I’m currently in the process of writing my personal statement I’m trying to determine what values I want admissions officers to find when the read they read my statement. I’m considering writing my essay on a story about how I was a leader or how I became a leader for something. However, my extracurricular already show a good amount of leadership qualities should I focus on driving the leadership point home in my essay or should I focus my essay on a trait that isn’t already somewhere in my application?
There’s no perfect answer to this question, because every essay is different! At the end of the day, Admissions Officers are trying to get a sense of you as a person, and how you might contribute to life onto campus: while talking about a specific activity is definitely fine if you’re talking about its personal meaning, you don’t need to reiterate your “fit” with the college, as the college usually will have its own essays for you to explain this (your personal statement is meant to be general, and more about reflecting than listing your resume.)
Don’t stress about writing about what you “think” an admissions officer would like to hear: this is a space for you to talk about who you truly are. Also don’t worry about writing about a super-common topic, because I did that, but made to sure that the thoughts and details that I referenced were those that were from my own experience.
One strategy that worked well for me was to write a few different topics (don’t worry about fitting a common app essay question, as the common app has a question that allows you to write anything you want,) before finding the topic that I liked, and then just writing AS MUCH on that topic before revising.
Hope this helps! Good luck with admissions!