question: Do you have a significant nickname or something your friends or family members refer to you as that defines you in their esteem?
Interest Survey
Some of us have near-obsessive interests in certain things. It’s not uncommon to pick these up when we’re very young and carry them through our entire lives. What are you most interested in?
In some ways, writing about a deep interest you have, something you’ve been interested in for a long time, and with great intensity, could be the best and easiest thing to write about. Why? Because instead of writing so much about ourselves, we can’t write about our interest and why we’re interested in it.
It’s always harder to write about ourselves than it is to write about something outside of us that we know well. Here again, if an area of interest is a big part of your life, and there’s no other way to talk about it on your application, this is a good candidate for your essay.
Key Question: Is there one thing you’ve been interested in for a long time that you spend a lot of time on outside of school?
Key Question: Our most interests often show up in our lives as hobbies. Do you have a hobby you’ve been deeply involved in for a long time?
Talent Show
We all have talents, even if the talents we have aren’t the obvious ones recognized by our society. For example, some of us live in such difficult circumstances that we develop special talents just to get by in life.
Or perhaps we do have a talent our society regards as such but it’s not part of what we do at school. If this is the case, this prompt may be the one for you.
There’s an interesting opportunity here: the opportunity to surprise a reader by defining a talent you possess that isn’t a talent most of us think of. This can be a wonderful opportunity to introduce humor, humility, and irony into your essay. These are things most applicants have a hard time expressing. If you can do this well, your essay might give you a real advantage.
Key Question: Do I have a conventional talent that is an important part of how I think of myself and that cannot be explained anywhere else on the application?
Key Question: Do I have an unconventional talent or can I describe a part of myself as being a talent in a way that’s surprising, funny, or ironic?
Meaning Matters Most
It’s easy to read this prompt and think that it’s about backgrounds, identities, interests, and talents. It is, but it’s really about what these things mean to you.
The meaning you take from these things is more important in this context than the things themselves. Why? Because many people might have the same talent but no two people will find the same meaning in it.
Keep in mind that these essays are your best chance to stand out from the crowd. The meaning you take from things in your life is unique to who you are. That’s why colleges want to know so much about that. Your background, identity, interest, or talent is just a vehicle you use to deliver to your readers an explanation of what is most meaningful to you in life.
Key Question: What does my background, identity, interest, or talent mean to me?
Key Question: How does a part of myself or my life define me in ways that are unique to my experience?
Key Question: How would I be different if I didn’t have this thing in my life?
A Rare Opportunity
The essay is your chance to include in your application something that isn’t easily covered by any other part of it. It’s also your best chance to convey your uniqueness: the one thing that is your biggest advantage when it comes to standing out from the crowd.
No matter what you think of the other prompts, put some time in thinking about how you might respond to this one. As the wording of the prompt suggests, this is your opportunity to “complete” your application in a way that completes the picture of who you are.
Common App Prompt #2: Obstacle Course
This is a great prompt to answer if you feel it applies to you.
One way to think about this is through all the fiction you’ve read. In stories, overcoming obstacles and learning from them is the most common and most important thing characters experience.
Let’s take a look at the prompt and then we’ll break it down:
The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?
As you read on here, remember that we’ve all faced obstacles in life and we’ve all dealt with them in some way. Your obstacle doesn’t have to be huge. It just has to be something you learned from.
Why is This Prompt Here?
Our entire lives involve cycles of the pursuit of happiness punctuated by things that stand in our way. The obstacles we face tend to grow in number and complexity as we grow up. Certainly, you will encounter many obstacles in college. And what does a college want from you when that happens? They want you to learn something.
This prompt is designed so that you can express how well you do this.
You’ve probably heard the terms “grit” and “resilience”. They tend to mean more or less the same thing: when the going gets tough, you keep going. It’s not how many times you get knocked down, it’s how many times you get back up that matters.
These are some of the most tired clichés of athletic coaches in our history. But they’re true: we all get knocked down, we all get intimidated, we all get scared, we all get stuck, we all get sad and we don’t to play anymore.
What most colleges would like to know is that even when you don’t want to play anymore you figure out a way to keep playing. This is a positive character trait that is a very strong predictor of learning and life success. It’s also the one most important ingredients in whether or not you finish college.
Never forget that getting into college is nowhere near as important as getting out with some degree of some kind. It makes no sense to start unless you’re pretty darn sure you’ll finish.
That’s largely what this question helps you show people.
Key question: What are the biggest obstacles I’ve encountered in my life?
Key question: How have I handled these obstacles?
Key question: What have I learned from how I’ve handled them?
In some ways, I think of this prompt as being the most true-to-life of all seven Common App prompts. Our lives seem to go in cycles: we pursue happiness and at some point find our way blocked by an obstacle. We deal with the obstacle and get back on the path. Then we hit another obstacle. In a sense, our lives are a series of infinite loops as we move forward with the intention of getting what we want only to encounter obstacles along the way.
Whether or not we get what we want depends a lot on how we handle those obstacles. This is what college admissions folks want to know about you.
College is going to be full of obstacles. Some won’t even have to do with things you do on campus. You might encounter family difficulties, financial difficulties, challenges with your health. You never know.
But one thing we all know is that you’re going to run into obstacles of all kinds, many of which will be unlike any you have faced before. If you do it right, college is hard — very hard. It’s supposed to be. If it’s not, why spend all that time and money?
