The essay is also a very open-ended task, one whose final product can take many different forms, and likewise one where students often wish for some form of guidance.  While the essay itself must come from your own mind, I do believe I can provide a few thoughts that may help you get started.

The first step in writing the essay is figuring out which of the seven questions listed by the Common App you’d like to center your writing on.  The exact wording of these questions often shifts from year to year, but they do tend to abide by a handful of general topics.  One such topic is the Identity Question, referring to any question that asks you to examine how certain aspects of your identity have affected your life and/or shaped you into the person you are today.  The Identity Question can be useful for people who feel that there are certain aspects of themselves that are essential to their whole.  The aspect itself can vary wildly from person to person, ranging from religious affiliations to sports affiliations, so long as it’s important to the person writing the essay.  Another option is the Accomplishment Essay, which asks you to focus on a specific moment in which you achieved something.  The focus of this essay is in part on how you worked to accomplish the goal, but also on how it affected you internally.  This question is particularly good for those with impressive accomplishments, which they’d like to explain in detail to prospective schools, and those who achieved smaller victories that nevertheless encouraged them to grow.  What matters most when picking questions is ensuring that you can answer them with something you’re passionate about, as this is not an essay where you can just go through the motions and expect results.

However, while I do suggest picking whatever prompt personally calls to you, if you’re having trouble deciding, there is one prompt that I suggest you avoid and another that I believe is particularly rewarding.  The one I’d suggest you avoid is the Freestyle Essay, the prompt which asks you to insert an existing essay you’ve already written, which doesn’t necessarily have to be about yourself.  While this might seem like a great option to some, as it allows you to utilize an essay you’ve already written, this option is, in many ways, a wasted opportunity.  One of the great aspects of the Common App essay is that it allows you to display your writing style and personality to prospective colleges.  While the Freestyle Essay may appropriately showcase your skills in writing an essay, it’s unlikely to tell colleges very much about your personality.  This is why I’d instead suggest that you take a closer look at the Belief Essay, which asks you to examine a specific point in which you questioned or challenged a belief or idea.  This prompt can be great for many reasons, and it was so great that I opted to write my own Common App essay on it.  One of these reasons is that it provides you with differentiation; colleges love an individual who stands out from the crowd, and by reckoning with a commonly held belief, you can accurately present what makes you different from said crowd.  Additionally, it allows you to present a personal struggle; colleges love essays that are willing to show vulnerability, and by telling the story of how you questioned your own preexisting beliefs, you can create a genuinely emotional essay.  Further, to balance things out, it allows one to present an overcoming of that struggle; while colleges like to know that you have endured through some kind of hardship, they’d also prefer to enroll students who were innovative enough to find a way out of some of their hardships. Finally, the Belief Essay allows you to seamlessly implement a narrative structure into your writing, with the hero’s journey easily slotting into the format of one’s struggle and one’s victory.  While turning your essay into a narrative is in no way a necessary part of the process and can be difficult for some within the 650-word parameters, it is a great way to engage your reader and to fully showcase the depths of your abilities as a writer.

When you start actually writing the essay, you’ll want to keep a handful of objectives in mind.  The first objective is to show colleges that you genuinely know how to write a proper essay.  What this essentially means is that you must ensure that your writing is technically sound, that it follows the rules of grammar and spelling, and that it further avoids being confusing to read.  You should check that your essay has a clear introduction and conclusion and that these sections don’t contradict one another.  To guarantee that your writing is technically sound, you’ll want to constantly fine-tune your product–personally, I went through eight different drafts before submitting my final essay–and you’ll want to have people other than yourself, such as classmates, parents, counselors, and English teachers read your essay and give you feedback. The second objective is to keep yourself honest.  It is always important to remember that colleges can tell when you’re exaggerating.  Your Common App essay is a vital component of your application, and like all other parts of your application, you must keep your words truthful, though a degree of dramatization is permitted within the essay, so long as it doesn’t veer too far. Similarly, keeping yourself honest includes honesty in the essay’s authorship.  The essay must be written solely by yourself.  While you are allowed to take suggestions and criticisms from others, all the actual content of the essay must be pulled from your own mind, not that of a friend or generative AI.  Finally, the third objective is to keep your writing engaging.  Many approach the Common App essay in the same way they would a job application.  This is not a good idea.  Colleges must sort through thousands upon thousands of essays, meaning that any sort of blandness in your writing will cause you to be swept away by those tasked with reading the piles of papers.  You must be unique in your writing, and unfortunately, I don’t have any great suggestions for achieving uniqueness, as by the nature of the very word, your uniqueness must emerge from your personal psyche.  However, I assure you that that uniqueness can be found

Ultimately, the Common App essay can make or break a college application.  It will likely be one of the most important pieces of writing you craft in your high school career, and it demands an amount of dedicated time and effort in accordance with that degree of importance.

Please feel free to share your own experiences in the comment box below.

Your shared thoughts may help someone else going through a similar experience.  Thank you.