Webinar Transcript: How to Get Started on the Common App Personal Statement
Elton Lin
(This is a transcript of a webinar from August 2024, a recording of which you can find on our YouTube channel.)
Anna Lu: All right, we're live. Good evening, everybody; I see everyone filtering in. Thanks so much for joining us. I'll give it a little second to let more people come in
Alright. Well, today we'll be tackling the Common App Personal Statement, which will be particularly helpful to any seniors or rising seniors preparing for their upcoming application season. Or maybe you're not quite in 12th grade yet, and you still—you just want to see what's ahead of you, and you want to prepare ahead of time—big kudos to you.
Many of you have probably heard of the Common App—really big platform, supports over a thousand colleges in their college application process—and kind of at the forefront of that is the Common App Personal Statement, or the Common App essay, which gets sent to every college that you apply to through the Common App.
So if you have any questions throughout the webinar, please feel free to make use of the Q&A function. We'll try to address as many questions as we can, probably with that final, like, 10 to 15 min.
But for the most part you will not be seeing from me until that Q&A section. For the most part, walking us through this whole topic this evening will be Kyra and Tyler. So I'll let them introduce themselves, and they'll take it away from here.
Kyra Jee (she/her): Thanks very much, Anna. Hey, everyone! And welcome to “How to Get Started on the Common App Personal Statement”.
As Anna said, this is the big one. But once you have your footing in what readers are hoping for when they read this part of your application, you can sort of give your applications the foundation that they need to branch out into all of the other pieces, essays, and transcripts alike.
My name is Kyra. I'm an Educational Consultant here at ILUMIN. I also lead our essay team and services, and we are very excited to break this one down with you today—me and my colleague Tyler.
Tyler (he/him): Hi, all. Yeah, my name is Tyler Fair. This is my 3rd year as an Essay Specialist at ILUMIN. I'm deeply passionate about helping students to find and craft their stories, and I find it is frequently a very moving part of my job and keeps me coming back for more.
I particularly like the Common App Personal Statement and working on it with my students because of the narrative-heavy, vulnerable, and creative style it calls for, so I'm excited to chat about it with you all.
Agenda
What is the Common App?
Which Prompt is right for me?
Debunking Common Expectations
What should I write about?
Tips: Crafting your Personal Statement
Student Sample Essays - Hooks
Hourly Essay Consulting
Kyra Jee: Here is our agenda for today. In this webinar, we won't be handing out a Lego brick, step-by-step manual for how to write the perfect essay. If we did that, all of your essays would sound exactly the same, and it would totally defeat the purpose of crafting a Common App that actually highlights what makes your application personal to you.
And so instead, we're going to set a foundation for brainstorming meaningful topics and crafting your essay as a narrative story. We'll do an extremely brief opener on college essays as a genre, and then give guidance for approaching the main personal statement itself.
We will take a look at the possible prompts you can choose from, break down some common misconceptions (so you can start fresh with stories that are actually valuable to you in your application), and then also offer a few student examples as well.
So by the end of tonight, you will have heard some big takeaways, and even a quick timeline of what you can expect. So you can sort of better prepare for this part of your college application essays.
College Essays 101
Allow students to speak directly to admissions officers
Offer more nuance than numbers or transcript alone
Help admissions officers determine fit
Are weighted differently at different colleges
Should NOT be written like formal/classroom essays
Are typically reviewed by AOs (NOT subject matter experts)
Should display passion, personality, and perspective
Kyra Jee: Here is our “College Essays 101”. Let's start with the very basics.
Most college applications are really packed with quite a bit of information that they are asking from you: not just your academics and your extracurriculars, but also essays that give you the opportunity to actually talk about yourself, your goals, your interests, and why you think you would be a good candidate for that campus.
These essays as a genre range from teeny-tiny, 50-word short answers to the more typical 200- or 300-word supplemental essays. And then, finally, you have schools with really big essays, like 500- to 600-word statements, like the Common App Personal Statement itself.
