What Should a Great Common App Essay Accomplish?

The conventional wisdom is that the personal statement is your opportunity to showcase your personality, passions, and unique experiences for admissions officers. It’s your chance to tell your story and highlight the qualities that make you a compelling candidate for admission. Some might also say the personal statement represents a chance to demonstrate your writing and critical thinking skills.

This advice is true, but it’s not particularly helpful for the majority of students.

Why?

Most students have no idea what personal “qualities” they should be highlighting and many haven’t yet developed or discovered any passions.

While some students are truly precocious (say, starting and leading international charities or building autonomous waterway clearing robots), the vast majority of talented, smart, academically qualified students have led lives centered around academics, family, and friends. This creates a catch-22: to be considered for admission at a top school, one must have a near-perfect GPA and test scores; however, achieving this typically means foregoing the type of adventures that might truly wow an admissions officer at an Ivy League school.

Therein lies the rub with traditional advice: if you spent years building a resume of extracurricular activities and preparing to ace your SATs, your story may not contain many truly unique experiences to relate in your personal statement.

So, what’s the answer?

The key lies in your ability to draw out themes and connections present across your various experiences and spin those themes into a structured narrative rich with intrigue, self-awareness, and promise for the future. Your task isn’t to have done the most interesting things as a teenager; it’s to convince your reader you will do incredible things in the future.

The key is in the depth of your reflection :)

In one module of my self-paced Common App personal statement brainstorming course, I discuss how the Common App prompts focus on themes of personal development and identity. Your task as a writer is to show a situation that caused you to evolve (enabling the reader to imagine your continued growth), or to highlight something intrinsic about your personality or character that allows them to envision you as an adult leading people or accomplishing important work.

Both of these writing strategies require a highly developed sense of self-awareness and the ability to be reflective. I encourage students to reflect after completing any activity (and even provide a reflection worksheet) to help them recognize broader themes across their activities and studies.

The answer to the question “What Work Should a Great Common Application Personal Statement Accomplish?” is not to showcase passion or unique experiences. It is to demonstrate your ability to forge a sense of identity and/or meaning from your experiences in a way that signals future growth to your reader.