One way to find possible topics is to think deeply about the college's essay prompt. What are they asking you for? Break them down and analyze every angle.
If, on the other hand, you have more than one idea you really like, consider whether any of them can be used for other essays you need to write.
8. Beyond what has already been shared in your application, what do you believe makes you stand out as a strong candidate for admissions to the University of California?
Finally, if you're planning to take the SAT or ACT one last time, try out some of our famous test prep guides, like "How to Get a Perfect Score on the SAT" and "15 Key ACT Test Day Tips."
Analyze the Prompts
Given the importance of details, writing about something that happened a long time ago or that you don't remember well isn't usually a wise choice. If you can't describe something in depth, it will be challenging to write a compelling essay about it.
As long as you're talking about yourself, there are very few ideas that you can't tie back to one of the Common App or Coalition App prompts. But if you're applying to a school with its own more specific prompt, or working on supplemental essays, making sure to address the question will be a greater concern.
Mostly, your topic needs to have had a genuine effect on your outlook, whether it taught you something about yourself or significantly shifted your view on something else.
My brother and I are exactly one year and one day apart. We look like twins — people confuse us — but we couldn’t be any more different. As children we wore the same clothes, received the same haircut. By the time we got to middle school it was clear that my older brother preferred quiet, indoor activities, while I was a born performer who preferred the theatrical, even when off stage. I took his relative silence to be disinterest and found it offensive. To the chagrin of my parents, we simply didn’t get along.
At that time, I felt uncertain about who I was because I was different online than I was at home or even at school where I was editor of my high school literary journal. It took me a while to understand that I was not the girl who hid in the corner making herself small
She was suspended for insubordination and when I called her, she said that surely in this situation I might find a way to think of more than my own feelings. I felt ashamed. It didn’t even occur to me to seek to understand what was behind her decision in the first place. I apologized, asking how to best support her. She said it was just important that I listen and understand that she could not thrive in an environment that promoted sameness. She spoke to me with a vulnerability I had never heard before. At the end of our conversation, I apologized profusely. She said she did not need my words and what she needed from me was to take a stand.
I reach in and let my fingers trail around the surfaces of each object. I select my first prey arbitrarily, and as I raise my hand up to eye level, I closely examine this chosen one. A miniature Flamenco dancer stares back at me from the confines of the 3-D rectangular magnet, half popping out as if willing herself to come to life. Instantly, my mind transports me back a few summers before, when I tapped my own heels to traditional music in Spain. I am reminded of my thirst to travel, to explore new cultures utterly different from my familiar home in Modesto, California. I have experienced study abroad in Spain, visited my father’s hometown in China five times, and traveled to many other places such as Paris. As a result, I have developed a restlessness inside me, a need to move on from four years in the same high school, to take advantage of diverse opportunities whenever possible, and to meet interesting people.
College Essay Example #9
Steve Jobs inspired me, when in his commencement address to Stanford University in 2005, he said "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma--which is living with the results of other people's thinking." I want to make mistakes, because that is how I learn
I found that the same idea of change through simple solutions also rang true during my recent summer internship at Dr. Martin Warner’s lab at UCLA. Dr. Martin’s vision involves using already available digital technologies to improve the individualization of healthcare. By using a person’s genome to tailor a treatment for them or using someone’s personal smartphone as a mobile-monitor to remotely diagnose symptoms, everyday technology is harnessed to make significant strides forward. At the lab, I focused on parsing through medical databases and writing programs that analyze cancerous genomes to find relationships between certain cancers and drugs. My analysis resulted in a database of information that physicians can use to prescribe treatments for their patients’ unique cancerous mutations. Now, a pancreatic cancer patient does not need to be the “guinea-pig” for a prototype drug to have a shot at survival: a doctor can choose the best treatment by examining the patient individually instead of relying on population-wide trends. For the first time in my science career, my passion was going to have an immediate effect on other people, and to me, that was enthralling. Dr. Martin’s lab and his book, Digital Healthcare: A New Age of Medicine, have shown me that changing something as simple as how we treat a disease can have a huge impact. I have found that the search for the holy grail of a “cure for cancer” is problematic as nobody knows exactly what it is or where to look—but we can still move forward without it.
