I’ve already written my Common App essay, but after looking online, I’ve been doubting the quality of my topic.
My current essay is about how I moved across the country after middle school and learned how to embrace changes. I talk about how I went through a period of boredom and stagnation before realizing I should challenge myself and invest more in my passions. I obviously won’t detail the whole thing here, but I do include other values like family, resilience, etc. in the essay.
The con with this essay is that I feel like it’s cliché and could come off as a sob story. I try not to talk a lot about the challenge itself and instead how I developed from it, but I’m still iffy on it. My backup plan is to talk about my journey to discover my passion, but with that I risk repeating myself in the individual colleges’ supplementals.
TL;DR Would me talking about how I learned from a move just be like a cliché “overcoming adversity” essay?
You might be ok, if you hit the right bullets. Just remember, you want to “show, not just tell.” That means, not just saying that you “developed,” but examples of how you take on new challenges, reach out to others, try new things, etc.
I see, so I should describe a few examples and reflect briefly on the experience, right? I’ve heard the “show don’t tell” thing a lot, but I guess it’s difficult to judge when one is being too factual v. writing too much purple prose.
Use the move to frame what you want to show about yourself. “Last year, my friends and I picked our ECs as a group. Having moved 1200 miles over the summer, this, and pretty much everything else, was now a solitary endeavor.” Then you can show who you are by how you decided how to invest your time, whom to befriend, what you treasured in the friends you left behind, etc. The AO will understand, without you writing about it, how hard a high school move can be. Use the essay to show who you are as a person.
Your instinct to talk about learning to challenge yourself is spot on! Talking about topics like families or resilience might not be the most compelling subjects.
Instead, you could focus on the specific challenges you needed to overcome as you adjusted to your new environment. Focusing on the most recent positive steps you’ve taken to adjust will show college admissions readers who you are and how you adjust to new situations.
I see; so really focus in on how I overcame the challenges and what it shows about my personality, those are the crucial things, right? I see, I’m going to keep revising.