These essays are weighed more or less importantly at different colleges, but their ultimate purpose is still the same, right: for you to have an opportunity to demonstrate not only what it is that you've accomplished in the last 4 years, but also if you can wisely and confidently reflect on those experiences through critical writing and critical thinking, and sort of be able to take a good look at yourself and your application, and communicate it to a panel of readers.
It is good to know as well—down here, that last, second-to-last bullet point—that your essays are typically not going to be reviewed by professors in whatever major you are applying for.
There are some exceptions to that: so if you are applying to a portfolio major, then they're going to have an artist or a musician to [review it], you know, as part of that application process.
But for the most of us, your job is to communicate, translate the importance or the relevance or the wonder of your chosen field to the readers—to be able to display your passion for that subject, your personality, throughout all of those activities, and what perspective you can bring into a college campus environment based on the obstacles and opportunities that have characterized your high school journey.
College App Platform
Make 1 online account the summer before 12th grade
Fill out general + school-specific personal + academic information (course history, self-reported test scores, Activities List, Personal Statement, school-specific supplemental essays, 1st and 2nd choice majors, Letters of Recommendation writers, etc.)
Apply to a max of 20 schools
Platform hosts 1,000+ universities!
Tyler Fair: So now, the kind of gritty conversation around what the Common App platform is.
There are several application platforms where students actually fill out and submit their applications. For example, the California State Universities, or CSUs, have their own platform. The UCs have their own, too, and some schools, like MIT and Georgetown, have individual platforms.
But the biggest is the Common App, where more than a thousand universities intake applications.
The summer before 12th grade, if you're applying to any one of those 1,000 schools, you want to create a Common App account. Most applications cost between $50 and $80 to submit, but the account itself is free.
The good thing about the platform is that everything is in one place. You will fill out specific information for each school, but other info, you can just upload once, and it will go out to any school you apply to.
Two important notes, though. You can only apply to 20 schools. If you want to apply for more, you can, but your best option is to research which schools have individual application platforms or other ways to submit applications.
Kyra Jee: Yes, and the other note with this piece is that you only are submitting one school's application at a time. So I have, sometimes, students who worry; they say, “hey, my University of North Carolina [at] Chapel Hill application is due October 15—do I have to submit all of my applications by 10/15?” And the answer is “no”; the deadlines for each of your schools does matter.
And so you're going to basically fill out all the information on this website—especially the stuff that stays the same, like self-reporting your transcript, filling out your activities list, your Common App Personal Statement—you're gonna do that once, and then submit the application off to your first school, and then that's it. You are going to replicate that process for each of the schools down the line, and it will… also, if you wanted to, it gives you the opportunity to change a couple of details on that information.
But the long and short of it is: you are not held to your very first deadline. You are going to submit things by each of the deadlines for the schools you're applying to.
The Main Personal Statement
WHAT IS IT?
The primary essay, reviewed by almost all colleges you apply to on this platform
HOW LONG IS IT?
250-650 words, or 2.5 pages
We recommend 500 words or more
HOW IS IT READ?
Alongside contextual info that you + your school provide
Used to learn about who you are as a person and determine fit
Tyler Fair: So the main topic of our conversation today is the Main Personal Statement essay.
It's one of the pieces you'll submit, and it's the primary essay reviewed by almost all colleges you apply to using the platform. There is a word limit of 650 words for this essay, which is about two-and-a-half pages double spaced, and it is through this essay you can imbue the most personality and voice into your application to accompany the contextual information and statistics you provide.
Crafting your Personal Statement
In short, the Common App is a story about how a meaningful moment or experience helped shape the person you are today.
Use creative writing, reflection, and figurative language to tell that story memorably. YES, you CAN:
Use first-person narration and contractions
Open with a hook
Quote conversations or internal monologue
“Speak” directly to the reader
Tyler Fair: In short, the Common App is a story—a story, a story, a story—about how a meaningful moment or experience helped shape the person you are today.
Because “personal statement” calls for creative writing, reflection, and figurative language, the types of rhetorical mechanisms or devices we strongly encourage include: using first-person narration and contractions, opening with a hook, quoting conversations or internal monologue, and speaking directly to your reader.
Your mission: Connect with the Reader.
Who are you, beyond your numbers?
