We’re back with the third installation of our common app essay series. We’re breaking everything down and calling out the pros and cons of each question. Here are our thoughts on prompt #3:
Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea. What prompted your thinking? What was the outcome?
Before we dive into how to answer this question, we need to take a step back and get back to basics. At its core, your common app essay should be a story with a beginning, middle, and end that sheds light on one of your personality traits or characteristics. You’re not going to be able to encapsulate your entire personality into a 650-word essay, which is why we’re always preaching about the need to go small. If you want to write about the fact that you’re ambitious and curious, you might write about the time you tried to build your own computer instead of just buying a new one. If you want to show that you’re the person your friends call when they need help, you might write about Saturday Morning. Keep this in mind as your read the rest of this blog post and start brainstorming potential responses and ideas for this prompt.
Please reread the prompt since we interrupted the flow of this post. If you can think of an instance where you took a pause, held space, or reconsidered something that you long thought to be true, this could be a prompt worth considering. But there are some traps here, which we’ll detail below:
The Issue Essay Trap:
As we said earlier, your common app essay needs to be about you. This prompt is asking about a time when you challenged a belief or idea, and if you choose to answer this, you run the risk of writing an essay about an issue or problem that society faces. These essays come off as impersonal and it’s highly likely that even if you do a good job explaining your stance, you’ll miss the mark when it comes to showing the reader who you are as a person.
The Rubbing the Reader the Wrong Way Trap:
It’s always important to mind your audience. No matter how passionately you feel about something, it’s unlikely that you understand all sides of the argument. The last thing you want is for the admissions team at your dream school to feel alienated or offended by what you choose to write. For that reason, we would tread softly before committing to this prompt.
But let’s say that you had a conversation with a stranger that changed the way that you view something. You met, talked, and walked away with new information that made you think. Before you start writing, go back and read the first paragraph below the prompt in italics. What will the admissions officer come away with after reading your essay? Is it the trait you want to highlight? Can you make it clear with this story, or is your essay just going to be about an interaction that you had? If the answer is no, but you’re set on the personality characteristic that you want to portray, read through the rest of the prompts and see where else it fits in. Should you decide to move forward, write down all of the details that you can remember about that day and use them to turn your response into a story. Don’t let the secondary character overshadow you, and instead use them as mirrors to explain your personality through the lens of your experience.
Get in touch with us here if you’re not sure where to start, we’d love to help.