Key Takeaways:
College essays are undoubtedly one of the most important components of the college application. Virtually every college requires its applicants to write at least one essay for their application, and for good reason. Unfortunately, many students report that writing their college essays is the most daunting and challenging part of the entire application process. However, once students understand and apply a few simple principles of college essay writing, the process will become much easier.In this article, we will explore the main purpose and goal of the college essay, provide general guidelines for choosing good topics and themes to write about, and address some common mistakes and pitfalls to avoid when writing your own essay.
The Purpose and Goal of the College Essay
Before brainstorming ideas for your college essays, it is important to understand the purpose and goal of the college essay in the first place —- why it exists, the role that it plays in your college application, and how it is read and interpreted by college admissions officers.
The overall purpose of the college application is to give admissions officers a complete picture of who you are as a student, as an individual, and as a member of a community. Each piece of your application is meant to contribute something unique to that picture. Your transcript and GPA represent your academic preparedness as a student, your extracurricular activities tell us something about your individual passions and achievements, and your recommendation letters speak to your role and standing in your school community.
However, your college essays hold a very special place in your applications for a couple of reasons. First, your college essay is the only component of your application that is completely within your control. Unlike standardized test scores and recommendation letters, which depend on a variety of factors outside of your control, you are in control of every word in your college essays. So, in a certain sense, your college essay is one of the purest representations of who you really are. Therefore, admissions officers are very eager to read your essays to see how you present yourself and what parts of your life story and personality you choose to share with us. Through your writing, they want to get to know you as deeply as possible to determine if you are someone who will fit in and thrive in their college community.
Another reason why the college essay holds a special place is because it is typically the only part of the application where we get to see your writing and communication skills first-hand. Every college will require you to demonstrate solid writing skills and communicate your thoughts clearly and concisely, regardless of your major. Thus, admissions officers are also reading your essays to gauge the clarity, depth, and maturity of your self-expression.
With this in mind, the main goals to accomplish in your college essays should be:
- To share unique, engaging, and deep perspectives of who you are as a student, as an individual, and as a member of a community.
- To demonstrate the clarity, depth, and maturity of your overall writing and communication skills.
No matter the essay prompt you’re given, the topic you choose to write about, or the writing style you choose to adopt, always keep these goals in mind and let them guide your writing process.
General Guidelines for Choosing Essay Topics
Given the lofty goals that your college essays need to accomplish, and the high stakes of college admissions in general, it is no wonder that so many students consider this part of the application process to be the most challenging. Few things are more daunting than staring at a blank page of an unwritten essay, feeling unsure of what to write about or where to even begin. With so many potential directions to pick from, how do you choose a topic that allows you to share the most important and compelling parts of yourself?
In this section, we’ll share some general guidelines for choosing great essay topics, regardless of the college you’re applying to, the major you want to study, or the essay prompts you are given. We’ll also discuss a few common pitfalls to avoid when choosing an essay topic.
Four Guidelines for Choosing College Essay Topics
1. Identify a unique narrative theme for yourself that is tied to your academic, career, and/or life goals.
The first step is to choose a good narrative theme for your essay. A narrative theme represents the main idea and point of your essay, and it is one of the first things that an admissions reader will use to characterize you and your application. It is very important to choose a unique narrative theme for yourself that you can support with specific details from your lived experiences — a theme that can be directly applied to your future academic and career goals. And of course, you need to choose a theme that allows you to directly answer the given essay prompt!
Below are some examples of common narrative themes seen in college essays:
- Responding to setbacks/growing from failures
- Learning to work effectively with others as a team
- Coping with grief/loss
- Exploring new dimensions of yourself
- A comeback/underdog story
- Changing your mind/updating your beliefs
- Battling against forces within yourself (e.g., physical defects, mental health issues)
- Challenging yourself/maximizing your potential
- Coming-of-age story/general growth
- Falling in (or out of) love with a hobby or subject
Of course, you might identify with many possible narrative themes that equally speak to you, and your essay could have more than one theme. To come up with a shortlist of narrative themes that best represent you and your life, we recommend discussing potential essay themes with your parents, teachers, counselors, and friends.
