<p>I’m considering writing about why I like Batman so much (I read the comics and don’t intend on mentioning the film). “Why you like Spiderman” was mentioned as a possible essay topic the Princeton Review guide to the essays, so I was wondering if discussing what draws me to Batman is/isn’t considered cliche.</p>
<p>What’s the best way to approach the “write about someone who has had a significant impact on your life” topic? I wrote an essay about my best friend of six years, but I’m having trouble focusing the essay on me, and not her, since admissions officers obviously don’t really care about the friend of someone applying to their school.</p>
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<p>That’s certainly one way to start, but keep in mind that essays need not “entertain.” An essay that merely makes the admissions officer stop and think can be just as effective. Don’t feel like your essay has to be all smiles and laughs; life has dark moments, and if they have played a significant role in shaping who you are you shouldn’t be afraid to tap into them.</p>
<p>I think Harry Bauld’s book On Writing The College Application Essay ([Amazon.com:</a> On Writing the College Application Essay: The Key to Acceptance and…](<a href=“http://www.amazon.com/Writing-College-Application-Essay-Acceptance/dp/0064637220/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1278381628&sr=8-1]Amazon.com:”>http://www.amazon.com/Writing-College-Application-Essay-Acceptance/dp/0064637220/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1278381628&sr=8-1)) is very good. It’s actually very funny and thoughtful.</p>
<p>Given the huge number of people applying each year, it would be stunning if any topic hadn’t been done in some way before. It’s the way you do it and what it says about you that counts.</p>
<p>I did mine on getting a tattoo illegally.
Your essay just has to be true, candid, and meaningful</p>
<p>I say choose a fictional character with whom you’re pretty familiar, but who’s not likely to have shown up in dozens of other essays. it’s up to you what you do with him or her.</p>
<p>“I did mine on getting a tattoo illegally.”
And you got into a great school, if I’m remembering your posts correctly. I have a couple good tattoo stories I had considered writing about, but I figured the topic would be too controversial for an admissions essay.</p>
<p>i wrote my “who has influence your life” essay on the dude who found chocolate.</p>
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<p>I didn’t use this prompt for CommonApp, but Princeton has a “influential figure” prompt that I wrote about (and used the same essay for Harvard’s and Yale’s supplements). I wrote about a composer … not sure if it meant much though because I got rejected at 2 of the 3 colleges I used it for ;)</p>
<p>I deal with this question everyday. I tell the kids to write about them. We spend about 2 months brainstorming and stream of consciousness writing. We start and stop essays and sometimes get halfway through a draft and because the student writes a line that leads to another essay.</p>
<p>Everyone has said it…it’s not the topic…it’s the you!</p>
<p>We start our essays the first day of spring break, and usually end them at Labor Day.</p>
<p>Some of the topics that kids are writing about are hyphenated-Americans, Alan Greenspan, I was a child pageant winner, my brother the drug addict, the impact of game shows on my life, the broken bones of rugby is music to my ears, and others.</p>
<p>They are all about them, and came from their brainstorming and 10 minute “stupid writings” as we call them. They had to write for 10 minutes at a time, even if all they wrote was “this is stupid, I can’t think of anything to write”. It was amazing what they wrote. Pen could not leave the paper.</p>
<p>Keep it about you…the dull moments, showing not telling, can be brilliant. Open with a quote or an anecdote and it’s often easier to write.</p>
<p>Good luck all. You will do fine.</p>
<p>Anecdotes are key. I wrote about the power of language in my Common App. Cliche, right? Bla bla bla, just like every potential English major (which I am not). However, I had maybe three sentences of abstraction–the rest was me careening from anecdote to anecdote (maybe 3 or 4 of them.) I think that might have been too many, and it’s certainly possible to write within the context of one overarching anecdote. However, I was accepted at every school to which I applied. </p>
<p>My Columbia essay/UChicago supplement (the other one was too long), similarly, was about how I have a sense of adventure and that has translated into curiosity to learn. Again, nothing particularly new, right? That one was within the context of how I liked red jellybeans when I was a kid, especially the red ones, because red could be either cinnamon (which hurt my mouth) or cherry (“the paragon of all jellybeans”). And now, they’re both kind of boring and bland, which is dreadfully disappointing, but now I like learning things instead. The “I like to learn” paragraph could have been full of abstractions, but I also stuffed it with examples. Not “I like to learn about a wide variety of subjects” but “I like learning about Latin literature (literally dozens of state and national awards), Islamic architecture (true facts but no extracurriculars related), physics (made its way into my counselor rec a bit), Korean pottery (same as Islamic architecture), European history (took AP), marine biology (two classes in it), and more.” Doesn’t that make me sound more interesting than “I like to learn about many different topics”? On the other hand, that was my National Merit essay, and while I made it to finalist, they sent me a [i[very* tactful and excited letter four or six or something days before they were making the final decision saying “So! We’re so glad to be able to inform you! That you have failed to make the cut to get a scholarship! Aren’t you glad we got to tell you that you’re not good enough to make the final cut, or even be in close contention for it, four days early???” I was like what. Lol… It was also a less polished essay at that point.</p>
<p>Be on the lookout for moments you can use for your essay. At Easter of my junior year, I was standing by our piano with jellybeans, and vividly remembered my adventures in jellybean-eating when they (instructors) gave them to us as a reward for doing well in swimming class when I was a kid. (And then I wrote an amusing and WAY over the top essay about it for Facebook. I was kind of cracked out at the end of junior year from about a 1,000 hour sleep deficit. It shows in my writing.) And then I was like hey. I don’t know precisely how to use this yet, but it’s amusing and (in a way toned down form) I bet it would be helpful for a college admissions essay. Then I filed it away in the back of my head for a couple months. Reading UChicago’s prompts, I figured out how to use it, there we go, I have a strong (but not terrific) essay.</p>
