How to Write the Common App Essay: A Guide to the Personal Statement

You already know that the personal essay, or the main essay on college application platforms like the Common App and Coalition App, is important. What we will call the “main essay” in this post is the essay that almost all colleges will see, and it’s sometimes the only opportunity to tell colleges who you are in your own words.

However, it also happens to be the essay that many students struggle with the most. For one, personal writing is a type of writing that is relatively new to many students, especially if the only writing they have done is for their history or English literature classes. Writing about oneself is an art, and many students are intimidated by writing something entirely about themselves. 

It doesn’t help that there are many myths surrounding the personal essay. Students often think the essay needs to be about a traumatic event, or that admissions officers want to see a sob story. Many students also enter the essay thinking that their essay is meant to only show their best qualities, or that the essay should include their activities to impress admissions officers. 

The reality is that the main essay doesn’t have to do anything except help the reader understand who you are: how you think, what you care about, what you value, and how you make meaning out of your experiences. There’s no correct topic and no one-size-fits-all approach. There are, however, some general guidelines that students should follow to help them figure out what the best strategy is for the story they want to tell. 

What Purpose Does This Essay Serve?

One mistake many students make is approaching this essay like one would a cover letter, but a cover letter is meant to help you secure a job interview. Cover letters explain how an applicant’s skills and experiences can help serve the employer for whom they are writing the letter. 

But a personal essay does not need to prove that you are qualified for college—that’s what your activities list, transcript, and standardized test scores are for. You’ll have the opportunity to go deeper into your activities in your supplemental essays, so you don’t need to do that here. 

This doesn’t mean writing about your activities is off-limits. However, when students write about their activities, it should be because they serve the emotional or intellectual arc of the essay. The main essay should give colleges a sense of what it might feel like to know you, teach you, live with you, or talk with you after class. After reading it, an admissions officer should be able to say something specific about your personality, values, perspective, or way of thinking.

What Makes a Good Essay Topic?

In general, it is a student’s reflection that makes an essay topic strong. Many students have heard that there are certain topics that are “off-limits” for this essay: writing about divorce, winning a big game, overcoming an injury, the death of a loved one, or overcoming shyness for a big performance are common examples of topics that students are discouraged from writing about. 

However, we’ve seen many of these topics come up in essays and still be successful because they were approached uniquely or they subverted expectations. For example, an essay that references the student’s parents’ divorce can subvert expectations by really being an essay about perspective: how a student slowly learned to see a parent as a full person to understand the choices they made. An essay about an injury can subvert expectations if the student focuses on the way it challenged their relationship to taking risks, or maybe how it made them rethink the way they understood hard work as a balance between grit and honoring their physical limitations.

The problem is not that these topics are inherently bad but that many students write the most obvious version of them. If the lesson learned—or the student’s reflection—is familiar, the essay can be weak even if the experience is unique. 

What Makes a Good Reflection?

One way we explain this to students is that they should avoid the “Disney Channel Movie” reflection, where the lesson attached to the experience is too neat or too obvious. A Disney Channel Movie reflection is the kind of takeaway that an eight-year-old could understand by the end of a 90-minute movie: believe in yourself, never give up, be kind, work hard, friendship matters, family is important, everything happens for a reason. These are too broad to reveal much about the individual student. If an essay about an injury ends with “I learned to be resilient,” or an essay about losing a competition ends with “I realized that hard work matters more than winning,” the reflection may be sincere, but it probably won’t feel specific enough to be memorable.

For example, instead of talking about how volunteering made a student understand that they are privileged or that others have less than them, maybe the student reflects on the process of dismantling their own implicit biases and savior complex, or how they’ve grown to understand what it means for an issue to be systemic. 

Where Should Students Start?

In our experience, the best place to start is not with the Common App prompts. In fact, many of our consultants choose to initially ignore the Common Application prompts in favor of allowing a student to explore their ideas more broadly before narrowing those initial ideas down. The Common App prompts are not bad, but they might limit your imagination if you try to answer them too directly. Instead, focus on how you want to share your story. 

The best essays begin with something concrete: a moment or scene, an object, a fact. You want to start somewhere specific and tangible, then dig into the idea. For example, a student might start with the day they accidentally joined the wrestling team, and from there, they can take us through their deeper exploration of institutional gender barriers, which shifts the narrative from a generic lesson about perseverance into a specific chronicle of cultural advocacy. Another student might open an essay by recounting their bizarre misfortune of falling into the unlucky 1% of a failed, routine dental surgery (a gum graft), but the procedure can become a way to think about chance: how much of life is shaped by probability, privilege, risk, and circumstances outside of our control.

In short, the starting point is less important than what the student makes of it. The essay really begins when the student explores why the idea has stayed with them, and what it reveals about the way they understand themselves or the world around them. 

What Qualities Does a Strong Main Essay Have?

Of course, there is no single formula for a strong main essay. But while strong essays can look very different from one another, they often share a few important qualities.

