As a junior in high school, soon to be senior, the college application process is here, or soon to be here for most of the people in my class… and without a doubt this process is stressful. Recently, with the COVID-19 outbreak and school ending early for the spring semester, I have encouraged myself to look at colleges and go to the common app and read the essay prompts. I have also gone on sites that say “the do’s and don’t of college essays” and most contain the similar topics of what not to write about.
Like any essay, the college essay requires time and lots of planning. I believe that to have a really good essay you must have a really bad idea, such as an event in life that you don’t believe to be the most interesting topic for a college essay. But that’s exactly what a college essay is supposed to be, original to you.
I believe what makes a successful college essay is something original and exiting to you. If you write about how you overcame the outbreak of COVID-19 when it didn’t affect you directly or within someone in your family, it won’t be useful for the readers to be involved and hooked into your essay, especially knowing that there are more than a hundred people across the world who might have written about the same topic. To have a successful college essay you need to find a special moment in YOUR life that shaped you to become the person you are today, you need the person who is reading your essay to get to know YOU. What makes you special? They know the things you achieved throughout high school, they want to know who you are behind those grades and school activities. What makes you unique? The answers to these questions are the thing that makes you the perfect person for them to accept into their college.
You are competing against thousands of students across the world for the same opportunity. Your college essay needs to prove that you are one in a million, and that uniqueness is exactly what will make a college essay successful.