All this prompt asks of you is that you explain one instance in your life where you got knocked down, got back up, and learned something important from the effort. Keep it simple. Strike an engaging balance between your feelings and your facts.
Key question: Is there a specific obstacle I remember well?
Key question:What are the most important details about this obstacle and how I handled it?
Key question: What are the most important feelings I had during this experience?
Challenges, Setbacks, and Failures: What’s the Difference?
I think the differences here are subtle but perhaps worth talking about — at least a little:
- Challenges are very difficult obstacles we face along the path to our goal. They are the things we grapple with, the things we work hard to defeat, the inevitable roadblocks we know we must go around or smash through. They tend to show up at particular places on our path to success, and that’s where we have to deal with them. If we don’t, we can’t move forward.
- Setbacks are things that happen while you’re on your way to achieving a goal but that don’t pull you off the path to achieving it. They just set you back a bit. They’re frustrating. It’s hard enough to make progress. It can be soul-crushing to see that progress stripped away in an instant. How do you respond when you suffer a soul-crushing setback?
- Failures are fascinating. Seriously, from the standpoint of learning, failures are essential. In fact, the faster you fail, the faster you learn. But as the term implies, failures are complete losses. They often require us to start over from scratch. They also require us to take what we’ve learned about what didn’t work and apply it to a new way doing something that we think might work. We can’t keep doing the same thing over and over again and expect a different result. (And yet, many of us do; this is a common human failing.)
I don’t think it’s too important in this prompt that you show your knowledge of the difference between challenges, setbacks, and failures. For me, as an educator, I tend to like failure stories best. Failure is so hard. And yet it is so valuable. Ironically, the very best students I work with fail the most. But we work to fail fast and to quickly come back with small and tightly focused solutions.
Key question: How do I react to failure?
Key question: How do I learn from failure?
Key question: What’s the connection between failure and learning?
Affect = Change; Change = Learning; Learning = Success
College means many things to many people. But to a college, it usually means one thing more than any other: learning. When this prompt asks how something affected you, what a college admissions officer wants to hear is that you were affected in a way that helped you make a positive change.
In theory, if you can keep going, making positive changes along the way, you’ll end up learning quite a lot. If the college you attend is holding up its part of the bargain, and they all try, then what you learn should translate into some kind of success that is truly meaningful to you.
As you work on this prompt, think about showing your reader that you understand the simple progression that leads from how you are affected by negative experiences all the way to how your success is related to the changes you’ve made and the learning you’ve acquired as a result.
Key question: How have you been shaped by the obstacles in your life?
Key question: What have you learned from getting through the obstacles in your life?
Key question: How will what you’ve learned from tackling obstacles help you in college?
Common App Prompt #3: Believe It or Not
This might be the hardest prompt to answer for any of us. That’s exactly why it’s a good one to consider. If you can answer it well, you’ll stand out from the crowd in two ways: your willingness to take on this challenge and your ability to describe something deeply personal.
Most people will answer easier prompts. The other prompts are more common to everyday life experience. This one is rare. Even when we do encounter situations that force us to reflect on and challenge a belief, this is often very hard to explain. Again, the harder a prompt is, the more likely you’ll make a positive impression by crafting a good response to it — if you handle it well.
Here it is:
Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea. What prompted your thinking? What was the outcome?
As we break this prompt down, think about times when you’ve changed your behavior around something. We usually don’t change our behaviors unless we consciously change our minds first.
Key question: When has a change of mind led you to change your behavior?
Key question: Have you ever changed your behavior and then wound up changing your mind about something?
Why is This Prompt Here?
This may sound strange, but this prompt is included because this is exactly what college is all about. Every school, every class, every formal experience your school will offer you is designed to challenge your beliefs about something in particular. This frequency and degree of challenge is what makes college fundamentally different from the schooling you’ve had in the past where, for the most part, your task has been to receive information and spit it back out.
There’s also another reason why this prompt is here. In recent years, we’ve seen problems on college campuses when people deal with ideas they find uncomfortable. Sometimes, these problems have lead to riots and property destruction because many students may be protesting the invitation of a speaker whose views they disagree with.
There’s nothing wrong with peaceful protest. But if you’re going to college, and you don’t think you can tolerate opinions that are different from your own, you may want to reconsider going to college — or at least make sure you pick one that matches your existing belief system. (But then, why go to college if all you want is to be validated for what you already know is true?)
This prompt is hard. But it’s probably the one colleges most want to know about. Your courses and your interactions with other people will bring you in direct contact with ideas you probably haven’t ever thought of. Some of these ideas may directly contradict things you believe to be true. How will you handle this? Colleges desperately want to know. In some cases, their long-term survival depends on the extent to which their students grow up to be mature thinkers who can deal with diversity of thought.
Ideally, this is an experience you enjoy because working through challenges to our existing beliefs is probably the best and most intense way to learn. This is exactly what colleges want to provide for you: the best opportunities for learning. It follows, then, that colleges would love to know that this is a kind of experience you find valuable and are eager to encounter again and again during your years on campus.
Key question: How do you react when you learn something new that isn’t consistent with something you already believe?
Key question: How do you feel about going to school with people who don’t share your beliefs about important things?
What Does It Mean to Question a Belief?