Big Takeaway #1
Kyra Jee: All of which brings us to our first big takeaway for today: that your mission with the Common App Personal Statement is to try and connect with your reader, right? To share with them who you are beyond your numbers—numbers being your grades, your transcripts, your test scores—all of these things can give us information about you
We submit them for a reason, but the essays are so long because they are offering you the opportunity to advocate for yourself and humanize yourself, and in so doing, talk about the ways that you actually differ from other applicants, whether or not their GPA lands in the same points as yours.
[I] really wanna emphasize that last slide of good intel from Tyler that, probably in most of the essays you're used to writing for school, there's, you know, all these conventions: “don't use ‘I’”, you know; “sometimes the hook has to be very literary”; and things like that.
But college application essays are their own genre. And so the things we're talking about today are about focusing on the genre of the Common App Personal Statement and how it might differ from other essays you might have written for school and other circumstances.
“Who are you?”
We often feel most connected to someone else when they’re vulnerable with us. Admitting something, realizing something difficult, sharing something honest → “I trust you enough to share the real me.”
Create that feeling in your essay, instead of narrating your resume. (Save that for the Supplemental Essays!)
As you select a topic, be honest, introspective, and creative.
Honor your boundaries! You don’t have to share anything you don’t want to.
Kyra Jee: And so here, on the next slide—to put it frankly—the best Common App essays are the ones that make us, as readers, want to get to know you better. Certainly, it's still an academic endeavor to apply for college, but we call it the Personal Statement for a reason.
The thing we really want to know is who you are, and how you, as a person, will not just contribute to your academic classroom by churning out, you know, your GPA in college, but also by being a member of the community, the member of the campus, somebody who will help start new things and be part of new things on campus and be the joy and delight that I guarantee all of you are.
Or, in other words, right: we often, in real life, feel the most connected to other people when they are vulnerable with us, admitting something, realizing something difficult, sharing something honest. Choosing to tell stories like that is kind of like saying, “I trust you enough to share the real me.”
And so, in the Common App Personal Statement, in [those] two-and-a-half pages, our job is to try and recreate that feeling in your essay, instead of narrating out your resume again, because they already have that information from you. They already have your transcript and what classes you've taken, and this Common App is an opportunity to show a different side of you (arguably, maybe a more honest or a deeper side of you), to be introspective and creative—as we said here, using that figurative language to really tell a story kind of as if you were giving a TED Talk or a having a deep conversation with a friend, just a little bit more polished.
All of that being said, of course there is a caveat here: honor your boundaries! You don't have to share anything so deeply personal about your psyche if you don't want to. You know, trying to come up with things for shock factor is not always the most honest or the most personal version of yourself.
And so today, we're going to take a look at some different ways to try and think about the kinds of stories that will help a reader want to get to know you better on their campus.
Which Prompt is right for me?
SUMMARY:
1. Tell us about your unique Background, Identity, Interest, or Talent.
2. Recount a time you faced an Obstacle. How have you grown?
3. Reflect on a time you challenged a Belief. How have you grown?
4. How has Gratitude affected or motivated you?
5. Describe an event that Sparked a period of Personal Growth.
6. Describe a captivating Concept that makes you lose all track of time.
7. [Prompt 1 but less supportive]
Kyra Jee: On this next slide here, you can find—well, on this slide, you can find a summary. You can find the full list of this year's Common App prompts on the official common app.org website—or frankly, by Googling it; they're everywhere. So today, instead of reading you all of it, I will just summarize the main takeaways.
If you haven't already seen the prompts, you should know that each of these prompts in its true form is actually something like 3 or 4 sentences long. There are a lot of follow-up questions, like “What did you learn from this experience?” or “How did you grow from this experience?”
Okay, if you are following along with us today, if you are a student who is writing or getting ready to write your Common App Personal Statement, and you're not sure which prompt is right for you, or you haven't even looked at the prompts yet: I want you to make—get out a little sticky note, and make a list of numbers or keywords to put a check mark or an “x” next to prompts, as I sort of gloss through the seven options that you have.
So Prompt 1, in summary, wants us to talk about your background, identity, interest, or talent. The technical wording is, like, “something so meaningful, your application would be incomplete without it.”
