Your Story, Your Voice: Brainstorming the Perfect College Essay Topic

This lesson welcomes students to the course and outlines the content and goals of the course.

This is a great place to start :)

This lesson highlights the role the essay plays in the admissions process (as a differentiator).

It also highlights several key characteristics that great personal statements should have.

This lesson gives a brief overview of the writing process and outlines the broad stages students should expect to navigate en route to writing their Common Application personal statements.

This lesson presents some under-appreciated reasons to begin the writing process early ( beyond stress relief and a sense of accomplishment)

This lesson explains that good writers must correctly envision who their readers will be.

The lesson provides students with a framework to use to think about admissions officers as three dimensional people, an essential step in the pre-writing process.

This lesson helps students to broadly categorize the Common Application personal statement prompts.

While each prompt asks a unique question, we find the questions fit into two broad buckets: questions about identity and questions about growth and evolution.

Thinking in terms of these broad categories helps with the ideation process, as students can "cast a wide net" when brainstorming, rather than straining to find the perfect memory/reflection to match a specific prompt.

This lesson introduces students to a psychological concept called The Valley of Despair.

The Valley of Despair is a stage of self-doubt everyone feels as they begin a new challenging new endeavor, be it starting a business, losing weight, or learning a language.

This lesson counsels students to reflect on joyful experiences to brainstorm topics for their personal statements.

The lesson also describes the “flow state.” Students can reflect on their moments of “flow,” revealing activities and moments when they feel fully engaged and alive (great essay topics!)

This short lesson guides students through identifying their core values. It is important for students to understand these guiding principles, as these principles speak directly to why the student does what they do and who they hope to become in the future.

This lesson teaches students to use the "I Remember" exercise—a powerful tool for brainstorming an essay topic or unearthing compelling details for an essay.

Students learn the power of channeling the subconscious to find the best possible topic for their essay.

In the final lesson of the ideation stage, students connect their core values with the memories and experiences they have brainstormed using the “I Remember” activity.

Connecting values and experiences is a powerful exercise that often helps students select a unique and compelling personal statement topics.

This module reviews what students have learned throughout the course and offers some closing thoughts.