2. Identify some key personality traits that you want to convey to the reader.
Along with choosing your narrative theme, you should also make a list of important personality traits that you want admissions officers to know about you. Other than your recommendation letters and potential college interviews, your essay is the only part of your application where admissions officers can get a sense of your personality. So, it is very important to consciously convey your most defining qualities in your essay. In fact, some students begin their writing process by drafting a list of defining personality traits first, and then using this list to pick a narrative theme that allows them to share those traits.
To help identify these personality traits, we again recommend speaking with those closest to you, as well as your teachers and college counselors. There are also many brainstorming exercises and worksheets online that can help you craft a list of your most outstanding personality traits.
Lastly, keep in mind that the key personality traits you convey in your essay do not all need to be considered positive traits. For example, if the narrative theme of your essay is learning to work effectively with others, you might express that you are very shy and have difficulty opening up to strangers. While this is not usually seen as an advantageous personality trait, it is an important one to express to develop your narrative theme and your growth within that theme.
3. Choose a few specific stories, anecdotes, or moments from your life that speak directly to your narrative theme and highlights your key personality characteristics.
Once you’ve selected your narrative theme and the key personality traits you want to communicate in your essay, it’s time to identify the specific details of your life that best convey your theme and personality. These specific details are critical to building and developing your theme into a unique essay that could only have been written by you!
Depending on the nature of the essay prompt, these specific details could come in the form of a short story, a series of anecdotes, a reflective inner monologue, or some other style that best captures your theme and addresses the prompt. For example, if your narrative theme is about changing your mind on an important issue, you might choose to write an inner monologue that demonstrates the internal thought process you went through to reach a new conclusion. On the other hand, if your narrative theme is about battling forces within yourself, you might choose 2-3 short anecdotes that describe your individual battles with different ailments over the years.
Lastly, the specific details in your life that you choose to write about should ideally complement the other components of your application, presenting new and interesting information about yourself that can’t be found elsewhere. At the same time, your essay should be consistent with other parts of your application and supported by them. For example, if your essay is about discovering and developing a new passion, there should ideally be evidence of pursuing that passion through your extracurricular activities list. Or, if your essay is about becoming a better collaborator with other students, one of your teacher recommendation letters should ideally corroborate this development. If the content of your essay is supported by other parts of your application, your essay will be more memorable, and so will you!
4. Dig deep!
What often separates a run-of-the-mill college essay from an exceptional one is the level of intellectual and emotional depth expressed in the writing. Thus, our final suggestion when choosing essay topics is to dig deep!
Once you’ve chosen some specific life stories and details from the previous step, narrow down your ideas to the ones that are most compelling, profound, powerful, and eye-opening. Ideally, you want to choose stories that will have readers hooked from the first line to the last, and these are typically stories that feature raw, honest emotion with high stakes or big-picture implications. Writing like this will present you as a highly interesting and mature student who others will want to converse and work with in college.
Avoid superficial and clichéd topics at all costs; these will feel like the essay equivalent of “small talk”, and such essays are easily forgotten. As a rule of thumb, you should aim to choose an essay topic that causes a powerful emotional reaction within yourself (positive or negative), as this will likely cause a similar emotional reaction in the reader if written well enough. A common piece of writing advice that speaks to this is the following old adage: “Write about what scares you!”
Digging deep in your personal writing is much easier said than done. Doing so can require uncomfortable and sometimes painful reflection on your personal life that many people would rather avoid. However, if you’re able to overcome this barrier, you can turn an otherwise standard college essay into a game-changing one.
Common Pitfalls to Avoid when Choosing College Essay Topics
1. Choosing a topic that is too common, basic, or superficial.
This is perhaps the most common pitfall that we see in college essays. If your essay topic is too cliché or superficial, admissions readers will often dismiss you as “just another applicant” instead of viewing you as a unique and memorable person who they want to learn more about. For example, if the essay prompt asks you to describe a time when you faced a significant challenge, you probably don’t want to write your essay about bouncing back from a bad exam grade in your math class. Regardless of how meaningful the experience may have been for you, this is a story that is way too common among high school students. So, instead of remembering your triumph in math class, the reader will more likely remember that you chose a cliché essay topic that is not deep enough or specific enough to you.