We change our beliefs all the time. In most cases, the change is trivial. I do a lot of writing. I’m always looking for the best writing software I can find. I have strong pre-existing beliefs about what has worked well for me in the past. But there’s no real risk in my questioning those beliefs. The worst thing that’ll happen is that I find a better piece of software to work with.
Then there’s the little kid who says, “I don’t like broccoli.” But when you ask why, he says, “Because!” This probably means the kid has never tried broccoli. Most of us don’t like vegetables when we’re little. But as we get older, our minds and our palettes change. At the age of 55 now, I’ve definitely questioned my childhood belief in the superiority of eating meat over vegetables. Fortunately, my wife cooks vegetables in interesting ways. Regardless, even though this kind of questioning and change makes a big difference in my life, it’s not the kind of questioning and change colleges are interested in.
Now, my niece made a huge and unusual change in her eating when she was only about 10. She decided to become vegan. That took a lot of research. And it still takes a lot of research because she has to know all the ingredients in everything she eats. It’s a tough commitment, tougher than any commitment I could make. But she’s 12 now and she’s stuck with it. That’s a change worth writing about.
Colleges want to know how you’ll handle and benefit from challenges to core beliefs you’ve held most of your life, beliefs about yourself, other people, and the nature of the world.
Key question: Is it common or rare for your to challenge your existing beliefs or the beliefs of authority figures?
Key question: Can you think of a time when you risked something big in order to express a belief that really mattered to you and that contradicted with the belief of someone else?
We’re Always Questioning Every Time We Learn Something New
We all learn many things between kindergarten and our senior year of high school. Every time we study something new, we’re forced to question a pre-existing belief and change our minds. Most of the time, however, these changes are very small. What you’re looking for here is something bigger and more consequential.
For most of us, college is the first time in our lives when we leave our families. As such, it’s often the first time in our lives when we feel free to consider who we are as young adults, what we truly believe independent of family ties and traditions, and how we want to live in the world.
The simple structure of college leads us to question many things. In fact, I’d argue that it just isn’t possible to get a good college education without changing our beliefs in significant ways. This internal transformation is so fundamental to the college experience that colleges would love to know what you think about it.
PS: Colleges really need to whether you can handle this or not. If there are beliefs you have and you can’t deal civilly with ideas that contradict them, college might not be the best place for you. At the very least, you may have to pick a college with a belief system that matches your own.
Key question: What kind of opportunity does learning new things represent for you?
Key question: When you learn something new and it does change your mind, how do you feel about this experience?
They’re Looking for a Specific Experience
I think the tough part of this prompt is finding a specific experience to focus on. Most of the big changes of belief that we go through build up slowly over time from long series of experiences. But the prompt is very clear in wanting to know what “prompted” the change in your thinking.
If you can make a good case that running into the same question over and over eventually prompted you to think about it more deeply, that’ll work just fine. This is a common experience. Few of us give up long-held beliefs over a single incident. More likely is the case where we’ve been questioning something for a long time and a significant event occurs that “prompts” us in that moment, or shortly thereafter, to change our minds about something.
Key question: Can you describe in detail one specific experience of questioning a belief and how it affected you and others around you?
The Ideal Essay Links a Change of Mind to a Change in Behavior
There are many times when we question our beliefs and decide to stick with them. That’s normal. In fact, it’s much more likely than changing our minds.
All of us have a hard time changing our minds about things. However, your ability to change your mind and truly gain something from it is what colleges want to know about most.
So what’s the big gain?
The big gain, as far as most colleges are concerned, is that as you change your mind, you begin to change your behavior as well. You think differently, you act differently, and you begin to get different results in your life. Ideally, these results are consistent with the best parts of your nature as influenced by your college experience.
Key question: Have you ever changed your mind about something and immediately changed your behavior around it?
Key question: Have you ever been challenged to change your behavior but used your existing belief system to argue effectively about why you shouldn’t change your behavior?
Key question: How much do you enjoy change? Do you get bored easily? Or do you prefer a consistent routine?
Common App Prompt #4: Problem Child
I love this prompt.
The reason I love it is that it suits my personality so well. I’m fascinated by intellectual challenges. I do a lot of reading to research specific questions I have mostly about history these days and how our country got so jumbled up the way it has. And this is exactly where I spend a lot of time thinking about the ethical problems we face as a nation.
Most importantly, however, I’m a big problem-solver. Look at me right now: I’m creating an entire online community to solve the problem of students producing good essays for their college applications. I love stuff like this!
At first, it seems that this question is all about thinking. But really it’s about doing. Specifically, it’s about problem-solving and the kinds of problems you’ve either solved in your life or are hoping to solve — perhaps as a result of learning new things in college.
Describe a problem you’ve solved or a problem you’d like to solve. It can be an intellectual challenge, a research query, an ethical dilemma — anything that is of personal importance, no matter the scale. Explain its significance to you and what steps you took or could be taken to identify a solution.
Even though this prompt is specific to problem-solving, it’s wide open with regard to problems you may have solved in your life, even little ones. It also includes problems you want to solve in the future — perhaps as a result of learning new things in college!
Key question: What’s the biggest problem you’ve ever solved?
Key question: What’s the tiniest problem you’ve ever solved that was meaningful to you?
Key question: If you could solve one problem in the world between now and the time you’re 30, what problem would that be?
Why is This Prompt Here?
