<p>Although not required, many kids discuss personal issues in college essays. Why? I understand that a college admissions committee needs to know how a person thinks. However, this translates for many into very personal essays about themselves. For example, I know one teen who wrote about her father and the effect his leaving the family had on her and her brothers.</p>
<p>How personal do these essays need to be?</p>
<p>Just asking.</p>
<p>Well, they have to be personal enough for the reader to get an idea of who the applicant is and how their mind works. It is not necessary to write about divorce, death, or other personal circumstances, but some people feel that these types of events help them grow and shape who they have become. Sometimes a student writing about the loss of a parent (through death or divorce) is really telling a story about how they learned to become independent and take on more responsibilities. Sometimes students write about personal challenges because their high school performance was negatively impacted by those challenges and they want to show how they bounced back. There can be all sorts of reasons people share personal stories. An applicant can just as easily write about how they came to love chemistry or what they aspire to study in college, but every essay needs to leave the reader with a connection to the applicant so something about it needs to be personal/unique to the writer of the essay.</p>
<p>I agree with Bessie, they don’t need to be about intensely painful or personal experiences, but they should give the reader some insight into who the student is and how they think and how they got to where they are today. </p>
<p>Some students also open up in these essays because they are more or less anonymous (the chances of meeting your essay reader face to face are pretty slim) so there is a freedom to write about personal experiences without shame or fear of retribution and you can be earnest in a way that might be embarassing if you were to tell the same story to someone you know well. </p>
<p>You don’t have to reveal everything about yourself, but it’s not neccessarily a bad idea to give a little window into your soul. For many people, by the time they’ve reached the age of 18 they’ve encountered and hopefully surmounted at least a few serious roadblocks and those may be the most telling stories to put in an essay. </p>
<p>That being said, there are plenty of essays that don’t deal with painful experiences that are highly successful, but they should all in some way be personal. Otherwise, what’s the point?</p>
<p>With my first 2, I, like most, never knew how the essays they’d worked so hard on were received. With my third, admissions called asking to share it. His essay was about a hobby, and it showed him to be happy, outgoing, social, engaged in the world. Nothing deep or dark.</p>
<p>I am going to agree about the nothing dark… deep, however, isn’t necessarily a bad thing, especially because boys as a general rule don’t exactly embrace the deep. So by telling him NOT to be deep it could net the most superficial thing going.</p>
<p>As a teacher of writing and a parent my advice was the same to both kids: write about something you really like and that you’re really interested in and find a hook – something to grab the reader and structure the essay.</p>
<p>The topic doesn’t really matter.</p>