Thanks for your responses!
that’s a very grey area. you can either butcher the essay by making the essay revolve entirely about the insecurity or you can master it by relating it to broader concepts. avoid focusing the essay on the insecurity but strive for making the essay have a universal theme and adding your insecurity into it in a separate paragraph. good luck!!
It’s fine to write about the insecurity, as long as it is absolutely unambiguously clear that you’ve overcome it, and that it’s not going to negatively impact your performance/function. Otherwise, u run the risk of raising red flags that u may have trouble coping in college. Adding humor to the story (if appropriate) can’t hurt.
The playing music topic makes me fall asleep even before reading the essay.
If u must write about it, then focus on what you have “done” with it, like volunteering to entertain seniors at a nursing home, or playing to sooth abandoned dogs at the SPCA that are about to be euthanized.
The point is to shown how you’ve grown-- that you’ve contributed to something or someone, that you’ve become more of an adult.
Make the essay so personal that your best friend could find it in the street and immediately know that it was written by you.
Any topics are fine for essays as long as they can tell something about YOU. Make sure you know what personal qualities that you want to show to the admissions officers and emphasize them through your essay.
College essays are an opportunity for the admissions officers to get to know you. If you feel like playing music is a part of who you are, then write about it. Don’t worry about it being cliche. If you don’t focus on the music but focus on you, then your essay will be unique and compelling in it of itself.
I agree wholeheartedly with the last two posts. It was the exact strategy I used when was writing my college essays and it is the advice I continue to give people. Make it personal to you. Don’t let the fear of writing about a cliche topic stop you from writing about something that really means something to you, because if it really does and you are really able to show it in a unique way in your essays, then the admissions officers can tell that you are being true to yourself. In other words, it is not what you say but how you say it
Don’t be insecure about what you write about, as it will show through in your writing. Realize that admin officers have read dozens of essays about almost every topic a high school senior could consider, and from multiple perspectives.
Chances are virtually 100% that you won’t be writing about something new. But the readers don’t care about the topic, as much as they want to read essays that make them want to get to know you better as a person. The essays that stand out are the well written ones where you speak from your heart.
The essays that they reject are more clichéd topics that are much more boilerplate - kids who write about what they think will interest someone else, instead of what is important to themselves.