Writing Your Common App Essay
A reflection of my process while writing my Common App essay only 8 months later
Writing Your Common App Essay
For most American high school students, senior year is supposed to be the most laid-back year of your high school career before finally being allowed to move on with your life… yeah right. If you’re one of those people hell-bent on participating in the ivy-league college rush, the first half of your senior year (and really your summer going into it) will be spent filling out as many college and scholarship applications as possible before the start of the new year. To add on top of this, having a schedule almost fully filled with AP/IB and college credit classes in order to even be considered for these top universities eats away much needed application time with large projects and test cramming. This lack of time in the fall of senior year makes it incredibly important to complete your Common App essay as soon as possible, which will likely end up being the pièce de résistance of your college application. The Common App essay acts as your “elevator pitch” about yourself that will be looked at by colleges first and foremost, and can (and likely should) be used as a personal statement in other applications outside the Common App. Here’s the kicker: you are limited to only using 650 words maximum, meaning that you have to explain to the admissions counselors why they should care about your life specifically over the lives of a sea of applicants across the globe in the length of 3-4 paragraphs. Trying to figure out how to express yourself with such a limited word count and relatively small amount of time can be nerve–wracking, and it especially was for me. I had no idea where to start or how to make my writing stand out as much as the example essays I had seen online, leading to me wasting the month of August coming up with five different drafts that were scrapped one-by-one as September rolled around. Ultimately, this resulted in an essay that, while I felt was pretty good at expressing my journey as a learner, lacked a lot of creative appeal that kept it from standing out among the better essays. As the time for the class of 2025 students to start writing their own common app essays draws near, I wanted to share some lessons I learned both during and after the whole college application process that will (hopefully) make it a little easier to start writing your own Common App essay.
The most important aspect to remember while writing your Common App essay is that it is essentially your “elevator pitch”. Remember, you only have 650 words available to communicate to the admissions counselors with, and they will likely be skimming over it as quickly as possible given how many different ones they have to look at in a day. Thus, it is vital to make your essay as engaging as possible with a strong hook, conclusion, and body paragraphs that keep the reader (aka the admissions counselor) enticed enough to read through your whole essay, whether they wanted to or not. It’s just like being in an elevator standing right next to a well-known investor: you have to have a strong hook that makes them want to talk to you in the first place, and an even stronger conclusion that keeps them thinking about it after the ride until they call you back later. I came up with some general pieces of advice that I learned during my overly long brainstorming processing that should help with outlining an engaging enough essay:
- Firstly, and I can not stress this enough, you do not need to answer any of the provided prompts directly (or at all really). I’ve seen a large number of individuals who have spent valuable writing time looking at each prompt and deciding on which one would let them write the best essay. Hell, the seventh prompt every single year has always been “any topic of your choice”. There is no expected format that needs to be followed either when writing your Common App essay, meaning that if your strong point is creative or esoteric writing, formatting your essay to look like a letter or a conversation are just some examples of ways you could make your essay stand out if you pull it off well.
- That being said, the essay prompts are a really good starting point to come up with ideas for your essay. Note how all seven prompts aren’t just “tell us your life story in chronological order”, but rather asking you to share a part of your culture, or one of your hobbies, or even just to talk about a subject you find really interesting. Ideally, your essay shouldn’t just be a backstory of your whole life or a list of accomplishments you’ve done, but rather it should tell a story that showcases how you grew as a learner or showcases how your thinking process works (while sprinkling in your accomplishments here and there of course). Remember, your reader will have access to all the other activities and information you put in your application (and your other essays too), so don’t feel forced to squeeze in every single accomplishment into this single essay.
- Writing a creative and engaging story requires the use of creative writing techniques. Hopefully you haven’t fully fallen asleep yet in your literature classes and still remember enough about idioms and similes and whatnot to incorporate them into your essay. Knowing how to describe events or concepts to your reader instead of outright telling them what they are (show don’t tell) is key in painting your essay in their brain and keeping them hooked. Additionally, if essay is narrative focused, making sure not to describe the plot linearly (if you can) can go a long way in keeping the reader mentally engaged and asking questions as they’re reading, as if the story is too linear you risk the reader being able to assume the general idea of your essay halfway through and skip your conclusion entirely.
- Regardless of what you decide to write your essay about, or how you’ll go about writing it, there should always be a central theme to your essay that should be conveyed to the reader by the end (and ideally left for them to ponder on a little). This can be something as simple as a lesson you learned, or a viewpoint/idea that you feel is important to express, or even a direction or calling you want to dive into during college that shows the reader that you don’t just plan on slacking off during your four years of college. For example, if your essay is about how you love the beach, your theme could be centered around the importance of marine biology and environmental sustainability. Or, if your essay is about eating slices of cheese, your theme could be as esoteric as how we all have “holes” that showcase our weaknesses and how you learned to fill your hole with teamwork after winning the championship game (or something).
