The personal essay from start to finish

I want to begin this section on the Common Application personal essay by telling you a story about myself, something to help you understand who I am.

A stentorian clangor jolted throughout the right pocket of my quintessentially boorish denim jeans. My trembling, maladroit hands — I always was embarrassingly clumsy during my developmental years — frantically fumbled about in search of the cell phone that was causing the commotion in question. Exercising a copious amount of caution, I slowly extracted the phone from my pocket as my heart rate rapidly accelerated.

Do you feel like you know me better? We’re basically best friends now, right? Here is everything you just learned about me:

• I am in possession of a cell phone that occasionally rings.
• I am also in possession of jeans with pockets.
• I have a history of clumsiness.
• One time, I took said cell phone out of my pocket when it was ringing.
• The mention of heart rate suggests I can perform basic vital functions.
• I wrote a paragraph that wasted 10% of the personal essay’s 650 word count.

I opened this article by preparing you for “a story about myself, something to help you understand who I am.” Instead, you got a meaningless word salad that treats fancy-sounding — and oftentimes misused — descriptors like a garnish. The primary goal of the personal essay isn’t to wow admissions officers with flashy prose. You’re already using the internet to submit your application; showing them you also know how to look up Thesaurus.com isn’t a flex.

In my opinion, this missing of the mark largely stems from the fact that the personal essay is unlike almost any other assignment high schoolers encounter. For all of the English class essays analyzing “To Kill a Mockingbird” or “Lord of the Flies,” we rarely ask students to get unapologetically personal with their writing. The result is a startling number of Common App essays that either read like a bland book report or resemble the “all fluff, no stuff” example above.

It might seem like this essay is impossible, like a nightmare version of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” designed to haunt seniors applying to college. Ultimately, though, every unsuccessful essay shares one common trait: it fails to address the task at hand.

“The first thing you have to understand is that there is only one universal goal that a top admissions essay has to accomplish: to make the [admissions officer] (AO) like and root for you on a personal level. No other universal rules exist. That is the only guiding principle, everything else is dependent on the AO that reads your app,” an admissions officer at a T5 explained. “Average essays ruin top applications, strong essays boost average applications.”

If you read my earlier section entitled “The ratings system and what goes on behind closed doors,” you’ll recall that admissions officers typically present the applications they read to their colleagues in committee meetings. Admissions officers aren’t going to give an impassioned speech on your behalf in committee just because you have great grades and test scores; thousands of applicants boast those same stats. The sales pitch an admissions officer makes is essentially them telling the story of your application, and an effective personal essay contributes to that narrative by shedding light on who you are. Thus, I have two main pieces of advice: be genuine with your topic and be genuine with your style.

Be genuine with your topic

I ended up writing two different personal essays. The first was one that I wrote towards the end of my junior year for my AP English Language and Composition class. (As an aside, I greatly appreciate Mr. Barnes and Mrs. Lindsey getting their soon-to-be seniors early practice with that assignment.) In my essay’s defense, it was fairly well-written and told a cogent story of a high school debate round that altered my worldview. But that essay didn’t feel right. It felt forced, the type of contrived essay that leads to an equally contrived committee presentation. So I scrapped my topic altogether. No college admissions officer will ever read that essay.

Late in the summer between my junior and senior year, I sat down and began writing. I didn’t have anything in mind, nor was I writing for any particular purpose. I just wrote about how I was feeling at that moment in time, no looking back to see if the previous sentence flowed smoothly into the next one. About an hour later, I had completed a stream of consciousness that, if I’m being conservative with my count, switched subjects entirely seven times. From mechanical errors to words I can’t repeat in a school newspaper, to say my writing was raw would be an understatement. More importantly, however, my thoughts were raw. Re-reading those ramblings now, they took some beautiful turns mixed with some even uglier ones. I ruminated on everything from my past to how I currently view myself and the world, intertwining those ideas with my future ambitions and fears. It’s probably the most emotionally intense thing I’ve ever written.

It’s also the most authentic. When I opened my notes app and returned to that entry a couple months later, there was a specific jump in ideas between two paragraphs that stuck out to me. After thinking a little more about what experiences in my life prompted that jump, I knew what I wanted to write about. I had found the basis for an essay that, given my relatively mediocre course rigor and test scores, may have helped me gain admission to four T30s. Humans are incredibly complex and unique. Once you find a topic that deep down feels right and speaks to you, you’ll know that it isn’t going to devolve into trite clichés.