More than any other prompt, this one hints at the kind of person you may become after college is over. Let’s face it: the word is full of problems. Many of those problems are solved by people with college degrees, sometimes many college degrees. College is not required to solve important problems. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg solved some pretty big problems and they were all college dropouts. (Granted, they all dropped out of really prestigious schools.)
Thinking about this once again from the perspective of a college admissions officer. Who would they like to admit more: an applicant with all the grades, scores, and activities? Or a similar applicant who had a strong sense of what he or she wanted to accomplish in college and in the world?
That’s what I love about this question: it says so much about who we’ve been, who we are now, and who we’ll probably be in the future. That’s hard to know about yourself. So it’s really impressive to people when you know it. It also gives them a concrete way to know and remember you. You’re the person who wants to… [insert problem you want to solve here]. Assuming your reader can understand the problem and why you want to solve it, this will go over well.
Key question: How do you think college relates to problem-solving in your life?
Key question: Are you a person who often notices problems or who thinks about problems a lot?
Key question: Is problem-solving meaningful to you? And if so, how would you describe the meaning it gives you?
Intellectual Challenge
Ever tried really hard to figure out something that was really important to you? That’s what they’re talking about here.
Thinking, really deep thinking, is very hard. Our brains don’t like to do it at all. It’s exhausting. I know most people don’t think of chess as a sport but it’s not uncommon in world championship play for a player to lose 4–6 pounds sitting in a chair playing a single game.
Intellectual challenge may or may not be something you really love. But it’s something colleges love. If you can write about this with sincerity and authenticity, don’t hesitate. College is the very definition of intellectual challenge.
Key question: How much do you enjoy just thinking about really complicated problems whether you do something about them or not?
Research Query
This is a more formal version of trying to figure something out. They use the word “query” here intentionally. It means that you went into solving a problem by answering a specific question.
This is the more formal side of work at college: research work. You’ve certainly done some research papers in your time, but none of them have probably been as formal or complex as those you’ll produce in college.
I think what the prompt is telling us here is that two things are important: a specific, well-defined question to answer; and some kind of logical journey of research in pursuing that answer.
Here again, if this sounds like you, put yourself down on paper. This is exactly what you’re going to do a lot of in college.
Key question: On your own, outside of school, have you ever come up with a specific question you wanted to know the answer to and then done specific research to figure it out?
Ethical Dilemma
This might sound foreign to you but it’s actually the problem you’ve probably spent the most time dealing with throughout your years in school. Ethical dilemmas are almost always about people and how they act toward each other. Ever had a friend? Ever lost a friend? Ever wondered if you and your friend should do something that might affect other people who aren’t your friends? You’ve dealt with ethics.
The field of ethics is complicated. But you’ll have plenty of time to study it in college if you become a Philosophy major. Right now, think about right and wrong. Think about things that have happened to you and to other people you know. Think about the future and the kinds of people problems that are likely to arise as technology advances.
Some common ethical problems we talk about today have to do with robots replacing human beings in the world of work; whether or not it’s responsible or irresponsible to continue to ignore global warming; the safety or lack thereof of self-driving cars and other autonomous vehicles; over-use of antibiotics in medicine that is leading rapidly to entire classes of rapidly evolving “super-bugs” which are so strong no antibiotic we have can stop them.
Think, too, about politics, or the justice system, or laws about wages, health care, even university tuition! These are all things where one small group of people decides how very large groups of people should be treated. These are standard ethical challenges all modern societies face. And there are never — ever — easy answers to them because the well-being of human beings is at stake.
Key question: How much do you think about the way people treat each other?
Key question: How do you decide what is right when there are two or more solutions to a problem but someone loses something important in every scenario?
A Problem Solved or a Problem to Be Solved
It would be amazing, frankly, if in your 17 or 18 years on this planet, you would have truly solved a big problem. Sometimes we do, but mostly we solve tiny problems and wrestle with big ones, finding temporary ways to deal with them, and then encountering them again at another level.
If you’ve truly solved a problem that was important to you, then definitely write about it. But writing about a problem you’d like to solve in the future might be easier and, if you can do it well, it might be exactly what a college wants to know about you.
As an educator, I’m naturally drawn to students who have big dreams about solving big problems in the world. The idea that I might be able to contribute, even just a little, to their growth in this area makes me feel connected to solving the problem, too.
College admissions officers feel much the same way. Most colleges would like nothing more than to have a campus crawling with independently directed young people working alone or together to solve difficult problems in the world. Solving important problems is one of the main functions of the modern research university.
Key question: How do you envision your future work in the world?
Key question: If you see yourself solving problems in the future, what problems seem the most urgent to you?
Common App Prompt #5: When Sparks Fly
This prompt is similar to prompt #3. But there’s a subtle difference you need to think about in choosing between the two.
This prompt asks you to talk about something that “sparked a period of growth”. There are two important things hidden in there: the word “spark” suggests that something sudden and volatile happened; the phrase “a period of growth” suggests that this sudden and volatile thing put you on a path to change that lasted for a while.
Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others.
There’s an “and” there. That’s really important. It’s another thing that makes this prompt a little more challenging than it seems. You have to talk about a spark, a period of growth, and a new understanding.
Key question: Has anything surprising happened to you that caused you to make lasting positive changes in your life?
Why Is This Prompt Here?
