I am was planning on responding to the Common Application prompt titled “Discuss an accomplishment or event, formal or informal, that marked your transition from childhood to adulthood within your culture, community, or family” however, I just learned that common app is revising their prompts so instead I will answer to this one: “Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others.”
I am planning on writing about how my mom was diagnosed with cancer about a year ago and how that changed my outlook on life, my preparation as a student, and my responsibilities at home. One great piece of advice that I read on a thread here at CC is that in order to make yourself stand out as an applicant, your essay should detail one of your extra curriculars in depth. A lot of the colleges that I have visited have say that they count family responsibilities as an extra curricular and would like to see that in your application. So my question is as follows: how heavily do colleges weight family responsibilities and does my topic add color to my application and give insight to myself as an applicant, especially to Ivy schools?
All feedback is greatly appreciated! Thank you in advance!
Unless you have a truly great essay in you, I’d avoid that topic. BTW - lost my dad to cancer so I know how powerful and tragic that is for someone.
First, adcoms get that essay all the time. Sure it is emotional and impactful, but they have read it a thousand times. It is cliche.
Keep in mind, it will not be anywhere as meaningful to them as it is to you, it was not their family.
It is a downer, hard to write an inspiring sad story, it is possible but very difficult.
Family responsibilities are indeed something they want to hear about, but perhaps your school counselor or your teacher in their LoRs can mention it? There are often short questions in supplementary application you could leverage.
Most kids haven’t lead exceptional lives (very few have at 17), so it is natural to look at the death of a loved one and reflect upon it. But it rarely makes for a unique narrative that allows you to stand out.
Thank you for your response.
I’m very sorry to hear about your father, that is very tragic and honestly the worst thing to live through.
You are right about this being cliche and something I should avoid (and that’s definitely not the news I wanted to hear considering I already started writing!), but I think I’m taking a different approach to this topic. My intention is not to make the main focus about my mom and how strong I think she is for everything that she goes through and how sad I was, but rather how I feel I am more ready to live as an adult because of the growth I have experienced. If that is still slightly cliche, I am also planning on writing how this experience has expanded my interest in my intended major, bioengineering/biomedical engineering, because of my interest in the procedures, medical equipment, treatments, etc, that my mother undergoes. Considering this information, do you still think I should chose a different topic?
The hard part about writing this essay is getting enough distance to have some perspective: it is such a profound experience and still so new that it will simply be difficult not to have too much ‘story’ and not enough about you. Writing personal essays is really difficult even when the topic doesn’t have so much emotional weight. Truly thousands of students write essays about how their experience with a medical crisis (whether their own or somebody close to them) has led to an interest in some aspect of the medical field.
That does not make it a bad choice for an essay, but it does make it harder to stand out. Take a run at the essay- write a draft and put it aside for a day or two, then come back to it. Can you take out all the parts about your mother and still have it read as a coherent essay, that makes sense and shows something about you as a person, your journey, your choices?
@AnthonyZ I think @collegemom3717 gives good advice, since you already have the essay in progress, finish it and put it aside, then like she said, come back and read it with some emotional distance. If you love and it honestly reflects who you are, then keep it.
But, and I just want to be helpful here, I truly believe you cannot write a great essay on this topic. The emotional trauma has compromised you, you cannot at your age have the distance to get a good perspective on this topic.
BTW - My son had the very same impulse, he was close to his grandfather and thought to write about him dying and how going into genomics might mean stopping cancer from killing more grandparents. In the end, I think he saw it as a cliche topic. Instead, he wrote a letter to him, sealed it up and put it away forever.
He ended up writing about a passion project of his, something that combined a hobby, his ECs and his community service. It was unique to him, if you read it and knew my son, you’d know it was his essay. It set him apart and made him memorable. It gave him an identity. To the Princeton adcoms was that “boardgame kid”. I think, sadly, too many kids each year are that “kid with a loved one who is suffering from cancer”. Do you know what I mean?