I think one of the leading causes of generic essays is generic brainstorming. In my opinion, people who start their search by asking “what would make a good essay topic?” are doing things backwards. If your essay doesn’t make you feel something, there’s no way it’ll make a complete stranger feel something. If you try to take a random event from your life and portray it as way more profound than it really was, your essay is inevitably going to fall flat. Admissions offices receive tens of thousands of personal essays every year — I can virtually guarantee you they’ve read essays about the same topic as yours. But what they haven’t read before is your unique perspective and spin on that topic. Shallow thinking is to blame for most bad essay ideas. “I was shy, then I joined the debate team and now I’m confident” is the type of surface-level essay concept that will blend in with the bajillion others on your admissions officer’s desk.

With that in mind, here is my step-by-step advice for selecting a topic:

1. Get your thoughts and feelings out. Get everything out. Childhood memories, deep-seated insecurities, what motivates you to get out of bed every morning. It doesn’t matter if it ‘sounds stupid.’ If it’s something you feel or believe, write it down. You’re not writing to get into college. You’re writing for the sake of writing, or, if you want, talking/vlogging/whatever it is the cool kids do these days. Bask in the opportunity to self-reflect. If you treat this like a chore, your eventual essay is going to be a chore.
2. Don’t try to immediately interpret everything you just wrote and pull out an essay topic. Allow yourself some time for your thoughts to process and sink in. If you’re working with a genuine stream of consciousness, it’ll probably appear incoherent and all over the place at first glance. Remember that you weren’t concerned about the quality of the writing itself. Once you’ve given yourself a little space, go back to see what ideas keep cropping up and where the shifts in your line of thinking occurred.
3. Dig deeper into the things that stick out to you. What do they say about who you are as a person? How did you become that person? If needed, it can be helpful to retrace the events in your life that coincided with those changes in you as a person.
4. This isn’t a step so much as it is a reminder to be gentle with yourself and to give yourself breaks as needed.
5. By this point, you’re hopefully starting to pull more concrete ideas out of your original writing. Look through this year’s Common App essay prompts and consider which ones would fit well for your ideas. Then sketch a brief essay outline. What would the beginning, middle and end look like? Beyond the subject of the essay itself, is there broader “so what?” commentary that reveals something meaningful about you as a person? Many applicants focus too much of their essay on the event, person, etc. they are writing about. Your admissions officer isn’t going to fight for you because you have a cool story from marching band. They’re going to fight for you because you showed them you’re a critical thinker, because you’re the type of person who they couldn’t stand to reject and not have on their campus.
6. If you want, consider creating a more detailed outline. Keep in mind that this isn’t a five-paragraph essay with a specific format, so feel free to get creative. At the same time, however, remember that readers spend a matter of minutes on each application. I had an idea last fall to critique linear conceptualizations of time by discussing an absence of flashpoint moments in my life, but… yeah…I decided against writing that essay.

There are a few other notes I want to make somewhere in this section. The first is the fact that tragedies can be very transformative events in our lives, and I think this method lends itself to highlighting that. I won’t pretend to have had a difficult upbringing by any stretch of the imagination; I would argue the exact opposite given the people and resources I have been fortunate enough to have. That said, there was something from the summer between my freshman and sophomore year that, for many reasons, I’ve spent a good amount of time thinking about. If you know me well, you know what I’m referring to. 

I think a lot of people around me assumed I would make that experience a central part of my application. I can’t speak for my letters of recommendation, but I decided not to mention that event at all. I would rather get rejected by a school than receive an acceptance letter built on the back of someone else’s pain. I’m not entirely sure where I’m going with this paragraph; maybe it doesn’t apply to you whatsoever. But if it does, know that you don’t owe anyone anything. If you want, you can always ask your counselor to discuss something in their recommendation.

Secondly, any great essay has to take risks. Now, I’m not going to act like my essay was great — all I know is that it wasn’t terrible enough to sink the rest of my application. I do know that I checked several of the “avoid talking about these things” boxes and didn’t have the most streamlined essay format. But I also have an ego that told me I’m a better critical thinker and writer than the average high schooler, so I did those things anyway. Perhaps this was a dumb act of hubris, or perhaps my “risky” essay compensated for the shortcomings elsewhere in my application. If you find yourself in a spot where controversial opinions may seep into your writing, just be sure to keep the essay focused on you, with your edgy hot takes merely advancing the story.

I have also found that many of the best personal essays I’ve read aren’t afraid to discuss one’s own flaws. This might seem counterintuitive given the goal of the essay, but, in my humble opinion, acknowledging the complexities of your character demonstrates a level of maturity and self-awareness that most teenagers — and adults, for that matter — do not possess. If you choose to go this route, it’s important not to let your blemishes consume you. This type of essay should probably address how realizing your flaws has changed you and how you have worked to improve yourself.

