"High school students may worry about not having an original topic for their college essay – that anything they write about will be something admissions officers have read countless times before.
But admissions deans and directors from several colleges told U.S. News it’s OK if applicants write about a common subject.
‘Overuse of a topic doesn’t make it a bad topic,’ says Whitney Soule, dean of admissions and student aid at Bowdoin College in Maine.
How common an essay topic is matters less than a student’s ability to express something about himself or herself." …