Writing a college essay can be a complete source of panic for many students. It can be scary to think about the fact that college admissions officers probably read around 50 college essays every day, meaning they likely spend less than 5 minutes reading each file before they've made a decision. When reading a college essay, the first two paragraphs can create a memorable story for an admissions officer, or another duplicate of 45 other essays they've read that day, and trying to fight through the competitors with more earth-shattering or exotic life stories can get the best of applicants.
Even though this is a very real fear, it's a false belief that you need a tragic or highly impressive life story to get into a notable university. At its core, a college essay is a personal marketing document, a written portfolio that shows colleges who you are and why you will be an asset to the student body. With this in mind, what you write about doesn't have to be the most interesting thing that an admissions officer has ever read, but one that avoids common traps and captures your true voice.
Why Choosing the Right College Essay Topic Matters
Your SAT and ACT scores show that you know your stuff, your GPA proves that you can handle academic workloads, so what's the point of writing an essay? The answer is simple: the college essay is the only part of your application that gives you the opportunity to show who you are, not what you can achieve. There's more to you than test scores or grades, and the university wants to know that you're a human with qualities that can enrich the campus community through things like roommate ecosystems and seminar discussions. They want to know the things that make you unique; things that they can't find in scores or recommendations.
With this in mind, choosing the right topic for your essay is extremely important. A poor topic will shift the focus away from the things that make you you and disappear into the waves of other people who have the same experiences you do. They may highlight privileges that don't contribute to how you'll operate in the campus community, or uncover hidden red flags that might make them second-guess you as an applicant; or worse, they'll be bored and uninspired by your story. Learning how to write a college application essay requires you to shift away from standard high school paper writing templates and create a non-fiction narrative that's uplifting, interesting, and compelling, and that all starts with your topic. The list of topics you can choose from for a college essay is extremely vast, so it's easier to point out what topics you should avoid.
College Essay Topics to Avoid
Common College Essay Topics to Avoid
The Athlete Injury Trope
If you're an athlete, there's nothing wrong with a good story about how you worked hard, got hurt, learned valuable lessons from the bench, got back in the game, and won. If this is your lived experience, it is a valuable story that can influence people to learn about teamwork, relying on others to support you, and sharing in victory. The reason it fails is not because this is a bad story; it's because it's a similar story to thousands of other athletes. Applicants rely on this arc every cycle to communicate their ability to overcome obstacles, but it doesn't make them distinguishable from other athletes.
The Community Service Champion Trope
Maybe you went on a trip to a foreign, developing country for a couple of weeks to do community service, and you learned amazing lessons about humility and privilege. Again, this experience isn't useless, but it's similar to many other applicants', and one that can easily come off as privileged or superficial if not written with extreme care. Admissions committees have heard time and again how students have learned that poor people are happy too, and it comes off as out of touch and superficial.
Cliche College Essay Topics to Avoid
The Family Hero
Writing a beautiful essay about a relative who has passed away and left a mark on your life can be an inspiring story that's meaningful to you, but still doesn't accomplish what you think it might for admissions officers. This is another extremely common topic, and one that focuses more on your relatives' assets than on yours. Admissions officers, upon reading this story, are more likely to want to admit your relative than you. Your essay should focus on your own internal processing, choices, and actions, not someone else's.
Your Essay Writing Experience
The process of writing a college essay can communicate themes of overcoming obstacles and persevering, but it's a massive cliche that admissions officers have heard before. Instead of communicating your ability to push through setbacks, it usually ends up reading as an admission that you couldn't find anything interesting or unique about you as an applicant. With that story, an admissions officer may think that the essay you've landed on is uninspired and a final resort.
Bad College Essay Topics
Unresolved Trauma
Mental health is an important topic of discussion, especially in college spheres, but not on an admissions essay. Exploring your mental health is important, but discussing a crisis that is ongoing or unresolved can communicate that you aren't able to handle the stress of a college workload, accomplishing the exact opposite of your essay's goal.
Relationship Issues
Discussing your first love, heartbreak, or relationship conflict may seem like a good way to communicate the struggles that you've overcome prior to entering college. However, this topic feels immature, and admissions officers are not the right audience to discuss high school issues of the past. Instead, they are looking for you to take an experience and glean valuable lessons that you will apply toward the future in your college experience.
