When faced with college essay prompts, a lot of students mistakenly think big. Big life lessons learned. Big impacts. Big epiphanies. That’s fine if you’ve experienced something transformative, but your college essays don’t necessarily have to be about something dramatic.
We teach our Collegewise students that sharing a small slice of your life in an essay can often help the reader get to know something about you just as well as–if not better than–a story in which you try to inject something big.
One student we worked with wrote about how he designed a website for his club soccer team, complete with press clippings, player bios, and a schedule of upcoming games.
A student who, when she was young, lost her mother wrote about cooking dinner for herself and her father every night. She called the essay, “Table for Two.”
A summer camp counselor wrote about making playlists on his iPod that the kids would love, and how by the end of the summer, he was sure his head would explode if he heard "Who Let the Dogs Out?" one more time.
One boy began his essay, “I’ve got a harmonica in my pocket right now,” and described how he’d taught himself to play it. In his words, he was "by no means a harmonica virtuoso," but he could “play a mean 'Oh Susanna.'”
And a student transplanted from New York City to Southern California wrote about his diehard love for the Yankees, an interest he shared with his dad.
I’m not suggesting you should write about something totally insignificant (nobody cares how much you like to dunk Oreos in milk). Effective stories about the small slices of life share something that matters to you, that you’re proud of, or that the people who know you best would read and say, “That’s so you.”