Think again about why we go to college — from the perspective of the college itself. Colleges don’t know much about you. They don’t know what you’ll major in or what you’ll do after college. They don’t know if you’ll even finish college; about half of us don’t finish a 4-year Bachelors degree within six years.
But college admissions folks certainly know what the fundamental purpose of college is and they know how they provide it in their own unique way. Even though every college is a little different, they’re all built around the same two basic equations: Information + Experience = Learning; and Learning + Time = Change.
If you don’t learn much, college is not a good value. You won’t be happy and you won’t act with fondness, generosity, and reverence for your alma mater. But mostly, you’ll feel let down and your college will feel they’ve let you down. Nobody wants that.
But there’s another part: If you learn things but those things don’t change you in some meaningful and more or less permanent way, most colleges would say that you got very little value out of your time there or that they didn’t serve their mission as an institution in your case. Nobody wants this either.
How you answer this question, then, gives colleges at least some idea of how valuable your time with them will be. It also lets them know how well you’re going to fit in with their mission.
College is all about big learning. College professors really do want to see the occasional spark in your eyes of an “Aha!” moment. But they also want to see you change because of that moment. Ideally, they’d like that change to be significant and long-lasting.
Key question: Do you remember a time in your learning life when you had an “Aha!” moment?
Key question: Do you like being surprised by what you learn or are does it frustrate you when new learning pops up unexpectedly?
What’s a Spark?
We all know what a spark is literally. But the word is used metaphorically here to suggest a sudden, and usually unexpected, “accomplishment, event, or realization”.
Our lives seem to us to trudge along slowly. We change. But most often the changes are gradual or uneven. We don’t notice them until they’re long past. This is a clue about how to find them for this prompt.
You’ve changed a lot over your first 17 or 18 years. Think of all the differences in you just from middle school to today.
One tough part of this prompt, however, is to find that exact moment when something struck you as so important that it put you onto a path of change that lasted at least a couple of months, a path that led you to a new destination where you could honestly say, “Yeah, I guess I’m a different (and better) person now.”
PS: This is not the question to write about a sustained downturn in your life. We all go through these, and these experiences might be perfect for prompt #2 about overcoming an obstacle.
Key question: What kinds of things have caused immediate changes in your life?
What’s a Period of Growth?
This is a tough one. But the gist of it is as follows: Some things do actually change us. But they often change us in one simple way. Getting punished for something is like this. You do something someone thinks is wrong and you encounter an immediate negative consequence. Maybe this keeps you from repeating the action; maybe it doesn’t. In general, punishment doesn’t lead to a “period of growth”. Often, it leads nowhere. Sometimes it leads right back to getting in trouble again.
However, we do encounter things that change our thinking or our personal direction. These things typically push us in one area over weeks, months, or even years. For example, athletics gets very serious in high school for some kids. Seeing how good high school seniors are at your first day of practice as a freshman could easily spark something inside of you: a deep commitment to improve.
This commitment could sustain you the entire time you’re in high school. But even if it only got you through half a season, that would be significant in this case. Growth is difficult to sustain over long periods of time like years.
We tend to grow in spurts. There are short periods where we seem to grow a lot. Then we plateau and don’t seem to grow much for a while. Then, often to our surprise, we spurt up once more. Sustained growth doesn’t necessarily mean getting a little better every day. Think about stringing those spurt-and-plateau periods together over several months.
Key question: Have you had periods of time in your life when you felt like you were growing in a consistent and positive way?
Key question: Have you ever set a challenging goal for yourself and worked until you achieved it?
What New Understanding Am I Supposed to Have?
That’s a good question. It’s probably the hardest and most important part of this prompt, however, so let’s see what we can do to figure it out.
Ever look back at yourself when you were a little younger and think, “Wow, I can’t believe I was that person!” or “I can’t imagine ever thinking that way about things!” These are the types of new understandings your readers are looking for in your response to this prompt.
In order to make this prompt work for you, you really do have to have a clear and new understanding of yourself (Who am I now?) or other people (How do I think differently now about the people around me?).
If you like this prompt, start here at the end, with the new understanding, and work it backward to the period of growth. Then try to find the spark that started you on your way.
Try not to fall into this trap: working for hours and hours on the spark part, adding more hours of work to describe the period of growth, and then having no idea what your new understanding was. This is the one prompt in the set that, if it’s missing one key part, ends up being an almost total failure, even if you write about the other parts well.
Why is the understanding so important? Think about it from the college’s position. Their entire job is to make sure you leave with many new understandings.
Key question: Can you describe a time when you know you’ve made progress in your life and that progress has changed the way you think about something?
Common App Prompt #6: Time Machine
This is one of my favorites. Why? Because I have a strong tendency to jump into things, remain in an almost trance-like state of concentration, and discover eventually that many hours have passed without my realizing it.
This sense of “losing track of time” happens to all of us once in a while. But this prompt was chosen specifically for those of us whose minds and bodies persist in single activities where time ceases to be something we concern ourselves with.
Describe a topic, idea, or concept that you find so engaging that it makes you lose all track of time.
As I said, this is probably something that happens to all of us to some extent. But I wouldn’t encourage you to choose this one unless you know for sure that some one thing consistently takes you “out of time”. If that’s the case, this prompt was made just for you.
Things that take us out of time, often put us in what psychologists call a “state of flow”. Flow is a mental state — a very intense one — that can occur when we’re involved in something that’s really interesting and also really challenging. Losing track of time on something often hinges on that something being very interesting to us and simultaneously very challenging.
