essay topic ideas!! what do y'all think??

College Essays
1

essay topics for national merit scholarship essay and/or common app:

  1. experience in a club focused on world issues/poverty. talk about how i never thought of myself as like a leader since im not super outgoing and talkative, but my experience with that club showed me that i can be a leader and i dont have to be super loud and outgoing to do it if i'm still friendly, confident, passionate, organized, etc.
  2. i was homeschooled until i started 9th grade full time. so would talk about being alone and quiet freshman year to joining more clubs sophomore year to becoming president of clubs junior and senior year. idk the whole 'clubs' part sounds fake and cheesy but it represents a change from a really hard and lonely time for my in 9th grade to my shift in confidence and involvement in later yrs.
  3. talk somehow about how i'm asian but i dont feel like it. i also dont feel white or american. so i don't really belong anywhere. so basically my identity is ???... yeah this is kinda a bad one but maybe if i develop the idea more and make it not cliche which is gonna be the hard part
  4. experience going to music camps every summer in high school (classical string music lol i'm a nerd, full scholarships, not that im that good im just poor lol). i love music but i realized i can't and don't want to be a professional musician and dont want to major in music.
  5. more ideas?? cant think of much else, but all my other ideas are crap so i should start thinking LOL

THANKS! rate from worse to worst!

2

I think that the third one could be a really good essay if you figure out a way to word it. Since you’re Asian, could you talk about (or perhaps embellish) how you make efforts to return to your roots or find yourself? There was a show on Viceland that I watched called Huang’s World and he went back to China/Taiwan I believe to see where he came from because living in the US has sort of diluted who he feels like as a person. Maybe consider watching it. I just kind of liked the principle of it and thought it was interesting. It might give you some inspiration on writing about finding your identity :slight_smile:

The first one could also be a strong topic if you did it right as well, though.
Just some ideas. Hope I could help!

3

2 and 4 stand out to me as most potentially interesting, but of course a lot rests on execution as well – it’s possible to write a boring essay about an interesting topic or an interesting essay about a mundane/common topic.