Tufts Blogs

This month is application advice month, so all the officers are busy writing about the pieces of the application. I wanted in on the game, so I figured I'd talk about something from my own perspective - how I picked my college essay topic. A few weeks ago, I wrote about the difficulties involved in choosing a topic for my thesis, and thinking about that was giving me flashbacks to choosing my college essay.

I honestly think this was the most difficult part of the application process for me. I remember making lists of possible topics, stories I could tell, things I could talk about, and then looking at my list and only picking the topics I thought would be impressive to an admissions officer. I wanted to pick something that would be true to me, but also be what I thought the scary, faceless admissions officers (this was before the days of friendly deans with fantastic blogs) wanted to hear.

So I picked something stuffy but that I thought would perhaps come off as impressive and decided to write my common app essay on the power of ideas and my respect for them. It was something I cared about, but it definitely wasn’t the most exciting (to me) topic on my list of potential essay ideas. 

I tried to write that essay a good fifteen times. It never went well. I would get halfway through and find myself stuck, with no idea what I wanted to say or what the point of my essay was. Or I would struggle with every single word and it would take me a half hour just to write a few boring, over-edited sentences. I got frustrated, and took a break. 

A few weeks later, I had to write an essay for a scholarship. I didn’t really think I was going to get it, so I put less pressure on myself to pick the perfect topic. I wrote about becoming a yoga teacher, and how odd it felt to be the only teenage guy in a room full of middle-aged women doing yoga, and how I pushed myself to keep going because it was something I loved so much.

The essay flowed out of me without any trouble. I wrote it in about fifteen minutes. At that point, I realized that this should be my topic for my college essay. It was clear that I enjoyed writing it, that I cared about this topic much more than my first attempt, and I had long since learned that the essays it took me the least time to write were often my best ideas. So I switched my topic and wrote about the thing I really cared about. That essay helped me get into schools I loved (like Tufts) and also ended up winning me that scholarship, too.

The point is, the topic isn’t really all that important to the admissions team. It matters so much less what you write about, and so much more why you write about it. Did you pick your topic because it’s something you truly care about? Something you could talk about all day and still want more? Is it something that gets you excited, or happy, or frustrated? Does it help explain why you care about whatever it is you care about? If you’re writing your application about things you’re actually excited about, your excitement will bleed onto the page and whoever’s reading your application will get excited too. So go forth, get excited, and write essays you actually care about!

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