Key question: What activities hold your attention so strongly that you get lost in them?
Why Is This Prompt Here?
Think again about how college differs from high school. In high school, you take many different classes, you explore many different interests. High school is a mile wide and an inch deep. School will throw everything at you. They just won’t throw too much of it.
In your first semester at college, you’ll take fewer classes even if you haven’t picked a major. As soon as you pick your major, your studies will become more focused. If you go for a Masters degree, you’ll focus for 1–3 years on one subject only. And if you go for that big Ph.D., you will literally lose yourself for years and years inside of one tiny aspect of one narrow topic.
Colleges would love it if you stayed on campus for 10–12 years, which would be a minimum for a Ph.D. At the very least, colleges would like you to have a few classes that hit those optimal levels of interest and challenge. So they want to know if you’ve had this experience before. They want to know if you have it a lot. They want to know if it’s something you look for in a particular kind of life experience.
Key question: Have you ever had such an intense and specific interesting in something that it crowded out other things in your life?
Topic? Idea? Concept? Aren’t These All the Same?
To me, these are all the same. But these prompts are carefully worded, so perhaps there are some subtle differences we can find. Still, I don’t think you need to worry much about this for one reason: topics, ideas, and concepts are all things we think about. Sure, we explore them by doing things. But my hunch is that the thinking is what colleges want to know about because thinking intensely about something is often what takes our mind away from the clock on the wall.
I would think of the difference between these three things like this:
- A topic is a broad area of thought but it’s highly concrete. A topic is creating art or reading or playing a game. (NOTE: Please don’t write about video games here unless you’re applying to a school that has an e-sports program.)
- An idea is more specific. In fact, I usually make the case that an idea is something we express in a single complete sentence. That’s probably more narrow than your audience needs it to be. But a sentence is an idea. So that’s how I like to think of it.
- A concept is a little tricky. It’s broad like a topic but it’s abstract, not concrete. For example, courage is a concept, wealth disparity is a concept, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity is a concept. To draw a contemporary contrast here: liberalism and conservatism are concepts; that “The best government is that which governs least.” is an idea; universal health care is topic.
That being said, I wouldn’t worry too much about the distinction between topic, idea, and concept. The important thing to take away from this is that you’re being asked about something you think about often and intensely. There can be some doing involved. There usually is. But it’s your thinking that colleges are more interested in here because, well, that’s what most of us do most of the time at college. (Or at least it’s what colleges hope most of us do most of the time.)
Key question: Can you describe a time in your life when you spent hours thinking intensely about one thing or one set of closely related things?
The Rules of Engagement
This isn’t an important thing. You can probably figure it out from what’s come before. But I wanted to give you a little perspective here.
When we get engaged to a person, we make a commitment. It’s not yet a lifetime commitment; that comes with marriage. But it’s a commitment to get married, so it’s pretty close. Regardless, it’s a sense of commitment; it’s gonna take a lot to shake you away from this.
Then there’s the notion of an “engagement” as in “My favorite superstar music group has an engagement on May 19th to play the Enormodome at 8 PM.” What’s the connection? There’s a commitment here, too. It’s got a date and a time and both you and the musicians have to show up together at the Enormodome.
To me, when someone talks about engagement, even if it’s just emotional or intellectual engagement like it is with this prompt, I think of commitment. I think of intentionally setting aside time to pursue a particular thing.
This is also consistent with what happens at college: studying hits a new level few of us have ever experienced. Many classes require a commitment to put in several hours a day in order to keep up. You also have a commitment to come to class and to interact appropriately. That’s a kind of engagement, too, again because there are time- and place-based commitments here.
As you think of something that makes you lose track of time, think of something you’re committed to, or at least something you commit to spending some amount of time on — which often becomes longer because you lose track of time. It’s certainly possible to become randomly enthralled with something without any planning or commitment. But if that happened, and you enjoyed it, my hunch is that you’d make a commitment to it and plan to be enthralled a little less randomly the next time.
Key question: How inclined are you to set goals and make commitments to achieving them?
Common App Prompt #7: Dealer’s Choice
I’m not sure how I feel about this one. It’s as wide open as open can be. You can even turn something in that you’ve written before. (Just make sure it meets the word count requirement and is appropriately framed for a college admissions officer.)
In one sense, this is the easiest prompt of all. It literally explains itself:
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.
Instead of analyzing this, let’s think about a few other things. If there was a prompt you could do something unusual with, this is the one. Of course, unusual usually means risky. But risk and reward tend to go hand in hand.
Key question: Are you a highly confident writer?
Key question: Do you enjoy taking risks with your writing?
Key question: When you do take risks with your writing, what do you do to make sure you’re not risking too much?
Why Is This Prompt Here?
My hunch about why this prompt is here comes from all my years of teaching writing: giving writers broad choices gives them the opportunity to select the topic they are most passionate about. This usually leads to their best writing.
An important feature of the essay is to see how well you express yourself in writing. Maybe the other prompts don’t suit you well. Maybe you’ve got an amazing idea for something incredibly original. Maybe the folks who make up the Common App just want to be absolutely sure that the playing field is as level as possible for all students.
My gut tells me this prompt is included with the best of intentions for helping anyone be successful. But it’s a little trickier than it’s humble request might indicate.