<p>Essay from cracked out (kind of not joking) period:</p>
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<p>PS Don’t take drugs kiddies, they’re bad. I haven’t either.</p>
<p>For me, the common thread in all my essays was the way I focused on my thoughts and my changing opinions throughout the thing. Not in the neurotic way, and not in the “someone died so I felt sad way,” but in the way that I picked moments in my life that may not have seemed significant but were because they changed the way I see the world.</p>
<p>My commonapp essay was about me becoming an agnostic, my essay about an influential person was about a girl who made fun of me in middle school, and I wrote another long essay about me coming out to answer the Brown question of the best advice I’ve ever been given. </p>
<p>And I don’t know so much about imagining giving a speech or imagining entertaining an acquaintance. All of my essays were very personal; I really reached out to the reader. I talked about things that I would not want to bring up in the first few minutes of talking to someone. But I’m that kind of a writer; I love tackling big topics and tracing a thought throughout several distinct events. I love making jokes when writing about the saddest things that ever happened to me. If that’s not you, then maybe the speech thing is the way to go.</p>
<p>well, face it, you can’t find a topic that no one has ever done before but you should be able to come up with a way of putting it that no one has done quite that way before. For the Why___________ come up with an essay that you cannot send to another college, for the significant impact, I didn’t use it because I felt like it couldn’t be done well for me because the I idolize my mom has been done too much, otherwise, pick something that is unique to you, ie, you got pecked by a goose at five years old and are now scarred for life, link that to anything else…</p>
<p>Most schools emphasize it as the one and only way they can see you without numbers. You’re not a number. The only way to show you’re you is to shine through your essay. I think the topic needs to be something that bugs you or something that you mull over way to often… with that kind of a topic, you’ll write genuinely. Just don’t make the topic too “large scale”. You want to personalize it as much as possible. For example, if you’re writing about global warming, narrow in on how it effects your own community as opposed to how it effects the world. A lot of people will write about why it’s bad but you want to personalize it, make it yours and stand out. A book on essay-writing isn’t really going to help you be original. You want to come up with something that gets you thinking and you’ll be good to go.</p>
<p>You hear all the time about how, “You need to stand out in the college admissions process,” or how you should “Make yourself look different than the rest of the applicant pool,” etc. When I was applying to college this past year I thought this was a just a bunch of talk.</p>
<p>Then this year I got a job where I occasionally have to sift through donation request letters. After only reading a handful, I can tell you that they all started to blend together. One seemed no different than the next one. It got to the point where I would more or less skim them just to look for something that would stand out or appear interesting.</p>
<p>I agree with the people who say writing a genuine essay is important, but I disagree that the topic of a college admissions essay is not. Sure, that near win sports story could really be from the heart, but when a lot of people write something similar you are just going to get lost in the shuffle. And you have to remember that an admissions officer may not read your essay carefully enough to notice the slightly different spin you put on it towards the end. If it appears cliche at first glance, they will likely assume that holds true all the way throughout. I think you have to pick a topic that is going to catch the eye of the admissions officer. What experiences, thoughts, etc. have you had that make you unique? I wrote mine on going to a roller coaster camp… haha</p>
<p>I think this is a unique topic. There’s a community called PUA a.k.a. pick up artists. Who devote to better their lives in the pursuit of becoming a better person and pursuing women. It’s an interesting society and which I am apart of. We have our own websites and forums, our own lingo, and VH1 has even made a TV show on it. Would this be a suitable essay topic considering its personal growth and development characteristics? I would talk about different situations and scenarios in which I had to use the PUA skills and “routines” and how it has built self esteem and confidence in meeting new women and being a better me.</p>
<p>Write about one of your role-models and heroes. You don’t need to know him/her personally. Why do you respect him/her? How has he/she influenced you?</p>
<p>Avoid writing about people you think other students would idolize (e.g., Abraham Lincoln, Gandhi, MLK Jr.). Your goals are uniqueness and passion.</p>
<p>@Lirazel
I have a friend who’s Harvard '12 and his common app essay was about the “power of language.” He actually used that phrase.</p>
<p>The actual topic of the essay is not as relevant as you might think, but rather how your ideas, style and spin shine through in the essay. I’d assume that not every adcom reads the essay so when a case is presented to committee one of the adcoms would brief the others on the essay. The topic itself without context is too banal to be included in such a brief but something like “She wrote music, what is clear is that she is passionate about the cello” would make more sense for such a briefing.</p>
<p>Hi! I’m really having a lot of issues with my college essay. For the “significant event” prompt, would it be too cliche to write about moving to a different country for high school? I started writing something that compares how easy everything (everything pretty much constitues academics and friends) was before high school and how hard it was after I moved. Still, it seems overdone. I mean, things change in high school. The only unique aspect I have is that all the changes that happened to me played out in another country. Would it be too mundane to write about the language problems I had and how I didn’t fit in, etc?
Wow, did I make that confusing?</p>
<p>My main essay [transfer] was about writing essays… And then I trailed off into how my views about writing relate to my life.</p>
<p>Although my first year essay was a cliched one. but then I was just an ignorant high schooler.</p>
<p>Most of the essays I’ve seen of people who’ve got into good schools have been personal experiences. Rather than being unusual/original they are more striking and basically tells a tale. Although some of them aren’t even in the essay format…</p>