So, I will forgive and forget, love and inspire, experience and satire, laugh and cry, accomplish and fail, live and die. This is how I want to live my life, with this optimistic attitude that every day is a second chance. All the time, we have the opportunity to renew our perspective on life, to correct our mistakes, and to simply move on. Like the phoenix I will continue to rise from the ashes, experienced and renewed. I will not waste time for my life is already in flux.
I attended the SPK Program, a five-week enrichment program with New Jersey’s best and brightest students. I lived on a college campus with 200 students and studied a topic. I selected Physical Science. On the first day of class, our teacher set a box on the table and poured water into the top, and nothing came out. Then, he poured more water in, and everything slowly came out. We were told to figure out what had happened with no phones or textbooks, just our brains. We worked together to discover in the box was a siphon, similar to what is used to pump gas. We spent the next weeks building solar ovens, studying the dynamic of paper planes, diving into the content of the speed of light and space vacuums, among other things. We did this with no textbooks, flashcards, or information to memorize.
Go to a college's website and click on a major or group of majors that interest you. Sometimes they’ll briefly summarize a major in terms of what skills it’ll impart or what jobs it might lead to. Students are often surprised to discover how broadly major-related skills can apply.
A: Mental health can be very difficult to write about for a few reasons:
Well-known examples from movies include “training” montages, like those from Mulan, Rocky, or Footloose, or the “falling in love” montage from most romantic comedies. Or remember the opening to the Pixar movie Up? In just a few minutes, we learn the entire history of Carl and Ellie’s relationship. One purpose is to communicate a lot of information fast. Another is to allow you to share a lot of different kinds of information, as the example essay below shows.
Step 5: Expand on each description further and start to connect the ideas to develop them into an essay draft.
Montage Structure
Q: Are there any situations where I may not want to write about my life struggles?
I have misophonia--sometimes I even have to eat dinner in a different room from my family.
Imagine that each different part of you is a bead and that a select few will show up in your essay. They’re not the kind of beads you’d find on a store-bought bracelet
Quite often, college admission papers begin with an anecdote or a personal story. Review and mention this story again when you are working on your conclusion. No matter what subject you choose for your paper. Just make sure it shares something interesting about you. Take this essay as an opportunity to reveal your hidden features and create a real portrait of your personality. By linking the introduction to your conclusion, you will create a coherent paper.
- Facing difficulties and overcoming them
It may well happen that you did not discuss any conflicts in your paper. You did not describe any tragic events, and you did not evaluate the strategies that you used to overcome difficulties. Thus, you entire essay may look and sound positive, but you still need to be careful about the tone that you use in the conclusion. A positive tone used in the body of your paper does not save you from the responsibility to use the same positive tone in your conclusion. Do not forget that you must tell your readers how your admission to college will contribute to this college and the entire community.
Choose the words to conclude into an essay wisely. Focus on yourself, not others. No one says that you cannot quote other sources. However, it is better to avoid doing it in your conclusion. Your conclusion is small enough to leave little or no space for direct quotations. When you quote, you lose a chance to express yourself fully. If you want to know how to end a college essay, remember one important thing: no quotes in the conclusion. Otherwise, you will have fewer chances to meet your academic goals.
2. Never use any stock phrases
When admission officers review your essays, they will note the slightest inconsistencies. They will certainly notice that you do not know how to write college essay conclusions if you limit them to a simple summary. Avoid clichés or ordinary phrases like 'that was the catch point', or 'that was the aha moment for me and my family. ' You will never create a compelling argument if your conclusion begins with any of these phrases. Your conclusion will become meaningless for the admission committee. Do not try to look more honest than you are in reality. Do not assume that your readers are not intelligent. Instead, be clear and unambiguous in your analysis of learning. Review the lessons you have learned and apply them in practice. Imagine that you are a writer, and your readers want to see a happy end. How would you approach it?
Your last paragraph is the only opportunity given to you to finalize your argument. Do not waste it on stock phrases. Do not spoil the overall impression created by your paper. You have gone half way to get the desired admission, so do not let a single inappropriately used phrase take you in the wrong direction.
