Prospects & Providence

One of the most common and most difficult questions that we admission officers are asked by prospective applicants about choosing a topic for a personal statement is, “How can I stand out among 30,000 applicants?” I say that it is a difficult question because there is honestly not an answer to it, at least not a specific one. There is no one particular way to make you stand out through your personal statement. And truthfully, the longer you spend thinking about how to “stand out,” the more likely you are to be dissatisfied with what you write. The most important thing to remember about the personal statement is that the purpose of it is actually as simple as it seems – we really just want to learn more about you. We want to know what matters to you, what accomplishments you are most proud of, what obstacles you have worked to overcome, and how you reflect on the way that your experiences have shaped who you are. If you are being genuine you will automatically stand out because there is only one of you in the pool. We are looking for what makes you special and if you write an authentic and thoughtful essay about yourself, we will uncover just that.

So, should you write about your fear of public speaking and how you overcame it during the annual school play? (Is that too clichéd?) Should you write about the death of your childhood pet? (What if the admission officer doesn’t like animals?) Should you write about how your mom is your role model? (Doesn’t everyone write about that?)

For starters, there is no such thing as a “clichéd topic”, but there are better and worse ways to write about a common topic (which we will get to in the next post about the personal statement). When choosing a topic, you might want to bounce ideas off of people who know you, but it is important to pick the topic that resonates best with you. If you don’t like what you’re writing about, it’s hard to expect that we will. Most likely, you will be spending a good deal of time with this essay, so you want to actually like your subject.

Just as there’s no inherently cliched topic, there are no inherently boring ones either. Many students feel that if they haven’t gone through some kind of life-altering or traumatic event that they have nothing to write about in their college essay. But many successful application essays are centered on topics that might initially seem mundane to you. Things like a student’s bus ride to school or that time they won the cross country meet can be interesting essay topics as long as the student writing about them feels strongly about those experiences.  This does not mean that all of you should run to your computers and write about your bus ride to school or that time you won the cross country meet. It means that you shouldn’t worry too much about your topic being ordinary. What makes the topic interesting is the way you reflect upon it. Trust your experiences and don’t embellish.

Here’s a tip about how to actually go about choosing a topic. Take a look at the Common Application Personal Statement prompts.  Try writing a paragraph about each prompt and see what you come up with.  You might discover that trying to write about a person who has had a significant influence on you has got you thinking about something really important that you’d like to share.  Likewise, if you have too many ideas in mind and can’t decide which topic to go with, try writing a few paragraphs about each one.  What would your central point be regarding each of those specific topics?  Whichever one has you must excited is likely the best to pursue.

One final tip:  you might worry that you can’t fully describe yourself or something important to you in 500 words or less.  Well, you’d be right.  You are so much more than your personal statement, and we know that the essay gives us only a glimpse of who you are.  Hopefully, you will feel that even though your essay doesn’t tell us everything about you, it tells us something great.