When choosing stories for your essays, always ask yourself: “How common is this experience likely to be among other students? How unique is this story to me?”
2. Choosing a theme or story in which you are not the main character.
Another common mistake in the college essay is to spend more time talking about other people and things than you do about yourself. This is especially relevant when the essay prompt is about something external, such as writing about a person who influenced you or discussing an academic field that you’re passionate about. You want to avoid the common trap of spending paragraphs excitedly talking about a family relative who shaped you or a book that you read over and over. By doing so, the admissions reader will learn a lot about your family or your favorite book, but they will learn very little about who you actually are!
Remember that this is your college application, and you must be the main character of your own college essays! No matter what the topic of your essay is, you must always bring the topic back to you and your narrative theme. For example, instead of focusing an entire essay on a relative’s life and achievements, you should spend most of the real estate in your essay discussing your goals and achievements that that relative inspired.
3. Using the essay to brag about yourself and your accomplishments.
While your essay should focus on you and your life stories, you should also avoid writing an essay that simply outlines your life achievements. Doing so may present you as immature or insecure, instead of a deep, humble, introspective, and growth-minded person, which is what colleges want to see.
Also, be mindful of simply repeating information about your activities and achievements that can be found elsewhere in your application. Remember that one of the main goals of your essay is to share unique aspects of your personality that can’t be found elsewhere. Thus, writing your whole essay about your activities and accomplishments is a wasted opportunity! It’s much better to use the precious real estate in your essays to share more interesting and profound perspectives on who you are as a person.
4. Using the essay to defend or excuse past failures.
The opposite of the previous pitfall, many students are nervous about shortcomings in their college application — a bad grade, a lack of extracurricular achievement, etc. So, given the chance to write anything they want about themselves, they seek to fix these blemishes by explaining them away in their college essay.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t usually have the effect that you might think! Rather than smoothing out the wrinkles in your application, writing about imperfections in your profile might actually call more attention to them than they would otherwise get! Also, using your essay to defend your shortcomings might portray you to admissions readers as someone who makes excuses for failure. Of course, there are effective ways to address your faults through your college essay, but you have to be very careful about how it is done.
To avoid this pitfall and others, we always recommend having an impartial person, such as a teacher or college counselor, who will read your essay and give you critical feedback on it.
A Note on the Common Application Personal Statement (CAPS)
The Common Application, used by most colleges and universities in the country, asks each applicant to choose one of seven potential essay prompts and write a 650-word essay responding to that prompt. This is known as the Common Application Personal Statement (CAPS).
Here are the CAPS prompts from the 2025-2026 application season:
- Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.
- The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?
- Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea. What prompted your thinking? What was the outcome?
- Reflect on something that someone has done for you that has made you happy or thankful in a surprising way. How has this gratitude affected or motivated you?
- Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others.
- Describe a topic, idea, or concept you find so engaging that it makes you lose all track of time. Why does it captivate you? What or who do you turn to when you want to learn more?
- Share an essay on any topic of your choice. It can be one you’ve already written, one that responds to a different prompt, or one of your own design.
It is very important to note that in general, college admissions officers do not have any preference for which essay prompt you pick! They are primarily interested in what you have to say about yourself in your essay, and how well you respond to your chosen prompt. So, it truly does not matter which prompt you pick; choosing one prompt will not give you an admissions advantage over another. In fact, the reason why the Common App features multiple prompts (especially the last one) is to give students a wide range of options to tell their personal stories. Therefore, we recommend choosing your essay’s narrative theme and story first, following the guidelines discussed above, and then choosing an appropriate CAPS prompt that allows you to tell your story in the best way possible.
