The Common App personal statement is the component of your application that most conveys your uniqueness and individuality. It is intended to humanize you and reveal your personal narrative that underlies your achievements and choices in high school. Despite a sea of applicants with similar transcripts, clubs, sports, and more, your application can stand out through an extraordinary personal statement that reveals your motivations, values, dreams, and identity. We know it’s difficult to choose a personal statement topic that can include all of these attributes – keep reading to learn how to pick a good essay topic!

A good college essay topic will make your admissions officer root for you

Your application will be read by a member of the admissions committee of the college you apply to. We’ll refer to this person as your admissions officer. At very selective universities (think Stanford, Ivies, MIT), if your admissions officer thinks your application has potential, they present your application to a larger committee. This larger committee will vote on whether or not to admit you. In short, your admissions officer needs to like you enough to argue in favor of your admission to their colleagues.

Your essay topic should help your admissions officer root for you. Some essays accomplish this with a topic that tugs at the reader’s heartstrings. For example, writing about a challenge or loss you’ve faced. These topics can be powerful but are tricky to do well. If you choose a topic that involves hardship, it’s crucial to frame the hardship as something you’ve overcome or learned from. Many students fall into the trap of describing the hardship in great detail and leaving little room to describe how they grew from the experience. It’s the growth, resilience, and overcoming that admissions officers will be compelled by, much more than the hardship itself.

A good college essay topic reveals a unique insight

A good sign that you’ve chosen the right topic is that you can write a lot about the topic without straining for words. If you have spent enough time in a certain topic area, or enough time reflecting on this area, your words should flow freely. Additionally, being able to write a lot about the topic is a sign that you may have insight into a topic that few others do.

For example, I cannot write more than two sentences about bowling. This is because I haven’t bowled more than a handful of times. What I know about bowling is what everybody knows about bowling. However, I can write pages and pages about racial segregation of schools in Shelby County, Tennessee. This is because I started a program regarding race relations in my county, interned at a nonprofit that strove for racial reconciliation and reparation, and read constantly about this topic in high school. This ended up being the topic of my own Common App personal statement – the personal statement that got me into Stanford, Cornell, Duke, Vanderbilt, and other schools.

Your essay matters much more than your topic

At the end of the day, what you choose to write about matters much less than how you write about it. I have read exceptional personal statements about mundane aspects of life (helping your mom find the right coupons, getting a bad haircut) and extraordinary events (fleeing political instability in Venezuela, overcoming poor mental health as a sophomore in high school). The best way to choose whether or not a topic is right for you is to jump right into writing!

You’ll recognize the topic you’ve chosen is the right one for you when you’ve framed your personal narrative in a manner that’ll make your admissions officer root for you and incorporated a unique insight. After writing a first draft and revising at least a few times, most students have an “Aha!” moment where they recognized they’ve written an essay they are proud of that represents them well.

How Esslo can help

Esslo's personal statement feedback feature was trained on 100+ personal statements from admits to Stanford, Ivies, MIT, and more. It takes your essay draft, makes dozens of comparisons to our repository of excellent essays, and returns your draft with line-by-line comments, overall feedback, and next steps for improvement – all derived from insights from the best essays. And our founders, Hadassah and Elijah, are Stanford grads available 24/7 via email to answer any of your questions as well.

Good luck and happy writing!