Lastly, I would be remiss not to spend a paragraph on intellectual vitality (IV), defined by a former Stanford admissions officer as “palpable academic energy that shows up in college applications as raw intelligence, authentic joy for learning or striking thoughtfulness. You’re applying to be a student who studies with Nobel Laureates. You need your application to glow with IV.”

Intellectual vitality is an extremely important aspect of what makes great personal essays great. You might be upset with me, then, for waiting until the very end of this subsection to bring IV up, but I did this because I don’t want you to feel pressure to “sound smart” with your essay idea. I’m of the belief that if you are a legitimately outstanding thinker and learner, enough time to self-reflect will naturally yield an essay attesting to your IV. Try completing this sentence to see if your essay has a meaningful ‘so what?’ that showcases your intellectual vitality:

My personal essay frames me as X by showing how Y has had Z effect.

Here is an example using my Common Application: My personal essay frames me as a “big picture” critical thinker driven by compassion for others by showing how my shifting understanding of macro/micro dialectics has helped me better orient myself as an agent of grassroots change.

Needless to say, I’m not going to copy/paste that sentence into my essay, but I am going to use the topic of my essay as a vessel to embody this idea.

Be genuine with your style

Even the best idea can only go so far if poorly executed. Always come back to the goal of this essay: “to make the AO like and root for you on a personal level.” You should, of course, proofread to avoid obvious spelling and grammatical errors, but that alone isn’t going to turn someone into your biggest fan.

Personally, I love thinking about words and how to use them to say what I want in the best way possible. Sometimes I’ll have a specific word or short phrase in my mind and I’ll challenge myself to reverse-engineer the entire paragraph around that “moment.” I’ve written and edited pieces where I’ll stare at a sentence for 10 minutes playing out different “scenarios” in my head. If I word things this way or sequence this clause before that one, what happens? Why does “this clause before that one” sound better than “that clause before this one?” What doors does that choice open or close as far as making the next sentence roll off the tongue well?

At a subconscious level, I assume we all do this to some extent, especially when writing something we deem important. I distinctly remember going through my personal essay with a recent Parkway West alum and current student at a T20. We were pulling our hair out trying to perfect the wording of one small part of one sentence when they said to me, “you realize we’ve spent all this time on a line they’ll read in two seconds?” I think there is such a thing as “over-editing.” Your personal essay should strive to pass the “stack test” with flying colors. If you placed your essay in a giant stack, would people who know you be able to identify yours based on how it sounds? If not, it likely means your voice got lost in the shuffle and your essay isn’t as personable as it could be.

I often have similar conversations with Pathfinder writers. One strategy that I find helpful is asking them to articulate their idea as if they were explaining it to a three-year-old. This isn’t part of some condescending power trip; I recommend this exercise because I think it’s easier for people to clearly define what they want to say and then “scale up” their writing than it is to start with lavish sentences and work backwards. My advice for your initial personal essay draft is to write how you would talk and make adjustments as needed so your work reads smoothly. This also helps to avoid the trap that many students fall into: you can’t revise a blank page. Using a general outline, just start writing. Don’t even worry about the word count yet. You can’t begin to polish your essay until you have a solid idea of what there is to polish.

You may realize at this point that you aren’t vibing with the structure of your essay. Perhaps it eerily resembles this example from a disgruntled admissions officer?

“This essay outline has become the most popular over the past 3-4 years or so. I’m not sure why, but it goes something like this:

1. First standalone sentence that’s supposed to ‘grab the reader’s attention’ I guess. The electricity in the room was palpable.
2. Following that, the first narrative paragraph explaining/revealing the context and situation. Got it, so you’re at your state debate tournament.
3. Montage paragraph describing your journey from the beginning to this moment. You joined your debate team and were elected team captain.
4. Jumping to the present and wrapping up your story. Hurray, you won an award and/or placed well.
5. End with a personal takeaway that doesn’t look any different than the last hundred essays I’ve read about your sport/club/instrument. You weren’t confident in yourself initially, but now you learned to accept yourself and are thriving as a result. You were scared to be in a new environment, but now you feel comfortable and have assimilated into a new team.

Now fundamentally this structure makes sense and performed well years ago. It builds suspense, it weaves in and out of time like an action movie. The problem I find is that many of these essays 1) follow this structure exactly with no variation and 2) have nothing of substance to say. It gets tiring. Instead of having exactly this outline, I would recommend that students try to build upon this or use this as a launch pad.”