Many students write their CAPS essay in the opposite order, picking a prompt that they like first and then identifying topic ideas based on that prompt. However, this method could artificially limit the range of interesting essay ideas that you could explore. It is best to consider ALL of your potential life stories, based on the principles outlined above, and then narrow them down based on the prompts available to you.
For more general guidance on essay writing, check out our other blog posts below:
Also, feel free to reach out for a free 20-minute consultation with one of our Admissions Strategists.
FAQs
I genuinely feel that I don’t have any compelling life stories to share that relate to my given essay prompt. What should I do?
If you are having trouble coming up with compelling essay ideas for a given prompt, we recommend having a deep brainstorming session with a parent, teacher, college counselor, close friend, or someone else who knows you very well. Having a thought partner in the essay process can help you identify relevant moments from your life that you might dismiss or overlook.
Another tip is to think of alternative ways to interpret the essay prompt that might allow you to more easily respond to it. Sometimes, a literal interpretation of a prompt may feel too specific or restrictive, but a broader interpretation might allow for more possibilities.
Also, this is an opportunity to get creative in your writing style and presentation! By using various creative writing tools and storytelling techniques, you can transform an otherwise standard story into something more unique and memorable.
Am I allowed to use humor and make jokes in my essays?
Absolutely! As we mentioned earlier, the best essays tend to have rich emotional content, and humor is certainly a powerful emotion that everyone can relate to and appreciate. Contrary to popular belief, admissions officers will not take you less seriously as an applicant if you insert a sense of humor into your essays, especially if it is a genuine part of who you are. In fact, since many students avoid comedy altogether in their essays out of fear, admissions readers often respect the courage it takes to try to be humorous in your writing, and many readers enjoy the light-hearted break from the standard, more serious essay.
That being said, you want to be careful with how you insert humor into your college essay. Ideally, you want to use comedy to support and elevate the narrative content of your story, not to replace it or distract from it. Also, keep in mind that the things you find amusing may not be funny to the admissions officers reading your essay. As usual, it’s best to have another set of eyes to review your essay and let you know how it might come off to someone who doesn’t know you.
I have an interesting essay topic in mind, but I’m worried that the content might be too sensitive or extreme for a college essay. How do I know when I have gone too far in my essay?
In general, this can be a difficult question to answer. Although we advise you to dig deep and get personal in your writing, some topics can certainly be considered too risqué for a college essay. How do you know when you have crossed the line?
As college admissions officers, we have seen thousands of accepted students write about highly sensitive topics, including mental health issues, domestic violence, sexual identity, and extreme political opinions. None of these essay themes are off-limits. What really matters is how you choose to write about them.
While there are no hard rules about what you should or shouldn’t say in your essays, here are a few general rules of thumb:
- Avoid extreme negativity in your essay.
- Avoid gratuitous use of extreme language that might be too uncomfortable for an average reader (e.g., profanity, slurs, hate speech, graphic imagery, etc.)
- Avoid writing that is solely for the sake of shock value. Again, the main goal of your essay is to inform the reader about who you are, not to shock or surprise them. You might even consider putting a content warning at the start of your essay if it contains themes that may be too extreme for certain readers.
- Avoid opinions or stances that are highly polarizing. While it is fine to voice your true opinions on an important issue, a particularly strong stance on a controversial topic could dominate your essay and present you as a one-dimensional student with an inflexible mindset. It’s best to present a nuanced understanding of multiple viewpoints alongside your own opinions, to demonstrate deep understanding of how others think and feel as well.
Former Admissions Officer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Former Teaching Professor and Residential Advisor at Harvard University
- 2 Years in MIT Admissions
- 2,000+ Applications Read and Evaluated
Hakim earned his B.A. in Mathematics from Boston University. As a first-generation college student, he experienced the transformative power of a world-class education first-hand, and he developed a passion for higher education and college admissions. After graduating from BU, Hakim served as an admissions officer at MIT, where he read domestic applications from every U.S. state and territory, as well as international applications from India and the Middle East. In addition to participating in committee decisions, Hakim conducted statistical research into qualitative predictors of student success at MIT. He also spent his summers counseling minority applicants through the MITES and E2 programs.