All this aside, if you truly believe in your essay, go for it. Applying to college is one of your first adult actions, you are taking responsibility for your future. Know yourself, listen to impartial feedback, then make your decision. It is all anyone really needs to do…
Taking my mother out of the equation is a good way to determine if my essay is unique. I guess I really never did consider that statistically, there are many people in my same shoes and it is inevitable that thus essay has been written a million times, each time worded differently. You’re right, it does sound very typical to say “I want to be a doctor because [insert close relative] was diagnosed with [insert disease].” I’ll definitely write a draft, because where I think my essay may be different is speaking to specifics about what I was interested in, and not a general “this changed my life” type essay.
While you are here, I’d like to ask you another question. How do admissions officers react to quirkier essays? One thing that comes to mind when thinking about something TRULY unique about myself is when at the beginning of this year (January 1st), I have saved the cap from every single bottle of water that I’ve drank to keep tabs on the volume of water I consume because I drink a lot of water and I was curious (so far I’m averaging almost a gallon a day). Is this weird? Or does this show me as someone interested in details? I would appreciate your feedback on this!
I’ll definitely take your advice. You are completely correct in that I have not considered how many other people are in the same situation or even worse, because from my perspective it can sometimes feel like I am all alone in this battle. Thank you for your compassion, currently my mother is doing very well so I hope my post is not worrying you.
Since you were kind enough to respond, I’m hoping to pick at your brains a bit more and ask for what you think as to these alternative essay topics-
I mentioned this in my response to collegemom3717. I have kept the lids from every single bottle of water that I’ve drank starting January 1st of this year because know I drink a lot of water and I wanted to know exactly how much (I am averaging at about 1 gallon per day). In this essay I could speak on my curiosity for information, the reactions I get from carrying entire gallons around in public, and a variety of other things.
I could tell a story from when I went on a mission trip last summer. In order to build a set of steps and a ramp for a handicapped lady’s front porch, we had to move a huge granite slab. Laying flat on the ground, the rock was about as tall as I and for whatever reason had been placed right at the front porch when the house was built more than 100 years ago. Long story short, I came up with way to move this rock inch by inch and worked my butt off until it was about 8 feet away,. Only 2 minutes later a man from our organization arrived with a big pickup truck and a chain to move the rock. Wanting to know more about the rock’s mass, I took it’s measurements and chipped off a small piece of it. The first week of the school year, I took that piece of rock to my chemistry lab, found it’s density, and with a few simple calculations, I found the rock to weigh about 760 pounds!
Sorry for the long response, but you have gotten me truly excited now that I realize that there are other topics that I could write about that I think are undoubtedly unique to me! Please let me know what you think of both of these, I can not thank you enough for your input (especially since I was so set on my essay topic until you responded).
Here’s another detail I left out about my second option - on that same mission trip, every day during dinner each work team elects one person to stand up and summarize their day and progress they made at their work site. One day, my group chose me, however, because I’m bilingual they thought it would be funny for me to stand up and start speaking in Russian in front of the 60 some people there (none of which knew Russian). We came up with a funny story that I hit my head while working and woke up only speaking Russian, however, I was to report our day regardless of that accident. So I stood up and started speaking Russian to the crowd while another member of my group “translated” what I was saying. Little did they that know I was just reciting a famous Russian poem and not talking about our progress that day!
Please let me know if your thoughts have changed. Thank you!
@collegemom3717@psywar and @CU123
I am still new to this site, I do not know if I’m supposed to ‘at (@) you’ when I reply to your comments, so I am doing so now just in case. Sorry if it’s redundant.
I like the bottle caps and the Russian translation stories. Just be sure to show depth, maybe use them as opening anecdotes and then get more serious?
I am sorry to not have good advice about your essay parent’s cancer, but I did want to send best wishes to your family.
Also – please don’t fixate on Ivy schools only! With your talents and motivation you will can succeed at many schools, and you can cast a wide net. To name some additional options, a selective liberal arts college; honors programs at your state university; and merit awards at prestigious schools that are not Ivy League.
I like #1 as well… You could do a lot with it. Just make sure it relates to you- maybe you learned something about yourself based on these reactions, etc.
Thank you for your thoughts. I am applying to a variety of schools; to me the Ivys are at the top of my list so I want to do the best job that I can to get accepted.