Key question: When it comes to writing, do you have a topic that you enjoy writing about more than any other?
Key question: Is there something unusual you know an unusual amount about?
Will This Prompt Work For You?
I think this prompt works to the advantage of people with unusual talents for writing. Like the admissions officers you’re writing to, I have read thousands of college entrance essays. I gotta admit, as much as I love helping kids write them, they tend to be highly similar even if the kids are very different. I don’t think it has to be this way. This is why I discourage writers from using the standard college essay clichés.
But I think most of us read too many of those “Essays That Worked” books. There’s nothing wrong with looking at successful college essays. But it’s bound to influence what you think of your own essay, and that’s probably how so many essays end up sounding like they were written by the same person.
In the back of my mind, I have this crazy idea that a long, long time ago, one kid wrote one essay to get into the first class at Harvard in 1636. The essay “worked” and people have been copying it for almost 400 years.
But you don’t have to do this because here’s a prompt where anything goes. You call the game. You deal the cards. You make the rules and make your reader play by them as they review your work.
By choosing to do something unconventional, you may miss the mark by a wide margin. On the other hand, your essay is bound to be something your readers remember. And that’s the essential advantage you want.
Real people really read your essays. If they like your entire application, they go to meetings with other real people and advocate for you to be admitted instead of other people.
Sure, you want them to like you and to think you’re smart. But really, you want them to remember you. Something about what you write needs to catch their attention and stick with them across the many days and weeks they will spend choosing the students they want to admit.
The opportunity to be remembered is the biggest opportunity you have with this prompt. Try your best to be remembered in a positive way. What’s the best thing you can do to increase that likelihood? Share your unusual essay with many different people, preferably adults who are not your teachers. Why? Because you’re looking for readers who are proxies for the person reading your essay. That’s an adult who doesn’t know you very well.
Key question: If you wanted to make sure someone remembered you, what’s the one (appropriate) thing you would tell them?
But This Prompt is a Bad Idea If…
Even though the prompt says you can send in an essay you’ve written before, I’m going to work very hard here to discourage you from doing that. I’ve seen kids do this, or want to do it, and it has often turned out badly. There’s no reason it has to turn out badly. It just often does.
Perhaps the biggest problem in turning in something you’ve already written is that it probably wasn’t written with a college admissions officer in mind. Your one big goal is to reach out and grab the attention of one adult human being. You’ll have a much a better chance if that’s who you’re writing to.
The other thing that seems to come up when we want to turn in something we’ve already written is that we leave tiny mistakes behind. In adjusting for the word count requirement, for example, we may pull something out of our existing essay and render it incomprehensible to someone else. We understand it just fine. We wrote it. Even when we take something out, we still remember what it was. A college admissions officer doesn’t have that advantage.
The other problem that occurs involves leaving things in, things we wouldn’t put in at all if we started fresh. Think about how much you’ve learned about writing during your senior year. Think about how much more you could learn about writing if you got some help on a new essay. Most of the writers who work directly with me say that not only do they like their essay but that they add new writing skills and increase their confidence as writers. There’s value in this no matter what happens next in your life.
I know these college essays are hard. That’s why I set up this community to help as many students as I can. At the same time, they’re kind of supposed to be hard. They’re designed to give you an opportunity, perhaps the first opportunity of your life, to think in a big way about who you are, what you care about, and why you want to go college. Those are hard things to think about. Most of us avoid these questions. I know I did. But I’ve realized over the years how much there is to gain from responding to them as best we can — even if it takes a while.
Key question: If you’ve decided to submit an essay you’ve written before, are you doing this because it’s the best writing you’ve ever done? Or are you doing it because you don’t want to take the time and energy to write something new?
The Trap in the Common App
Are the folks who write the Common App trying to trick you with you their essay questions? Not at all. It’s just that sometimes we fall into a trap because it’s easy to think, from the questions they give us, that our essay needs to be about this big, huge, life-altering experience—something that jumps off the page and says, “Take me! Take me! I’m the best! I promise!”
Look at the Prompts
Let’s take a look at this year’s prompts:
1. Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.
2. The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?
3. Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea. What prompted your thinking? What was the outcome?
4. Describe a problem you’ve solved or a problem you’d like to solve. It can be an intellectual challenge, a research query, an ethical dilemma — anything that is of personal importance, no matter the scale. Explain its significance to you and what steps you took or could be taken to identify a solution.
5. Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others.
6. Describe a topic, idea, or concept you find so engaging that it makes you lose all track of time. Why does it captivate you? What or who do you turn to when you want to learn more?
7. 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.
I’ve highlighted what I call the “big phrases” in each prompt. These are the words that grab our attention, the instructions that are most intimidating to most of us. And the bait for the trap too many of us fall into.
What’s Everybody Going to Do?
Each of these prompts is designed to help you write a strong piece about something important. But too many of us think a strong pieces means we have to write about some heroic accomplishment or unbelievable experience.
And that’s where a lot of us get nervous.
Looking back to all the college application essays I’ve written, I can’t honestly say that I had some huge life-altering moment to write about. Things have happened to me. I’ve struggled and won or lost and learned. I’ve lost of track of time doing something interesting. (Who hasn’t?)