This template theoretically includes everything you would want in your essay, but it can produce some stale at best, cringeworthy at worst final products. Here is my super broad, big picture structure suggestion, with the proviso that this might not work for every essay idea:

1. Start with a hook. Paint a picture (I swear three years of newspaper editing have made me hate that phrase to no end) if you actually have a vivid, intriguing picture to paint. Pay homage to that one time your English teacher taught you what “in media res” means. Kick things off with a witty one-liner if that’s your style. Check out this essay intro guide. Whatever you do, make it something that’s “totally you” and sets the tone for the rest of your essay.
2. Next, give us some context. You might be thinking right now that my proposal is a carbon copy of the one I was just criticizing. Where I’m going to differ is that I don’t want you to burn through your word count setting up the situation itself in excess detail. I want you to talk about you. If this essay is designed to show what some facet of your life reveals about you, then it stands to reason that you need to spend ample time introducing yourself. If you’re responding to the personal growth prompt, what do we need to know about you prior to your growth? If you choose the encountering obstacles prompt, give us an idea of who you are so we can go into your story about the obstacle with an understanding of how it will tie into a meaningful message about you. Of course, you’ll still need to provide some information about the subject of your essay so it makes sense to the reader.
3. Unpack the subject of your essay. This can take on a variety of forms depending on what you’re writing about. My general tip is to avoid writing about your own life from a bird’s eye view. By that, I mean you don’t have the word space to give us your entire life story. Keep the scope of your essay fairly narrow in that regard. The other key piece of advice I have is to keep in mind that the parts of your essay should flow together as one cohesive unit. Because we often compartmentalize our work, it’s easy for partitions to emerge and for our essay to suddenly become three mini-essays. The broader point that your essay makes about yourself shouldn’t just appear in the conclusion. Rather, you want to interweave that concept throughout the entire essay. For example, my all-time favorite personal essay, written by a Harvard admit, is about looking in the mirror and recognizing our own biases against others. That essay begins by introducing the speaker and discussing their background and preconceptions. It then applies that overall idea to a specific story, showing the speaker’s biases in action until an experience defies their expectations. Finally, the speaker reflects on that experience as they come to terms with their own prejudices and the importance of holding ourselves accountable to challenge those biases. At face value, it’s a standard three-part essay with a beginning, middle and end. But what makes this essay special is how every part seamlessly contributes to the overarching message. I like to think of the “story part” of personal essays as a mere vehicle to illustrate what you’re trying to say about yourself.
4. Now that you’ve told us what your essay is about, you need to dig into what that subject matter tells us about you. This step largely depends on which prompt you choose and what you’re writing about, but it’s important to do more here than simply rehash what you said at the beginning of your essay. For example, if you introduced your worldview and pre-experience self under the personal growth prompt, this is the time to discuss how you have grown post-experience and what that says about you, your worldview, etc. If your topic is something that truly is meaningful to you, this is the part of the essay where your genuine voice will shine through the most. After all, this is where you’re discussing the authentic you and what drives you, not just some past experience of yours. This is usually my favorite part of a strong personal essay because it includes the most powerful moments, the lines I can imagine admissions officers reading aloud to their fellow committee members as they plead their case.
5. Go out by giving us something to remember. I won’t lie: this is arguably my biggest weakness as an essay writer. I think my underlying problem here is getting my brain to concentrate on aesthetics over substance — I’m very much the type of person who cares more about what you say than how you say it. I’ll take a stammering, but thought-provoking speech over eloquent platitudes every day of the week. Alas, the “clincher line” of your essay should be pleasing to the eyes and ears. Personally, I’d refer you back to my three-year-old exercise and go from there. If your hook introduces the overall idea of your essay in a clever manner, that opens the door for the type of concluding remark that comes full circle with a callback. This guide is also a good resource to get ideas for how to finish your essay.

One miscellaneous note: I won’t just regurgitate all of these tips here, but check out this post if you need help trimming down your essay to meet the word count.

The personal essay is fairly polarizing among applicants in that most despise it while a vocal minority — including yours truly — find it to be a rather enjoyable process. This is one of the few pieces of your application that you can still control come senior year, which I suppose can be a positive or negative depending on your perspective. The way I see it, a sizable portion of your “application narrative” boils down to entities beyond your reach getting to tell your story for you. This is an opportunity to put the ball back in your court and, for 650 words, tell admissions officers anything you want. We live in a world that increasingly prioritizes efficiency and productivity over the ability to reflect and actualize a better version of oneself. If nothing else, I appreciate a brief respite from that trend.

Ugh, that ending was too wordy! One of these days I’ll figure it out…