Coming up with an idea, transforming that idea into words, crafting an opening line, building the persona behind the essay, writing with a personal voice, and concluding with a spicy finisher! – these are all extremely difficult tasks. Yet writing your own common app essay requires doing all of these things and requires doing them very well. In this essay, we’ll discuss different drills that you can do to come up with an idea behind your common app essay.
What do you excel at? How do you represent those qualities? Remember that the admission officers are not trying to fill a class with students who have done x, y, and z. They are trying to fill up a class of students who have skills x, y, and z. You want to represent those skills/personality traits that make you a good fit for the school. The activities that you have done are there to support the theme you are trying to convey, that you have those skills that would make you successful.
Start with a few, say 5, qualities that define you and how you represent those qualities. Maybe you’re a go-getter, curious, and athletic. Maybe you’re funny, indefatigable, and ironic. Maybe you’re a great reader, etc. You get the point.
You can search up a list of 683 personality traits. Scroll through these traits and try to find some that describe you well.
After you’ve completed this, try finding specific experiences or stories from your life that support each personality trait. Maybe you’ve chosen caring as your personality trait, and you remember helping your parent in the hospital when they were sick. Or maybe you chose curious as one of your examples, and you remember a time in the lab when you went above and beyond to recognize the connections between different studies and their implications.
By now you should have drafted up a list of at least 5 qualities, and for each quality have 2-3 distinct experiences that support each one – for a minimum total of 10 experiences. Keep doing this for an hour or two and see what life experiences come to mind, what stories you have encountered in your life, and what interesting things you have learned.
The important thing to realize here is that there is beauty in the mundane. Even if you can’t think of the most defining story of your life, or you can’t come up with an interesting story to deliver, there is always some growth in the things that you have done, and when you spend enough time introspecting then you’ll realize the stories that you could write about.
The most important piece of advice I can give you when you’re doing this drill is to realize that the details of the story are not extremely salient. I like this saying that is – you are 10 percent of what’s happened to you, 90 percent how you react to those situations. I want to say that your essay will read similarly. If I were an admission officer, I wouldn’t care so much about the story itself as much as how you portray what you’ve learned from the story.
Let’s say I’m writing a story about being a barista at Starbucks. I write about how many different people I’ve come across, the names I’ve had trouble pronouncing, and the different short conversations I’ve had with both newcomers and regulars. I can describe my love for coffee and my love for brewing, and I can share what I’ve done as a barista. Those things are interesting – yes – because they’re detailed and specific. But what’s all the more interesting are the things that I’ve learned as a barista – this is where the real part of your story comes in.
Maybe through learning how to brew all these different coffees, I’ve become much better at brewing early morning coffee for my family, preparing everybody their own cups of coffee before they wake up and before I go to school in the morning. And that’s taught me the value of giving back and being appreciative towards my family.
Maybe I once gave the wrong order, or coffee spilt on the customer, and I heard an earful and I got mad, but then the manager explained to me how I should have dealt with the situation and how I should take up ownership and responsibility for what I did.
Maybe I mispronounced a name several times, but eventually had a conversation with the customer to know their name and history, and learned about the interesting backgrounds behind every individual.
Whatever the story is, there’s always some aspect of growth that you need to convey. That’s the point of your life – live and learn. Nobody will tell you this, but the point of your essay is to convey what you have learned in a single life story. And though it is really difficult to come up with these stories, it is easy to convey what you have learned from your experiences. That’s what I want you to focus when you’re doing these brainstorming and drills. I hope you have fun with this, and I hope that was all helpful!
コメント