College Essay Lab | Lesson 1 | How to choose the perfect college essay topic
Spoiler alert: there’s no perfect topic.
Sorry, but there isn’t. There’s no formula. There’s no guarantee. You’re too unique a person for there to be some kind of objective wisdom about college essay topics that would capture your uniqueness. So let go of “perfect”.
Instead, you’re just gonna have to pick a good one.
What makes a good college essay topic
Okay, ready for a bunch of clichés?
A good college essay topic is:
Specific
Memorable
A contained story with a beginning, middle, and end
About you
Really easy for me to say.
And anyway: knowing what makes a good college essay is less valuable than knowing how to choose a topic to write about. So let’s focus on that instead.
How to choose a good college essay topic
Put down the Common Application questions for the Personal Essay. As idea-generating prompts, they kinda suck. I promise I’ll come back to them later. For now, I have a series of questions of my own, which are specifically-designed to get you thinking about moments in your life that have the qualities of a good college essay.
TASK: Grab a notebook and pen and then watch this video, where I walk you through my favorite idea-generating questions for college applicants.
Commit
Now that you’ve written a list of potential subjects for your college essay, your job is to choose one.
Review your list of potential subjects one more time—and look for one that won’t feel redundant. For example, if you know your geometry teacher is going to tell the story about the time you organized a memorial for the classroom’s beloved hamster, consider crossing that off the list.
And then, honestly, you kinda just have to pick one. Go with the one that you feel excited about.
HOMEWORK: Commit to one of the ideas.
Once you’ve done that, click here for the next lesson—where I’ll talk about the importance of writing a rough draft, and why it’s different from a first attempt to write a final draft.
FEELING STUCK? Schedule a drop-in appointment with me here. Make sure to indicate that you’re working on Lesson 1, and describe for me what your “stuck point” is.