Tension, Vulnerability, and Self-Awareness

Strong essays often include moments where the student lets their guard down and is willing to be honest. Maybe they reveal a mistake they made, admit to a fault they are working on, describe a moment where they were challenged, or explore an internal conflict the student is grappling with. 

For some students, the idea of intentionally including moments where they don’t look perfect is scary. However, these moments endear us to the writer. They humanize the student, and they make us realize that the student is mature enough to identify their faults. Show that you are capable of honest self-reflection. A strong main essay does not need to show a student at their most impressive. In fact, essays that only present a student’s best qualities often feel less personal than essays that allow the student to be complicated.

This does not mean the student needs to reveal something traumatic or deeply private. Vulnerability can be small; a student can open up about a mistake they made, an insecurity they held, a contradiction they faced, a fear they overcame, or a moment of uncertainty. Maybe the student realizes they judged someone too quickly. Maybe they admit that an activity they once loved became tangled with external validation. These moments are often what make the reader trust the writer. They show maturity because they reveal that the student is capable of looking at themselves honestly.

Core Values

By the end of the essay, the reader should understand something about what the student cares about, what they value, and what kind of person they are becoming.

The writer does not need to state these values directly. Instead of claiming to be empathetic, the student should demonstrate a moment where they went out of their way to have empathy for another person, even if it was hard. If the student values curiosity, we want to see them chasing a question that they cannot get out of their head. A student does not need to say, “I value courage,” if the essay shows them choosing honesty even when it would be easier to hide. The essay should let readers discover the student’s values through their choices, observations, and reflections.

Reflection That Leads to Insight

A strong essay should show the student making meaning out of an experience. This is where many essays fall short. A student may tell a compelling story, but if they do not reflect on why the story matters, the reader may leave knowing what happened without understanding what it reveals about the student.

Strong reflection is woven throughout the essay. It helps the reader understand what the student noticed, questioned, misunderstood, reconsidered, or came to see differently. Sometimes the reflection demonstrates growth. Other times, it simply illuminates something about the student’s perspective. The best reflection often feels specific enough that another student could not easily write the same thing.

Surprise 

We don’t mean plot twists or shocking reveals. Instead, we’re talking about a student’s thought-process. A predictable essay tells the reader exactly what they expect: the student lost the game and learned teamwork; got injured and learned resilience; volunteered and learned gratitude; moved schools and learned to adapt. These lessons may be true, but they are familiar.

A more surprising essay makes an unexpected connection or complicates the obvious lesson. A student might use a small, ordinary moment to explore a larger tension in their life. They might take a topic that seems lighthearted and reveal something emotionally serious underneath it. They might begin with a topic that seems unrelated to their identity, only to show that it has everything to do with the way they understand themselves.

Subtext (AKA: Show, Don’t Tell)

You’ve likely heard this advice before. One of the most powerful qualities in a personal essay is subtext: the idea that not everything needs to be stated directly. 

This is where details and specificity come into play. Here’s an example:

This wasn’t the first time I’ve tried to set a verdict on a trivial matter. Once in eighth grade, I filled up one-and-a-half pages of lined paper scribbling 2s to decide if I should write my 2s with or without a loop. During my sophomore year, I wanted to choose between gold and silver jewelry and spent weeks scrutinizing the color of my wrist veins, trying to decipher if my skin was warm or cool-toned. 

Instead of telling the reader that she has struggled with overthinking or being too rigid in the past, she shows us through two sharp examples. The benefit of showing and not telling is that these details get to serve more than one purpose. First, they are funny and memorable. Second, they are specific enough that they ultimately describe a very nuanced pattern in the student’s thinking: this is someone who tries to turn even tiny decisions into fixed rules. Third, they create subtext. The student does not need to explain that they are uncomfortable with uncertainty because we can see that discomfort in the examples they choose.

By showing rather than telling, you can help an admissions officer understand you more deeply than just finding the closest adjective that explains away the complicated person you are. You want the essay to invite the reader to discover your qualities. 

Voice

The essay needs to sound like you. 

We cannot stress enough how important it is that students avoid generative tools, such as AI, when they are drafting. We know it’s tempting. We know you want your writing to sound polished. However, think about it for even just a second, and you’ll understand why this is a mistake. 

Admissions officers read thousands of essays every application season. If you’ve read things written by AI before, you likely have picked up on some of the turns of phrases or language it likes to use. However, an AO has read so many essays written by AI that they are able to spot a ChatGPT essay almost immediately. The last thing you want is for your essay to sound like everyone else’s. 

Your unique writing style and tone tell the reader just as much about you as the content. If you are funny, be funny. If you are philosophical, show off your pensive side. You want this to sound like you, even if it’s polished. 

Final Thoughts

Writing about yourself is hard work, and it requires a level of introspection that can feel deeply uncomfortable at first.

To make the process feel less like pulling teeth, we invite you to use this essay as an opportunity to learn more about yourself. Many students find the experience cathartic and illuminating; in the process of writing about yourself, you often learn about yourself.