Is writing about an event that happened to me recently in my common app bad?

College Essays
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Hi,
I think I’ve written a really good CommonApp essay. I know that I’m a strong writer, I enjoy writing and I’ve gotten feedback from multiple people who all said they really liked my essay so I feel confident in saying it’s a strong essay. However, my only concern is that it’s about an event that happened to me relatively recently, at the start of my senior year. I’m doing prompt #3 which is the one about an event that made you challenge a belief. Because the event that made me challenge a belief happened in the beginning of my senior year, I can’t talk about all the stuff I did in my junior and sophomore year of highschool because that wouldn’t line up chronologically.

I don’t want colleges to think I had this big epiphany about my life right before going to college and also miss the opportunity to talk about the interesting things I did in my 10th & 11th grade. Is this a dealbreaker? I know my essay is good but I’m worried about this. Let me know what you think!

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We have essay readers on this forum. Perhaps you might want to sign up and get some feedback.

http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/t/follow-these-steps-to-get-free-essay-feedback/3645578/

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I just saw that, thanks so much I will defintely check it out.

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Would these things be mentioned in your ECs? If so, then that’s enough. The essay is to give you a chance to add something additional to your application, so no need to rehash things you’ve already included elsewhere in the application (unless you want to dig deeper into them, which is fine, but not required if you have something else you want to talk about).

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I don’t think it’s wrong per se. There’s no timeframe requirement on such an event.

And of course the last prompt covers any topic - even if one didn’t exactly match up to what you wrote.

Good luck.

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This is the most important factor. It could have happened yesterday, or could be about something yet to happen. The time frame of what you write about doesn’t matter, as long as it’s a genuine reflection of who you are now.

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sounds perfect to me. I prefer something that happened more recently.

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8

Depends upon how well you–the writer–digested the recent event.

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Writing about something recent is not necessarily a bad thing. I would avoid any sports or injury stories just because those can be very repetitive for college admissions to read. For my essay, I wrote about an event but then morphed it into a realization I have about my life and how I want to overcome the obstacle I wrote about, rather than keeping it purely a story.

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