Your essays matter when you apply to college, quite a bit. Your grades and test scores are often fixed by the time it comes time to apply, your recommendation letters out of your hands, for all you can do to ensure you get good ones. Your activities are in the past, the 11th hour not the right moment to pack your schedule. Your essays are your last and best chance to impact your college admissions chances.
This begins with the Common App essay, generally referred to as the personal statement. This is a single essay which gets sent to every school you apply to on the Common App, and which may be used as well if you apply to additional schools through Apply Texas. This is the single most important essay you will write for your college applications, which causes a lot of stress when it comes time to get to writing.
In this article, we’ll explore the prompts the Common App provides for this essay, and how to go about answering each. We’ll also look at some overall strategy when it comes to writing your Common App essay, what colleges look for, and finally how to choose the best prompt for you. Let’s get started!
What are the Common App essay prompts?
The Common App releases their prompts every year, though generally speaking they don’t change much, if at all, from year to year. Here are this year’s prompts, along with a brief clarification on what each one is actually asking:
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.
This is an invitation to explore some facet of your identity, possibly through the lens of an extracurricular. If there is a word or phrase which you use self-definitionally, like “dancer” or “chemist” or “Vietnamese-American” you can use this prompt to explore why it defines you, and how you see the world because of it. This aspect or interest can be almost anything, so long as it is a core part of your identity, and has shaped you in some way.
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?
It is often said that we learn more from failure than success, and this prompt is a chance to explore that. You may not have faced any difficulties in your time in highschool, but if you did, and what you learned from them shaped who you are and how you have come to approach the world, then you should discuss these here.
While this is a place to discuss challenges, we recommend only discussing obstacles you have overcome, and what you have learned in doing so. If you have other challenges which significantly impacted your education, you can discuss them in the additional information section.
Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea. What prompted your thinking? What was the outcome?
This is an invitation to show self growth through an experience you had. We all have assumptions about the world, some of which prove to be unfounded when we are confronted with new experiences. Learning from times like this is a core part of growing up, and you are invited to recount your own experience here, to show how your own conceptions of the world have grown and matured.
While this is a chance to show growth, we do recommend editorial caution here as well. You want to show yourself as a mature person who has the potential to be a great part of a campus community, so we recommend avoiding subjects which may be too heavy for an admissions essay.
Reflect on something that someone has done for you that has made you happy or thankful in a surprising way. How has this gratitude affected or motivated you?
This is a chance to write an essay about a mentor or friend. Be warned though, this is still an essay about you; you are the one applying to college, and it is you that admissions officers want to hear about. Even as you write about what someone else has done for you, you should still be the main focus of the essay. The impact of the other person on you is what the bulk of this essay should speak about.
Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others.
This is another invitation to describe a time when you grew and matured as a person; both the instigating event, and how you responded to it. Colleges want to admit mature students capable of self-reflection, and this prompt is an invitation for you to show off a time you matured, and your own powers of introspection.
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?
This prompt is an invitation to explore one of your passions in depth, and to describe both why you enjoy it, and how you’ve explored it further. This can be an extracurricular or an academic topic, but we recommend whatever the subject, it’s something you’ve explored on your own, outside of the classroom. Universities are looking for passionate students, ones who have displayed a strong love for learning, and this prompt is a chance to show what you care deeply about.
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.
This is a chance to write anything, on almost any topic. That said, there are some things we suggest not writing about or submitting for this prompt:
- An essay you wrote previously for school. You want to submit something original for the personal statement, and it should focus on you primarily.
- A research paper (or similar). The personal statement is how you tell colleges who you are. While completing research is very impressive, there are better ways to show this off in your application.
- Creative fiction. While this can be impressive and well written, it is not the point of a personal statement.
- Poetry. If you want to show off your artistic skills to admissions officers, we recommend submitting an additional portfolio.
Now that we’ve covered what all the prompts are asking, we’ll go over how you can go about answering them.
General Essay Strategy for the Common App
We’ll start by giving you advice on approaching the essay as a whole, and then on which of the seven prompts you should answer.
In general, your essay for the Common App should do the following things:
- Introduce you to admissions officers.
- Tell them what values you hold, and what traits best exemplify you.
- Tell them what you care about, and how you define yourself.
- Tell them what your passions are, and how you’ve pursued them.
You don’t need to do all of these things at once, but anyone who reads your personal statement should end up with some idea of who you are as a person, what values you hold dear, what you care about, and how you approach the world. This doesn’t need to be explicitly stated; indeed, it’s better to show this through the narrative you tell, rather than stating it outright.
We recommend starting out by deciding what information you want admissions officers to know about you; which of your values you want to show off, and which aspects of who you are are so important that they need to know about them. Once you’ve determined this, you can find a narrative which lets you portray all of this information naturally.
For further advice on choosing a topic for your essay, see our article on brainstorming for your personal statement. This is a process in and of itself, as the proper topic will allow you to express yourself well, so care needs to be taken when selecting one.
Choosing the Right Prompt
We recommend approaching the prompt you choose to answer from the other side. You should decide what you are writing about first, and then say you are answering whichever prompt best suits the essay you have already written.
The point of the prompts for the Common App is different from those you receive in English class, or even those colleges assign for their supplemental essays. These prompts are meant as a starting point for brainstorming for your essay, not as strict rails you need to follow. The seventh prompt being a free response is the ultimate expression of this, and an acknowledgement that these prompts are not meant to constrain your responses.
We do recommend using the prompts to guide the direction of your thoughts, as they portray what colleges are looking for. You should not stress about choosing the right prompt, or about whether you exactly answer what it asks, so long as your essay does a good job telling admissions officers who you are, and what values you bring to their campus.
Note that Questbridge and ApplyTexas are slightly more restrictive with their prompts. While the questions they pose are still very open ended, and do parallel the prompts offered by the Common App, they are not quite as free as prompt seven, and you cannot simply choose to write about any topic. If you are planning on applying to schools through Questbridge or ApplyTexas, you should review their personal statement prompts first, and begin there with your writing. Due to the open nature of the Common App, any essay you write for Questbridge or ApplyTexas will fulfill their essay requirements.
Final Thoughts
Writing college essays is always stressful, but the personal statement is the longest and weightiest of the essays you are expected to compose, and therefore generally induces the most stress. This begins, in our experience, when students first read the prompts, and then feel at a loss for what they can possibly write to answer such open-ended-questions to appeal to colleges.
We hope that this article has broken down what each of these prompts is actually looking for, and how you can go about answering them. By doing so, you have the tools to approach writing your personal statement with confidence, and the knowledge of what admissions officers want to see. Of course, writing an essay is a process, and choosing your topic is only the first step. If you want help finding the perfect topic, or polishing your essay to truly appeal to admissions officers, then schedule a free consultation today to learn how we can help you. We have mastered the art of crafting the perfect college essays, and are always happy to hear from you.