Prompt 2 wants you to recount a time you faced an obstacle, and how you've grown from that experience.
Prompt 3 wants you to reflect on a time that you challenged a belief that you have and how you've grown from that.
I just wanna pause here: belief is super open-ended. Sometimes, for students, challenging a belief is about—is about faith or spirituality, and that's totally a sort of—can be a very meaningful essay to write. But also belief is just about worldview and about perspective, about a value system or expectations for something that turned out to be less true than you thought it was.
And so this prompt, like all of the prompts for the Common App, are super open-ended and super flexible. We'll talk a little bit more about that, too.
Okay. Prompt 4 asks how gratitude has affected or motivated you in your life.
Prompt 5 asks you to describe an event that sparked a period of personal growth or understanding of yourself and others.
Prompt 6 asks you to describe a captivating concept or idea or activity that makes you lose all track of time.
Prompt 7 offers you the chance to submit any essay for any topic written any time.
It's just a totally blank slate, but we always encourage students to avoid this prompt—avoiding Prompt 7—mostly because it encourages… it tempts some students to just grab a 10th or 11th grade, like, final project that you wrote in English, and then just turn it in here, which is not fully in the spirit of college apps—and hopefully, no matter how good that final, like, English paper reflection was at 11th grade, hopefully, you've had a little bit more time to grow and mature since then.
So we really want to be writing a new essay for the Common App Personal Statement. We really want to be thinking about the ways that you have grown as a student, and as a person in the rest of your life, too.
If you're feeling like—the siren call of how free Prompt 7 is, I would encourage you to turn and take a look at Prompt 1. First one on the map. “Tell us anything” is basically another way to translate this prompt. It’s super flexible!
Reminding yourself to answer the hard parts of these questions is a way to make sure that your essay is analytical, right?
Absolutely that Prompt 7 is easy to answer, because it just says, “Write an essay,” but making yourself think about those follow-up questions—“How have you grown? How have you learned? Who are you now?”—is going to help you write a more effective essay. The prompts are here to help you write a better story.
Okay. Now that we've gone through a summary; maybe you have successfully checked off or narrowed down your list from seven to three or four prompts after that… but what do we do with those three or four?
Tyler? Tell us about Big Takeaway #2.
The story you tell matters much more than the prompt you use to tell it.
Big Takeaway #2
Tyler Fair: The Big Takeaway is: the story you tell matters much more than the prompt you use to tell it.
The story you tell matters much more than the prompt.
Especially if you're just getting started, focus on crafting your strongest story before worrying about which prompt is perfect for you. Next slide, please.
Which Prompt is right for me?
Colleges don't prefer one prompt over another
Some of your stories will fit into more than one prompt
Instead of fixating on the prompt, start with the story
What trait do you want to demonstrate?
What prompt helps you add detail and reflection?
Is there a unique experience you want to share that offers context for your life as a student?
Tyler Fair: The prompts tend to have a lot of overlap—you might have noticed.
For example, exploring your personal identity, and perhaps, how you've experienced marginalization, might relate to an obstacle or personal challenge, or experience of your background. Similarly, perhaps, your love for how astrophysics and methodology cross over might naturally be a “unique background or interest”, or a “concept that makes you lose all track of time”.
You can see how, if you focus on the story, you could probably use your core story for multiple prompts, which is why we at ILUMIN prefer to focus on the story first.
What traits do you want to demonstrate? What prompts help you add detail and reflection? Is there a unique experience you want to share that offers context for your life as a student?
I think these are the things we tend to prefer to focus on, for sure.
Debunking Common Expectations
“I have nothing to write about.”
TRUTH: Many of the most meaningful, memorable essays start with the smallest, most ordinary of details.
Kyra Jee: Now that we've discussed a wide swath of things you actually will be considering writing about, places that we do want to start—those values and characteristics and experiences that you've had—we are also going to take some time to sort of debunk or break down some misconceptions that actually would get in the way of your writing.
So we have maybe 5 of these to just talk about today.
I think the first myth is also the most common one. This idea: “I have nothing to write about. I have no tragedy, I have no victory. I have no superhero story just yet.”
