Curtis WestbayYour Students Will Get A Lot of Support for College Essays
Off the top, I should say that your students will get as much support with their college essays as any student could hope for. When BASIS students are in Grade 12, they will have a class called College Counseling. For at least 50 minutes each day, they will have the direct support of their college counselor. This time will not involve direct instruction too frequently, and instead students will work privately with their counselor or in small peer review groups to improve their writing. With that said, here are some of the commonest topics in personal statements that we are tired of reading from students over the years.
It's not impossible to write a great essay about many of the following topics, just difficult. They've been done as topics so many times, and usually students don't have a novel take on them. Accordingly, if a student chooses to pursue a personal statement topic on one of the following themes, the margin for error is quite small. The commentary below should not be taken to mean that students are prohibited from writing about one of these topics, just that students tend to find their story more gripping than they will be to college essay readers who have read variations of these themes hundreds of times. This blog post is also not meant to imply that stories on these themes are not personally meaningful or important. There is strategic value in being memorable in the college essay. It's difficult to be memorable down a well-worn path.
The Essays We're Sick of Reading
Sports Success or Failure
Particularly in American culture, sports are not a unique experience in the lives of teenagers. Injuries, failures, and setbacks may be personally meaningful to our student-athletes, but they are definitely not memorable in a college essay. Worse still as essay topics are sporting successes. Writing about winning "the big game" through adversity is an overwrought essay topic which seems trivial alongside the true examples of adversity that many students feature in their essays.
Transitioning to International Education
Every year, I have students try to write this essay— "I came from Chinese public school where all instruction was conducted in Chinese. Coming to an English language international school was difficult." Yes, I'm sure it was. But it was a difficult transition for thousands of Chinese students every year. College application readers have heard this story before. Particularly for students whose English proficiency exam scores aren't exceptional, this sort of essay also might call attention to an area of perceived weakness.
CoVID-19 Learning Difficulties
In fairness, this isn't an essay I've read before... but that's only because BIPH didn't have seniors this year. I am certain that college essays were oversaturated with this story in the past application cycle. Students should be careful about their tone in any essay about struggles— they don't want to appear entitled, cynical, or negative. Especially because our students have been, by and large, very fortunate throughout the pandemic with a very brief disruption to in-person learning compared with many students around the globe, it would be unwise to pursue this topic.
An Essay about Someone Else
Even in an essay where the prompt requires a student to write about someone else, the essay has to be about the applicant. A common essay topic might be, "describe a person who has had an influence on your life." Even in an essay about this prompt, the essay needs to contain the student's story. Maybe it's true that a student's mother worked incredibly hard for them to be able to get a great education and always encouraged them, but until the essay becomes about the student's worldview, perspectives, and attitudes as a result of that influence, it has no place in the student's college application.
Résumé Regurgitation
Colleges will already receive every student's activity list! There's no reason to reduce your personality to an enumerated list of the achievements that colleges will already know about. In a personal statement, students need to appear three-dimensional, flawed, vulnerable, and human. A college application is not a job interview, and if a student approaches the personal statement hoping to obscure their faults and present the most sanitized, professionalized version of themselves, they will appear disingenuous.
Family Tragedy
Callous as it may seem, college application readers are probably tired of hearing about tumultuous divorces, deaths in the family, and other such issues. Again, these issues may have had a profound effect on a student, but they are topics that aren't unfamiliar to application readers. Additionally, topics that involve tragedy often lead to students wallowing in their misery. Better to pursue a more optimistic topic, altogether.
Conquering a Test Like the SAT or TOEFL
Writing a personal statement about not doing well on a test, working hard, and then finally doing well on a test is not only boring, but you're writing about an experience that just about every single student applying to U.S. universities also goes through. It's a manufactured drama that is certain to get eye-rolls from admission officer readers.
The Community Service or Volunteer Project You Did One Time
Such an essay calls attention to the fact that you may not have had any longer-term commitment to an activity or a project. You don't want to come across as someone who seems to only do something as a resume filler. If you're going to talk about a community service, volunteer or other type of project, it'd be better if it was a longer-term one.