The Worst College Essay Topics
Illegal Confessions
Writing about drinking, drug use, or brushes with the law as a minor can seem like a way for you to communicate your learning experiences, but instead, they display your lack of judgment. Admissions officers might immediately flag your essay as a liability to the campus and raise issues of compliance with school policies. While you think this can make you look like a reformed member of society, others may see you as someone that they can't trust.
First-World Problems
Before you center your essay around failing a low-stakes quiz or not getting into a specific summer camp, consider whether the problem you overcame was truly a problem and how it compares to other problems that students face. For admissions officers who are looking for grit and resilience, this lack of perspective can demonstrate a limited understanding of systemic realities and tank your application. Officers read essays about students overcoming amputations, extreme poverty, or other adversities you may never truly understand, and reading your essay in comparison will ultimately seem watered down and uninspired.
Topics That Aren't Automatically Bad
Reading these topics to avoid can make it seem like every topic that comes to your mind is a bad idea, but this isn't necessarily true. While your mind and heart may be in the right place, the main issue with these topics is the lack of specificity, uniqueness, or introspection. In reality, you can write about a cliche topic if you focus on the parts that are specific to you, like moments that were unexpected, unique to your experience, or specifically point out a skill you learned. The main difference is focusing on macro-concepts versus micro-concepts. In short, these are good starting points, but shouldn't be the end product.
If you write about a macro-concept, like a sports injury, the entire essay shouldn't remain on the surface level of that injury. Instead, focus on one micro-concept that's specific to you, like an unexpected consequence you experienced. Maybe your injury forced you to enter into an unexpected position in the team, like a data analyst, and maybe that sparked your love of statistics, which is why you want to major in mathematics at university. Macro-concepts should be the frame that allows you to talk about a micro-concept in detail, creating a funnel into what you hope to accomplish at the college you're applying to. That's the major difference between a bad topic and a good one.
How to Choose a Strong Essay Topic
Now that you know what not to do and have a general idea of how to move forward, let's talk about specifics.
A Mundane Object
The best place to start with your college essay is to focus on the mundane; things that are part of your ordinary, daily life. Look around the room you're in right now and find a completely ordinary object. What do you see? A worn-out pair of socks, a broken gadget, a graphic organizer? What's the story behind that object, and why is it meaningful in your own life? Starting with something like this can uncover a story that admissions officers haven't yet heard, making your application stand out among the rest.
A Core Value
Core values are another great place to start when thinking about your college essays. Brainstorm three distinct values that define everything you do in your life. Is it your curiosity, your orientation toward community, or is it your passion to try new things? Whatever value you choose, it should serve as a means for you to discuss how you've used that value in action, in a highly specific way.
No matter what you choose as your topic, make sure you can meaningfully address it within the constraints of the application process. Make sure you've established your parameters according to the university, like how long should a college essay be, or what kind of values the university likes to see showcased in their applicants. Remember that a smaller and focused topic will be much easier for you to edit than one that describes your entire life story.
Examples of Better Alternatives to Avoided Topics
The Sports Injury → The Sideline Experience
Instead of discussing your big win after an injury, discuss how being injured led you down a path you didn't expect, showcasing your own curiosity and adoption of a new technical skill, like learning to code scouting algorithms for your team.
The Service Trip → The Local Impact
Trade out your story about visiting Costa Rica and learning how happy less fortunate people are for an analytical exploration of a local community organization you volunteer for. Switch global generalizations for problem-solving and showcase your investment in your own community.
The Relative Obituary → A Forgotten Heirloom
A biography of your hardworking grandmother can be traded for an heirloom she left behind, like a recipe book that you had to translate into precise measurements. This will display your own mind and actions, which will translate into your academic approach once you reach university. Instead of your relative being the focus, they are the frame for your own story.
Your Essay Writing Experience → Your Group Project Experience
Instead of being meta, talk about the challenges you faced on a very specific project, and the detailed processes you used to resolve them, along with what you learned. Translate those skills into the future, discussing how you might apply them as a college student.
Your Best Topic Is Closer Than You Think
Even though it may not feel like it, you don't need some extraordinary story to do well on a college essay. Instead of making up a story or embellishing, be confident in the fact that your ordinary life is more than enough to write an engaging essay for admissions officers. The essay that you write doesn't need to prove that you're some kind of hero without flaws. What your essay does need to accomplish is humility, curiosity, reflection, or self-awareness skills that you've built throughout your experiences in life, demonstrating a student that a professor would love to have on campus.