And while it's totally fair and reasonable, if that's something that's like running in circles in your head right now, I just want to give you some encouragement! The truth is that many of our most meaningful and memorable essays that we've read and we've worked on as a team really start with the smallest and most ordinary of details. I think it's a really big myth that just—that tragedy must be the only way to write a Common App Personal Statement.
You know, if you had an earth-shaking experience that really impacted your life, then chances are you're probably considering writing it in some aspect of your application. And I think that would be really valuable, or it could be really valuable.
But for students who maybe don't have an isolated or particularly intense experience to write about: you know, your experiences and your insights are still rich and important and meaningful. And taking these sort of small everyday details of life and turning it into something much more meaningful often is a more effective Common App essay than trying to go for something like a shock factor. It feels—it often feels a little bit more authentic.
All right, let's take a look at our second myth.
Debunking Common Expectations
2. “I should focus on why I want to study ___.”
TRUTH: It’s okay to reference your major! BUT, especially if you have several resume experiences, save them for the Supplements. Use the Common App to show deeper reflection on YOU through critical thinking + creative writing—instead of just bragging.
Tyler Fair: Our second debunked common expectation, or myth, is that the student should focus on why they want to study their major of choice in their Lersonal Statement.
To me, the Common App is about the core of who you are, and then you let the rest emerge in the supplemental essays and statistics, information. Use this Common App Personal Statement to really show deeper reflection on you through critical thinking and creative writing.
As we've said multiple times, this is your—sometimes only—opportunity to show them your personality, your humor, who you are underneath some of the statistics and supplements and accomplishments. And so it really is important to make it count.
Kyra Jee: Yeah. Supplemental essays are great, too. But if you are definitely sitting there thinking about that second myth like, “Shouldn't I be talking about my major here?” Well, probably most of the schools you're applying to have also supplemental essays where they're going to be asking you, “Why do you want to major in this subject? What is an experience that you've had that's related to your major?”
And if you spend all of those experiences, if you use them all up in your Common App essay, you're gonna be up a creek with 14 supplemental essays looking back at you, asking what you're gonna write about in those.
So really, this is also about strategy, that to talk about something personal and not necessarily academic, not necessarily resume-based in your Common App Personal Statement can sort of free up your more resume-based experiences to answer questions that are a little less open-ended. Right? If you only have, like, one big research experience or one big internship or one big major-related experience to talk about, and your college is about to ask you, “Why do you want to study X? Why are you majoring in X?”, we want to make sure we can answer that prompt with something that's super relevant.
And so that brings us to the Common App.
Debunking Common Expectations
3. “The Common App should be flowery and artsy.”
TRUTH: This essay (like Supplements, and unlike UC PIQs) should sound the way YOU tell your most personal stories. Adding suspense, humor, and figurative language brings your essay to life… but metaphors, symbolism, etc. should still have clear purpose.
Kyra Jee: So here's our third myth that we want to debunk today: this idea that students often will say that the common app should be flowery and artsy and poetic and whimsical.
And the truth is that this essay… you know, I see where the idea is coming from, in that we did spend a slide saying, use figurative language, use metaphors and onomatopoeia and dialogue and hooks and things like that—but we want to do it with purpose, right? So if you're looking at a paragraph and thinking, “this is fluff, this doesn't mean anything,” chances are your reader might be thinking the same thing.
But if you are taking a hook to sort of ground the reader in a moment, in a memory of your experience, instead of just saying, like, “my biggest moment was when I da da da da da,” that will stand out!—the same way that, when you're telling a story, often, that the energy and the detail and the memories that you pour into it make it more memorable for somebody else, too.
And so yes, figurative language, yes, description. Yes, hooks, no flowery, no fluff. No “unsure what that description is doing here,” too.
And then, I guess, similarly, too, if your paragraph is chock-full of synonyms that you're not quite sure how to pronounce, words that you think you might not be able to define, if someone asks you to do it: you should probably throw those out, too. Talking like yourself, being earnest about what you've learned from that memory, trying to answer those questions, you know—“How did you grow? What have you learned? What's a challenge you've overcome?”—and sort of your regular speaking voice is going to be so much more memorable and authentic, and a lot more to the speed of what is going to stand out in a Common Application reading here.