For example, you begin your paper with the following sentence: 'As I was driving out of the parking lot, I knew it was the last time in my life that we met. ' This last meeting is the key theme of your personal essay. You speak about the fear of missing someone in your life. Now your task is to revisit and reinforce the same theme in your concluding paragraph: 'Ten years passed. I was lucky to be in that parking lot again. I noticed the girl in front of the mall. By that time I knew she was the woman of my dreams.' In this way, you revisit what you said in your introduction and provide a resolution to the central conflict of your paper. You give your reader a sense of confidence that you were able to overcome difficulties and improve your life to make it full again. You do not necessarily have to say what lesson you have learned. Let the reader guess! However, when reading your essay from the beginning to the end, the admission officer will certainly enjoy the thematic line and note the change that has occurred to you and people around you.
Along with the individually tailored research projects and the housing opportunity, there were seminars on public speaking, trips to the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and one-on-one writing seminars for the end of the summer research papers we were each required to write. By the end of the summer, I wasn’t ready to leave the research that I was doing. While my research didn’t yield definitive results for the effects of curcumin on cervical cancer cells, my research on curcumin-functionalized CoFe2O4/TiO2 core-shell nanoconjugates indicated that there were many unknown factors affecting the HeLa cells, and spurred the lab to expand their research into determining whether or not the timing of the drug delivery mattered and whether or not the position of the binding site of the drugs would alter the results. Through this summer experience, I realized my ambition to pursue a career in research. I always knew that I would want to pursue a future in science, but the exciting world of research where the discoveries are limitless has captured my heart. This school year, the REU program has offered me a year-long job, and despite my obligations as a high school senior preparing for college, I couldn’t give up this offer, and so during this school year, I will be able to further both my research and interest in nanotechnology.
I didn’t mind having a tense relationship with my brother because I was involved at school. In particular I delved into the world of musical theater in addition to regularly singing solos at our high school choir concerts. I spent hours after school preparing for shows. And when I came home, I practiced as well, falling into a rigorous routine I thought I needed to remain at my best and be competitive for parts.
Less than a year before ninth grade began, my cousin and close friend passed away from cancer, and in the hodge-podge of feelings, I did not emotionally deal with either death. However, a simple tale helped me deal with these deaths and take action.
I live outside of a major city in a small, rural town that’s majority white but for a small South Asian population. My high school wasn’t diverse by any standards. Some students were openly the children of skinheads. After a racist exchange with a student who insulted her and refused to sit at the same lunch table, my best friend, who was Muslim, did not stand for the pledge of allegiance in homeroom the next day.
College essay examples from students accepted to Harvard, Stanford, and other elite schools
I hadn’t heard about the encounter that sparked this move on her part and was surprised when she didn’t stand up beside me, hand against her heart, mouth chanting an oath. She hadn’t mentioned any mounting discomfort to me, nor had I noticed anything. Unlike my “patriotic” peers, I was less upset by her refusal to stand up for the pledge of allegiance and more upset that she didn’t share with me that she was hurting and what she was going to do to protest how she was treated because of her beliefs and the color of her skin.
Never before had I seen anything this gruesome–as even open surgery paled in comparison. These past two years of shadowing doctors in the operating room have been important for me in solidifying my commitment to pursue medicine, but this situation proved that time in the operating room alone did not quite provide a complete, accurate perspective of a surgeon’s occupation. Doctors in the operating room are calm, cool, and collected, making textbook incisions with machine-like, detached precision. It is a profession founded solely on skill and technique–or so I thought. This grisly experience exposed an entirely different side of this profession I hope to pursue.
As soon as the patient room door opened, the worst stench I have ever encountered hit me square in the face. Though I had never smelled it before, I knew instinctively what it was: rotting flesh. A small, elderly woman sat in a wheelchair, dressed in a hospital gown and draped in blankets from the neck down with only her gauze-wrapped right leg peering out from under the green material. Dr. Q began unwrapping the leg, and there was no way to be prepared for what I saw next: gangrene-rotted tissue and blackened, dead toes.