![]() ![]() "The idea of other people who are less advantaged being used as the vehicle for someone's increased self-awareness is how that can come across sometimes," Guttentag says, "and I think that can be difficult to pull off."Ī student's motivation for choosing this topic also matters. The Common App essay is limited to 650 words, for example. ![]() College essays about service to others, either at home or abroad, can be moving to read but difficult to effectively write, given the short amount of space students are allotted for a college essay, experts say. "If that's what has really mattered to the student, if that's something that has generated a lot of thought on their part, then I think it's a great essay topic," Guttentag says. One of the 2018-2019 essay prompts for The Common Application - an application platform that allows students to submit their materials, including the essay, to multiple colleges at once - focuses on overcoming challenges, according to the platform's website. It's also fairly common for students to write about a sports-related injury in response to a college essay prompt about overcoming a challenge or failure, says Christoph Guttentag, dean of undergraduate admissions at Duke University in North Carolina. "The self-awareness the student showed of being a good team member and showing up for her teammates and continuing to be positive even though it wasn't the personal experience that she wanted to have, it said a lot about her character and about the type of roommate she would be or classmate she would be," Stratton says, "and that landed really well with the readers." ![]() The student was a senior and had played throughout the season, but she found herself on the sideline during the final game. Laura Stratton, director of admission at Scripps College in California, says she remembers reading a well-written sports essay in which the author wrote about being benched. One pitfall of a sports-focused essay is that students may spend too much time describing what happened in the game, meet or competition and less on how it affected them personally, experts say. Many high school students play sports, so it's understandable that athletics comes up fairly often in college essays. Here are three examples of common college application essay topics that admissions officials say are fine for students to write about - as long as they do so thoughtfully. ![]()
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