All right, let's look at our fourth myth.
Debunking Common Expectations
4. “The Common App should be formal and academic.”
TRUTH: This essay (like Supplements, and unlike UC PIQs) should sound the way YOU tell your most personal stories. Using overly formal language that you wouldn't usually use, or sounding like you're too afraid of misstepping to be honest, won't help you shine.
Tyler Fair: Alrighty. Our fourh common myth is that the Common App should be formal and academic.
That's not necessarily true for the Common App Personal Statement—though, once again, the PIQs are their own thing, which… that's a different presentation. What we're really aiming for with a Common App is a style that reflects the way you tell your personal story, with your authentic voice. While it may feel like it could make you seem smarter, using uncomfortably formal or overly sophisticated language can actually distract the reader if the language doesn't seem to fit you.
But I will say there's some perks to using a more informal, authentic tone, because it allows you to use some nice rhetorical perks. For example, it's totally okay to use contractions like “I'm” instead of “I am”, or “I'd” instead of “I would”. And it's okay to address the reader directly. Good stories often involve bringing the reader in, right, using rhetorical questions and helping to make sure the reader understands what you're trying to write about.
Debunking Common Expectations
5. “The Common App should reiterate only my most impressive accomplishments to make sure I look good.”
TRUTH: Yes, the ultimate goal is highlighting your strengths! BUT sometimes showing growth REQUIRES showing where you started. Most enjoyable character arcs do.
Kyra Jee: And here's our last, maybe the most important myth that we want to debunk today with the Common App Personal Statement. I think it's related to all the ones that came before it, but it stands on its own, too.
“The Common App should reiterate only my most impressive accomplishments to make sure I look good.”
I have heard this 1,000 times from 1,000 students, and it comes from a very realistic place. Of course, the ultimate goal of a college application is about trying to impress the readers, right? It is ultimately about highlighting your strengths. But sometimes, showing growth requires us to show where you started.
You'll notice, if you are taking a look at the full version of the Common App prompts instead of just the summary that we saw today, that half or more of the Common App prompts—part of the wording is to tell us the before and the after. What were things like in your head before this experience? And then how did either the gratitude, the obstacle, the period of personal growth, the event, or realization? How did that change? Who you are today, right? How did that inform your experiences?
And so, in order to get us to this position of a very mature and responsible young adult—as I, again, guarantee that you all are—sometimes, we gotta start with the version of you who was a little bit younger or a little bit nervous, right? Some of our most exciting moments or our most proud moments are ones where we felt very nervous or unsure about it in the moment, and it wasn't until afterwards that everything came out really nicely.
A good way to think about this, too, is: in real life, if a person gave you two-and-a-half pages worth of a story that was top-to-bottom bragging, you probably wouldn't feel a very close connection to them. And, of course, as you now know from a Big Takeaway #1, your goal in this essay, your mission, is to connect with that reader and make them remember you.
So—using vulnerability, earnestness, explaining what you were thinking at the time through all that dialogue and internal monologue—it can really help humanize you from being a jumble of anonymous numbers to a real student who is making real decisions and would really make a great addition to campus.
Most character arcs do that.
Expect to write multiple drafts.
Give yourself TIME to write multiple drafts!
Big Takeaway #3
Kyra Jee: Alright, and with all of that said, that takes us to our Big Takeaway #3.
Maybe it's something that you already know, but I think it's worth saying: You must expect to write multiple drafts if you want to have a good Common App essay.
And I don't actually just mean drafts of the same story. Sometimes your best idea for the Common App Personal Statement, after like 2 or 3 months of work, wasn't your very first idea. And sometimes the very first idea that comes to your head is not the very best idea that best represents who you are, right? We have to test it out in the writing, have to go from thinking about [it] in our head, or talking about it out loud to somebody who already knows that story, to practicing writing it out, communicating what it is that you're thinking and feeling.
Yes, you could do your entire—you could probably spit out two-and-a-half pages like, the week before your EA deadline, and I bet some of you have some practice with that. But, you know, is that really the best version of your essay? Would you have benefited from starting a little bit early?
