Brainstorming Your College Essay
College essays are unequivocally the most important part of your college applications. Beyond transcripts, test scores, and teacher recommendations—your essays are the primary lens with which schools gain an understanding of you as not just as another applicant—but as a person.
This post introduces three exercises to help you begin brainstorming your essays.
Exercise #1: Timeline.
I once sat in on an MBA class at UC Berkeley, where the guest lecturer (the US ambassador to one of the Nordic countries…or vice versa) said something that I remember to this day: You are the only one that knows your story—no one else will do it for you.
So how well do you know your own life?
The first exercise is to create a timeline. Written in bullet points, drawn as a timeline, logged in excel—in whatever form you choose—detail every single event that you participated in, affected you, or otherwise shaped your life as far back as you can remember. Include key events from your childhood (perhaps, moving to a new country, starting a new school, gaining a new sibling). Are there activities that you have continued since elementary/middle school?
Once you have these activities mapped out, try to connect the dots. Which activities seem most linked to one another? Even if they may appear totally different on the surface, perhaps the skillset and learnings from one event, fed into your experience in another. Start drawing out that narrative of how all the events in your life led to where you are today.
Remember, college essays are an opportunity to showcase the best facets of yourself. They are NOT going to be a comprehensive picture of all that makes you who you are. And that’s okay. Focus on the most memorable, most important aspects. If you are having a hard time narrowing this down, imagine that you are sitting before your college interviewer right now. You’ve just discussed your interest in the school and recounted the highlights from high school and your general life. They pose the question: “what is the one detail that you want me to highlight from our conversation.”
What would you say?
Exercise #2: Details
For our next exercise, first take a moment and search up Stanford’s supplemental essay: A Letter to Your Future Roommate. Read through a few examples online, and then think—if you were to write this letter, what would you say?
This exercise is a matter of details. If you were to paint a mosaic, a collage, of yourself—what would be your pieces?
What are your likes, dislikes?
What pet peeves drive you insane, and what conversations do you have that extend into hours?
What small details ground you in your life? What are the traditions, routines that you’ve established?
What details have affected your life, inadvertently? Maybe it’s your relationship with your bad eyesight, or perhaps an odd feature of your body that you’ve grown to love.
What customs do you have at home that make you feel comfortable? Or perhaps you want to change?
This exercise can be a little tricky. After all, we are so accustomed to our own lives—the strangest things to other people, may seem totally normal to us. If you are having trouble with this exercise, I recommend making a small journal of the seemingly mundane things in your life. Do you have to drive out to a supermarket, or pick fruits from a local farmer’s market? Are you able to take a train across town, or do you have to wait for a family member to get off work to drive you?
Even better, read a book about life in other places around the world—and realize how different your lives are from theirs. I recommend reading Tara Westover’s memoir, Educated. Other books that may be helpful are listed here.
Exercise #3: Objects
My first post for Path Mentors began with this: “My high school graduation cap sits on the top shelf of the bookcase in my room. The glitter-strewn fabric delineates a serif "D" and perches gently on a square divided into equal sections of green and white. A couple certificates and awards from college hide it from sight, save for the tassel's green and white tips that peek out from below.”
What are the objects that mean something to you? If your house was at risk of catching fire (and with the California wildfires we know that this reality is becoming all the more possible), what are the objects that you would tuck away in your emergency backpack?
I once spoke with a Syrian refugee about her experience evacuating from her home. “Is there anything that you wish you had brought with you?” I asked. Her own emergency backpack was stuffed with textbooks, since her parents highly emphasized the importance of an education. However, she told me that she wished she had kept more photographs.
So what are the objects in your life that are important to you, and why?