Some of the most clichéd college essay topics involve “learning valuable lessons.”
Basketball taught me the value of committing to my goals.
Through community service, I learned the importance of helping people.
My leadership position taught me that I can work well with others.
It’s not that sports, community service, or leadership positions can’t be interesting topics—they can. But they become cliché because 1) Too many students say exactly the same thing, and 2) Most students don’t identify with those lessons until the time comes to write an essay. That’s why you’ve likely never heard a high school athlete actually say the words, “My sport taught me the value of committing to my goals.”
But that doesn’t mean there aren’t valuable lessons to be learned during the high school years. Here are a few skills and experiences that are there for the learning for any high school student. You don’t need straight A’s, exceptional talent, or an elected position to do them. And any of them will help you not only be more successful, but also get into college.
1. Initiate. Get things going for yourself and others.
2. Lead. You don’t need a leadership position to lead. Real leading is just having the vision and guts to stand up and say to a group, “Follow me.”
3. Have a point of view. Speak up. You might be wrong sometimes. That’s OK.
4. Be smart and open-minded enough to change your mind.
6. Solve interesting problems. Yes, calculus counts. But so does finding a venue for the winter formal when your class loses the one you’d planned on, raising money to resurrect the school newspaper, or finding a way to help the yearbook staff get along when the stress of deadlines leaves the group ready to implode.
7. Take responsibility (it’s called taking responsibility for a reason). Be willing to step up and say, “I’ll make sure it gets done.”
8. Fail. No, don’t blow off your final exams and call it an opportunity. I mean the constructive kind of failure that comes from trying things that might not work.
9. Be resilient. This is a corollary to #8. When something doesn’t turn out as you’d hoped, learn from it and just forge ahead.
10. Be curious. What interests you? What do you want to learn next? You don’t need to be a straight-A student to have an interesting answer to that question. From classes, to books, to YouTube, you’re in a world where you can learn just about anything that interests you.