I think so. So. For your health, for the quality of your essay, and for your loved ones’ peace of mind, I encourage you to give yourself a lot more time to actually sit down and complete multiple drafts of your essay.
We got a very good question in the chat that I'm just going to jump in and mention before we move to our next slide. Somebody is asking whether we recommend writing about experiences before high school, or should we stay focused on experiences in high school? I think that's a very good question.
Generally, I will say we want to stick to high school, because for any given—let's maybe give an example of, like… you want to tell us, maybe… for the prompt that is, “tell us about an event or realization that sparked a period of personal growth”, and for today's purposes, let's say that that experience was, like, a dance recital that you poured your heart and soul into in your 10th grade year or something like that.
Extremely cool, a great opportunity to show how your—you went into and came out of that experience. But if you're doing a dance showcase in high school, you probably started as a little kid, right? So there's a world where maybe we're thinking, “should we have started our story with the younger version of ourselves?” But if you just think about, “hmm, how much self reflection did the eight-year-old version of me, who was a dancer, have?” versus “how much experience does the 10th or 11th grade student have?” to maybe, like, better reflect on that situation or have it have a more recent impact on your life.
High school experiences are going to be more powerful in most cases. Yeah.
And then, caveat to that: even if you write about a story that maybe had its roots [in] when we were younger, I'm still gonna super encourage you to talk about how it impacted you as a high school student. If we're just talking about the new version of you that grew and emerged in middle school, sounds good; but also, hopefully, as we do—hopefully, more maturity, and more more responsibility in life, came up through high school.
Yeah, that was a good question.
Gotta have a plot.
What’s the point of telling this story? What does the reader learn about you?
Big Takeaway #4
Kyra Jee: All right. Here's our last big takeaway slide for today: gotta have a plot in that essay, right? When you are in the revising stage, you're thinking about your story, it's important to double-check: What is the point of telling this story? What is—what is it that the reader gets to learn about you in your story?
And so we are going to take a look at a couple of quick examples together.
Crafting your Personal Statement
Accidentally locking herself out of the house…
→ A humorous, adventurous tale of getting resourceful + realizing that, by not underestimating herself, she could “open windows of opportunity—literally!”
Kyra Jee: Alright, as we go through these examples (there will be 3 of them), I want you to be thinking about those other big takeaways, too. So Big Takeaway #2, that Tyler shared with us, was that the story you tell matters more than the prompt you use to tell it. And when we were debunking myths, right, one of them was realizing that the most meaningful and most memorable essays start with the smallest, most ordinary of details.
All three of the examples on screen that we're going to look at, I borrowed from recent Common App essays that we have guided students through on the ILUMIN essay team in the last couple of years. And so here we go!
For one student, we took the memory—mildly embarrassing, stressful at the time, but wildly triumphant afternoon that the student had when she accidentally forgot her keys and ended up writing a personal—Common App statement that was a very humorous and adventurous tale of learning how to get resourceful in the student's life, realizing that by not underestimating herself, she could open windows of opportunity in other parts of her life. In this case, it was literally opening the window back into her house on the second story.
In this particular example, if we're thinking about the breakdown of an essay, you can see that locking yourself out of your house probably wasn't even much of an accomplishment by itself, and it certainly has nothing to do with the resume.
But in this moment, in this memory, we had the—we had something memorable, right? It wasn't an essay that just said, “I know the importance of being resourceful, because when time—when the cards are down, I know what to do.” No, we grounded it in a story, a story that took place in high school!
Crafting your Personal Statement
Finally landing a volunteer position at the hospital, only to be assigned the gift shop for months…
→ A very earnest, warm essay about making small, everyday connections with strangers during tough times—a good reminder for a pre-med student
Kyra Jee: All right. Let's look at another example with our second student, who was a pre-med student.
Let’s see. Yeah! She had finally landed a volunteer position at the hospital the previous summer, and she had been really excited about it, and really excited to work with patients, and ended up being assigned to work the gift shop counter for months at a time as part of her internship.
