My daughter is beginning the brainstorming process and keeps coming back to a social media post she made a year ago as the springboard for her essay. I’m worried about it though, as she is a dance major and the essay will be about dancing. In all honesty, looking at the university prompts, she has not really had many hardships to overcome, dance is her passion and her main activity. Is this too blasé?
In my opinion, from everything I’ve read, she should write about dance. She should write about what has the most meaning for her, what interests her and excites her the most. She needs to write about who she is. If she tries to force out something else to please anonymous admissions officers, it’s likely to come across as artificial.
Additionally, my understanding is that people serious about dance spend a huge amount of time devoted to it. It then makes sense that so many of her experiences, ups and downs both, would be set in the dance world. And it’s pretty much a given that in an activity like that, there had to have been things to overcome. Maybe an example would be something like finding her voice to stand up for herself or others when it’s called for.
I think if writing about her experiences in dance are what she naturally feels defines her, she should, and she can try to do that without making it cliche by not writing about the same dance stuff everyone else writes about (I’d guess learning a new routine, messing up a routine at a critical time, dancing through an injury/coming back from an injury) etc. Making dance the setting makes sense to me.
My daughter was able to tie in her Dance with Community Service and Leadership for a couple of her essays. There are lots of angles to pursue. It always comes across more genuine when it’s something you’re passionate about that represents your life experience.
The topic doesn’t matter – the quality of the writing does. Can she reveal something about her motivations and character and say it in a way that adcoms haven’t heard before?
My daughter and her best friends are professional dancers. They all wrote their common app essays about dance. Three very different essays resulted but all said something about the character of the writer. They all did very well in the admissions process and all received substantial merit awards. As mentioned above, it’s not the topic per se but what you say about it and how well you say it.