If you’re sitting down to write your college essay but have no idea what to put on paper (or, more likely, the screen), we’re here to help. Writing a college essay can be scary and overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. One of the ways to make it fun is to write about something you love, something you cherish, and something that is close to you — and often that means your culture.
Culture comes in many different shapes and forms, but what it boils down to emotionally is community. Your culture could be your nationality, your religion or faith, the geographic area you are from, your hometown, or a hobby community you are a part of. A culture you are part of is something that isn’t unique to you, but that is precisely why it is a strong subject to write about. It is shared with a group of people who you’ve learned from, grown with, and are deeply influenced by, and that’s extraordinarily potent as a writing topic. An essay about your culture is about you, but it isn’t so much about you that it feels one-note. It’s you, within the broader context of culture.
If this sounds exciting but also overwhelming, send us an email. We help students craft outstanding college applications.
Below are five ways different types of cultural communities you can write about for your college essay.
5 Ways to Write About Your Culture
Religion
Religion is potent. Faith traditions have deep history — centuries of it — and being part of that sets you within a context of understanding and community that is potentially powerful. In an essay about a faith culture or religion, you could write about how religion shaped you to be someone you’re proud to be, or it can be about challenges you’ve had with a specific faith community and finding your way within (or out) of it. Faith hits people deeply, and conversations about faith have the power to resonate with a wide variety of readers if they are done right. This is because most people have faith in something, whether it be a formal religion with a book and a building, or a way of thinking.
Hometown
We all come from somewhere. That’s potentially the most obvious sentence we’ve ever written, but it’s also true. Some hometowns are particularly easy to write about, but all hometowns offer opportunities for narrative. We love essays about hometowns because they allow you to paint a picture of a place — your block, a town park, a gazebo in the town square where bands play on summer nights — and invite the reader into it. If you come from a big town or city, you’ll definitely need to do this sort of zooming in on precise moments. And if you come from a town of 1,000 people, maybe you can write about watching the one traffic light change. That’s an essay we want to see.
Geographic Region
You can also zoom out from your hometown. Maybe you come from a region that’s particularly unique or interesting, or you engage with the area in a way that isn’t expected. For example, perhaps you live in an area with rivers and canyons, and you’ve grown up as part of a rafting culture. Or maybe you spend every summer on a lake in the middle of nowhere sleeping in a platform tent and using an outhouse. Clearly, you can write about regions that don’t include bodies of water, too, even the desert!
Hobby Community
Is there something that you do that has a whole culture around it? If you perform in a band on weekends that specializes in some niche genre or only perform Tom Petty covers, that’s an interesting story! If you study martial arts and have immersed yourself in that culture, that’s an interesting story! And if you do competitive Scrabble and travel around the country for competitions, we’d like you to write about it right now and then send it to us so that we can read it, please and thank you.
Nationality
If you are an international student, writing about your culture may be a natural extension of your application. Writing your college essay about your nationality is an opportunity to show a piece of what you bring to a college community that varies from what domestic (US) students bring, while also orienting the college admissions officers to pieces of you that may not immediately ‘compute’ for an application reader in the US — a different educational system, for example. If you are a dual citizen with the United States and another country, and that has significantly defined you, you can also write about the two cultures you’ve grown up with.
If you’re struggling to decide what to write your college essay about, writing about your culture is an amazing way to connect with application readers while sharing crucial information about yourself that will augment and improve your college applications.
We help exceptional students find and get into their perfect fit colleges. Send us an email if you’re struggling with where to start.