<p>It’s too early to worry about essays in my opinion, but you will almost certainly have to write different essays for different colleges. If a college uses the common app (it probably will), then you will have a main essay that you submit to it along with all other colleges that use that application system (you can submit different main essays to different colleges if you wish, though). As I said, many colleges require you to write one or more auxiliary essays in addition to that.</p>