Actually, your original essay idea is doable if the focus is on your growth (as you pointed out) and not on your mom’s sickness. My kid went through the experience exactly what you described a few years ago, and her essay was on how she overcame the difficulty during that time when we were in and out of hospital and treatments. She got to her dream school (a top 15 in US News), so I don’t think you should just abandon your idea because others told you no. It will depend on how you word it, so the essay shows you a real person to the admission officers.
Your essay about the bottle caps is also not a bad idea. One of accepted students’ essay from JHU is about the applicant folding thousands of paper cranes using different of material and made into different sizes (see the link here: https://apply.jhu.edu/apply/essays-that-worked/2020/#essay1). It shows the person’s passion, curiosity, and dedication.
Also to your “lot of the colleges that I have visited have say that they count family responsibilities as an extra curricular and would like to see that in your application.”, it is true. I know a true story about a B student who got into Stanford by able to explain she was main care giver to her three young siblings while her parents too busy in keeping up their restaurant.
Try to stick to an essay topic that best presents you, and not to what other people tell you what you should, or you will sound like anyone else’s.
I appreciate that you think that! Now I am even more torn about what to write about. I have read the paper crane essay before and that actually did come to mind when thinking about the bottle caps. Thank you, I will have to think this over very well!
all great advice here. Do what “feels” right to you. Personally, I love the bottle cap essay, but I like quirky essays. They help “brand” you. You just became the “bottle cap kid” to me, and if well-written, that will work on adcoms IMO.
Las, I think if adcoms read another mission-trip essay they will keel over and die…
I agree with you on that. The more I read about college essays, the more I find that quirkiness, done in the right way of course, is successful in differentiating you from the rest of the applicant pool. I can’t thank you enough for your input, I am going to enjoy writing this essay.
Bottle cap idea is original and potentially interesting. It’s just a small slice of life that tells us something about your way of looking at the world. You can start with image of strange obsession (reader wonders, why does his kid’s room look like recycling bin?) and then explore the WHY (which shows your curiosity and, I presume, nerdy side). You can also work in WHAT you are doing while drinking all that water (which gives you vehicle to mention academics and other interests). Bottlecaps are definitely an idiosyncratic index of the quantified life.
Psywar gives you good advice avoid avoiding cliche topics.
Careful on mission trip idea. Mission trips are classic overused topics. By the time the admission officer gets to your file, s/he will have seen 100 trips to orphanages in Guatemala, 100 missions to rural impoverished areas, etc. This doesn’t mean you must avoid all mention of mission trip (or relative with cancer, for that matter) but you just have to make your approach unique. Your story about Russian “translation” is actually more original and shows some humor and wit and bilingualism–all admirable. (By the way, reminds me of scene in Life is Beautiful where concentration camp inmate “translates” for German guard–hilarious!..in otherwise poignant film). But ideally that story should have a more profound point than “I spoke Russian in front of some people and it was funny.”
By the way, the problem solving you are doing here is actually a valuable part of the process. Good ideas and original work often results more from a long grind than sudden flash of inspiration. Don’t be afraid to write BOTH essays, develop the ideas, write a few drafts, and experiment. Maybe an idea from one essay fits better in the other. Maybe you scrap one but cannibalize a few passages elsewhere or in short answers. Read drafts aloud to yourself. Bounce them off trusted readers. Failed experiments are not wasted time. You are discovering what you have to say. This is why it is MUCH better to begin this process in summer when you have time.
You are on the right track. Don’t stress about having to find the “right” essay. There’s probably a few approaches that can work. Just find an topic that lets you show something of yourself and make it the best you can. Kind of like picking a college, actually. If you’ve got the right stuff, there will be lots of places where will be successful. If you’ve got stuff to say, there will be multiple options for how to express it.
Sorry to blab on…God, did I just write that much? Good thing I am not the one writing essays!
I’ll definitely mention specifics. The recycling bin analogy is correct at one point I had hundreds of empty bottles in my room (before I started only keeping the caps). Or I can talk about the chemical properties of water, and how during Thanksgiving dinner I told everyone that I was thankful for water’s polar nature.
Thank you for your in depth response and time that you put in!
at one point I had hundreds of empty bottles in my room (before I started only keeping the caps). Or I can talk about the chemical properties of water, and how during Thanksgiving dinner I told everyone that I was thankful for water’s polar nature.