But I haven’t saved anyone’s life in a fire. I’m not an Olympic athlete. I haven’t won the National Spelling Bee. I’m haven’t invented anything or cashed out of three Silicon Valley startup companies. I’m… Well, I’m a good person who tries hard, gets pretty good grades, did some things in school that I thought were fun, etc., etc., etc.
What do ya know? I’m a regular person just like everybody else.
This is true for most applicants. And here’s the trap they fall into: THEY GO BIG! They take any experience they can find that matches a prompt and they write it up as though it should have made the front page on The New York Times.
I mean, this is your chance to impress folks, right? So ya better impress them. And that means coming up with something impressive.
This is what most of us do. I know. I’ve done it. More than once. If you have a big personality and you’re given to big explanations of things in your life, go big. But if you’re like most of us, a little quieter, maybe a bit more humble, or even shy, if you haven’t made the U.S. Olympic Gymnastics Team, maybe think about another approach.
Go Small
Remember that you’ve not trying to tell a story here that an admissions officer is going to send off to a publisher. You’re not writing an entry for the Guinness Book of World Records or Ripley’s Believe-It-Or-Not. You’re writing directly to a person, a person whose entire job depends on getting to know who you are, and someone, too, who is already predisposed to liking you.
So if a thousand other people answer their prompt with big language about some big experience, you’re gonna come off just like everyone else as a person who needs to make a big deal out of something in order to tell folks who you are.
There’s another choice: go small.
What if the truth of who you are is that you’re thoughtful, sensitive, you care about the little things, you notice stuff most people don’t? What if you’re at your best when you’re thinking about the tiny details in life? Or subtle shifts of emotion you notice in yourself or others?
What if you’re just a really smart good person who cares a lot about others and the world around you?
Do you think that’s the kind of person a college would like to have on campus? If so (and I think this is exactly the kind of person I’d want in my college), don’t be afraid to write an essay that packs its power into tiny ideas, well-written, and richly described.
Write to Connect, Not to Convince
There’s a sense we all have in this college application game that we have to convince someone to like us, to choose us over everybody else. We do have to stand out in a way that works for the people we’re writing to. But trying hard to convince them that you’re the person they should be advocating for can often backfire.
What if you were a person who connected deeply with your reader? What if you gave your reader so many tiny details about yourself that they could easily find something to relate to, something that would remind them about how they felt when they were in your position?
Think about some of the very best books you’ve read. What is it about the writing that has hooked you on the main character? In your last few years of high school, you’ve probably read some great literature, big stories about big changes in character’s lives. But I’ll bet these stories have unfolded with lots of little details, and that it is precisely these small things that have captured your attention and connected you with a certain character.
That’s the goal of your college essay: give the reader something to connect to, something they can connect to you personally, something you and only you could have written, something they will remember that’s not just like the hundreds of other essays everybody else is writing.
Why Is the Personal Essay So Hard?
“Why is the personal essay so hard?”
“It’s personal.”
“I know.”
“OK, then.”
“But why is it so hard?”
“It’s personal.”
“Sheesh!”
“What?!”
“I want to know why the personal essay is so hard.”
“I told you. IT’S PERSONAL!”
We think the hardest thing about writing personal essays for college applications is the writing. But it’s not. It’s the personal.
When you ask someone about something and they say, “It’s personal.” You know they don’t want to talk about it.
Personal essays for college applications feel the same way.
The hardest thing to write about is ourselves. Then we have to put our name on it. Then we have to send it to people we don’t know. And the stakes are high.
What could be more relaxing? (Not!)
Truth is, though, we have to be relaxed and comfortable with what we’re doing to produce our best work. If we carry our anxiety with us through the entire application process, it’ll show up in our writing—somewhere somehow. It always does.
And the last thing you want to say to college admissions officers is, “I get really nervous when I write.”
But you are nervous. Everybody is. I was. Every time!
I’ve written essays for both undergraduate and graduate schools. I just did it again, about five years ago, for a special program. I’d been a professional writer for more than 30 years. And I was still nervous.
But this time, I knew how to beat it.
And you will, too, when we work together in our college essay writing class—and then, after the class is over, when you get individual help all the way to the last word from me or Miss Margot.
So here’s how we all beat the anxiety we feel about the personal essay: we beat it, literally, over and over and over again. We beat it write out of ourselves through a series of quick activities that simulate the entire essay writing process—in about 15 minutes.
In our class, we’ll go through this process several times with several different prompts, some from the Common Applications, some that tend to show up on applications from colleges that don’t use the Common App.
You’ll pick a topic. Identify important elements. Make some quick lists. Talk a little bit about what you’d probably write. Things will move very quickly. You won’t have time to be nervous. And we’re just practicing. So what’s there to be nervous about, really?
Everyone will like what you’re doing and you’ll appreciate what everyone else is doing. I’ll even be doing it right with you as though I’m applying for college, too.
We’ll go through this process quickly. I think you’ll be amazed at how much you have to offer in these essays. And I know you won’t be nearly as nervous about it when we’re done.
If you do get nervous some time later, send me an email at stevepeha@gmail.com and we’ll work through it together, as many emails as it takes, until you aren’t nervous anymore.
You’re gonna write the best essay you ever have in your entire life. At some point, you’re gonna realize how good it’s getting. You’ll start to feel good about yourself as a writer. You’ll take pride in the quality of what you’re producing.
And those feelings will replace any personal anxiety you have about the personal essay.
I guarantee it!
Kind regards,
Mr. Peha
