<p>Is it best for a college essay to be about how someone changes and grows, and how it will affect their future or their work? I read online that someone wrote an essay to harvard and got waitlisted because the essay lacked an explanation of how the person changed and how their experience will affect their future. On the other hand, I have seen essays where someone wrote about their love of cheese and got commended once accepted to an ivy. So my question is what is the best essay topic to do (common app)? I find writing an essay about how someone wants to be another einstein is less appealing than somene who wrote an essay about how much they love fruit</p>
<p>
This is one perspective you can look at it from, but I don’t think it’s the only one. If you’re talking about something negative in your life, there probably should be some demonstration of how that will make you a better college student. But you might not be talking about something negative, so there might be no point to that.</p>
<p>As for the Harvard applicant… no one knows for sure why they are rejected. The essay just might not have been interesting. I would say that you don’t really want an “explanation” but a “demonstration.” You are writing about an experience in your life. You shouldn’t “tell” in your essay how you’ve changed; that should be evident after reading it. So I doubt that would be Harvard’s reasoning (maybe the applicant did not show it well). I would think, at Harvard, an explanation particularly would detract from a potentially good essay.</p>
<p>
There is not a “best essay topic.” Something can seem insanely interesting but if you write it badly it can still be unappealing. Mundane topics can be handled convincingly as well. There’s something to say about an adcom reading a dozen boring essays about one “cliche” topic and then coming to one incredibly insightful and creative essay about the same topic. Pick a topic that you think you can write about creatively and insightfully.
Great, because writing about Einstein (probably) would come off as contrived and dishonest unless the writer had an unexpected take on it.</p>
<p>In the end, you are trying to show something appealing about yourself through the essay. That might be that you faced [negative thing] and came out as [better person] or that you have [interesting quirk] or have grown up in [lifestyle circumstances]. Or you might not talk about any of those. You might talk about [seemingly random topic], and the “something appealing about yourself” is that you are capable of creatively analyzing something that seems simple.</p>