- Lastly, you have 650 words, that’s not a lot. You probably won’t be able to vividly describe the scenery of the soccer field you played in, or explain every intricacy of how a neural network works while still leaving room to talk about your theme/lesson and how it ties in with your accomplishments. It’s important to know what information is vital to the essay and what is not, and being ok with “killing your darlings” when you need to. This is also why it is so important to leave room in your time budget for revisions, as you will likely go through many, many drafts of your initial essay idea before finally getting something in the 650 word count limit.
I know most of this advice sounds really generic, but ultimately there’s not one right way to go about drafting your Common App essay, which is both exciting and scary for some (mostly the latter for me). Above all else, it is important to commit to an idea as soon as you can and stick with it until you’re happy with it, as basically any random subject you have thought about or minute experience you have ever had in your 17-18 years on planet earth so far can be used as a vessel for making you stand out from the rest and getting your pitch heard.
As an example of these tips, the final draft my own Common App essay is an effective example of an essay that both carries out some of these guidelines while also missing the mark with others:
After arriving home from PSU, I opened my Linux laptop to continue racking my brain on why my research project wasn’t yielding good results. All the regression models I had tested so far were heavily overfitting the test points instead of the actual response curve. Mistakes like these are probably the worst aspect of life itself. They can be either intentional or unintentional, have non-deterministic consequences, and be a major detriment to a kid who likes to have his whole life mapped out in a color-coded calendar. Even though this was my first time working on a project of this caliber, making such a mistake sent me into a panic knowing I only had one week left until presentations.
The dread of even making a mistake has played an influence in how I’ve lived my life. I had known from reading a book on the life of an engineer off the shelf of my second grade teacher’s miniature library that when I grew up, I wanted to be an engineer. This initial fascination would end up being the key motivating force for much of my early academics. However, I was different from many of the other young engineers who used to break apart their lamps or the young chemists who used to mix together dish soaps. I had a fear of messing up and breaking things. I never opened up my RC cars in fear of being electrocuted, nor did I explore nature off the sidewalk at risk of skinning my knee. While this did mean I was rather studious, it also ended up being a detriment to my own confidence and inquisition. I never thought to question or explore the inquiry “I wonder how that works” for fear of breaking something or making a mistake.
In middle school I came across another book that grasped my interest: Beginning Programming for Dummies. With the encouragement of my computer science teacher I started to dive deeper into the field, discovering a newfound sense of passion and curiosity that I had never felt before. This only compounded when I reached high school, where through the mentorship of more experienced upperclassmen I became exposed to various popular programming resources, namely Harvard’s CS50x, as well as discovering the beauty of using the terminal. Week by week, I spent my lunches working through the course, messing up almost every problem over and over until finally reaching a solution. The most beautiful aspect of programming to me was that it acted as a sanctuary which allowed me to mess around and explore without fear of permanent consequences. If I ever made a mistake, version control or even just the undo button made it incredibly simple to try things over again, and I eventually began to question why I couldn’t apply that philosophy to life as well.
Mistakes aren’t the worst aspect of life, but instead more of a necessary evil. Bringing change that (though sometimes scary) eventually leads to personal growth. And once I started to finally understand this, I began to dive deeper into every aspect of my life. I started to find the courage to try and make friends with more of my peers and learn from them, even taking leadership of my school’s programming club to help others discover the same passion I felt. I even secured an internship at PSU doing computational imaging research, something I never thought I would touch in my life. Most importantly, I learned the true flaws of my past fearful self and what the idea of “learning” actually is: making mistakes, but always beginning again more knowledgeable than before.
With this lesson in mind, I took a deep breath and started again on my research project. Using the notes I took, I began testing new methods for finding the hyper-parameters of each model, making mistake after mistake until I finally reached a solid result.
What this essay does well:
- There is a very clear theme present throughout the entirety of the essay: The fear of making mistakes. It’s used not only as a central theme to showcase the effect of fear on someone’s life and why that fear exists, but it also allows for me to talk about my own personal growth as a learner in overcoming that fear through learning computer science.
- The essay includes both a strong hook and a solid conclusion. The essay begins by introducing a small mini story that gives insight into a meaningful experience of my life. Similarly, in the conclusion I show the resolution I discovered in this experience, giving insight into what I had learned about the fear of mistakes and conquering said fear and how that helped the situation’s resolution.
Where this essay could be improved:
- The essay itself is… pretty generic. It keeps a mostly linear pace going through my journey learning programming (outside of the hook and conclusion) and fails to include really any creative writing techniques. Had I put more of a focus on expanding on the theme itself and having a deeper discussion about it over trying to squeeze in as many accomplishments as possible (that I probably could have talked about in other essays), the essay would have been able to stand out much more. There is also of course the lack of really any literary devices that makes the essay read incredibly flat.
The Common App essay can seem like an incredibly stressful part of your college application to complete in a way that both makes you stand out while still not taking up too much of your precious time. It honestly caused me a lot more stress than it probably should have and I ultimately spent too much time brainstorming that could have instead been spent on polishing the essay. So long as you can stick to a solid (and if you can, creative) theme that resonates with your life and study up on implementing literary devices, your essay should be able to effectively stand tall with the rest of your application and, hopefully, make yourself stand out against the tens of thousands of other applicants.