And in brainstorming out this activity there was a world where she was considering trying to ignore all of that part of her life, and try[ing] to just write about, you know, trying to make it as medically-oriented as possible. But at the end of the day, we were thinking, “no, you have supplemental essays where you can write about other scientific research experience, you actually can talk about the medical shadowing of doctors and getting to walk around and meet with patients in your supplemental essay in your activities list. Let's see what we—what story we can tell in the Common App instead.”
And so she… we ended up writing a very earnest and warm essay about making small everyday connections with strangers during tough times in their lives.
I wanted to share this example with you guys today, because I think that it shows us some of that flexibility on that myth of “do or don't write about your major”, right? The reason that this essay worked so beautifully in this Common App Personal Statement is because she wasn't focusing on, or bragging, or just trying to, you know, highlight just the topic and make it something that it wasn't. She thought a little bit deeper about what she actually really enjoyed about her experience, what she was able to reflect on and learn. I think that she really achieved her goals of connecting with the reader by being vulnerable and honest and self-reflective, all of which are pretty good reminders for a pre-med student.
Crafting your Personal Statement
Sitting in on mom’s appointments with hairstyling clients as a kid…
→ A thoughtful reflection breaking down the idea of “stranger” (+alluding to where the interest in psych “got its roots”)
Kyra Jee: And lastly, most recently, we supported a student who also had a ton of academic and research experience related to the major—in this case, psychology. For this particular student… again, lots of activities: ran a [cognitive science] club at school, accepted to research in labs over the summer, submitted a paper for publication in a national high school journal; and we talked about all of those things in the supplemental essays, we divided them up among those more “Why major?, “Why us?” questions.
And in the 650 word common app, we didn't want to just run through the resume again. So instead, we detailed an entirely different part of their life: a memory of sitting in on Mom's appointments as a hairstylist and sort of meeting clients. This student ended up writing a very genuine essay about doing away with the idea of strangers. They wrote about their understanding, their belief, that everybody is just someone you haven't met yet, and… the ways that everyone is connected to each other, and how important it is to sort of see this very deeply-shared humanity, and how all those realizations—again, this childhood experience, the observations there—had a tangible impact on who they were in high school more recently.
This Common App was a really good accompaniment. It focused on gratitude and growth and authenticity, and it was impressive because it did those things, right?
I think—interestingly, importantly for the student, as maybe you can sort of sense out—this Common App essay also functioned as a very… it was related to the major. It functioned as a very thoughtful reflection about where the initial spark for the major really started—or really “got its roots”, as the student said in the essay—by, you know, observing how people spoke and sighed and talked about their lives, letting their guard down.
It showed us—you know, “show not tell”—it showed us the student’s fascination with, and commitment to, psychology, even before they brought out the academic research opportunities and stuff. So their application wasn't just an impressive activities list. It also gave us a very deep understanding of who they are, and their ability to make very good thoughtful observations and contributions to the world around them.
And there you have three examples of these big takeaways in action.
Simplified Timeline
June–July
Continue researching College List
Brainstorm Common App (+ UC PIQs if applying)
July–August
Finalize College List
Supplemental Prompts Released
Create Common App Account
Complete Early–Mid Drafts of Personal Statement (+PIQs)
Sept–Oct
Finalize Personal Statement + Supplementals in time for EA/ED
Nov–Dec
Finalize Supplemental Essays (+PIQs) in time for RD/ED2
Jan–Feb
Submit any final Rolling apps
Tyler Fair: So now I'm gonna give you a little bit of a simplified timeline—maybe an idealized timeline—of when we would expect to see different portions of the application begin to be done.
I will note that if you are a senior and this stresses you out because you're feeling behind: we will work with anyone. We take everybody and meet them where they're at, and work with their essays as they are.
But maybe, if you're a junior looking at this list, it's maybe helpful to know that in the summer, come June or July, we like to see our students researching their college list and beginning to the process to brainstorm—beginning to process and brainstorm their Common App and, if applicable, UC PIQ essays.
Later in the summer, kind of July, August, we like to see a finalized college list starting to emerge, and we receive the supplemental prompts from schools. Around this time is also when we like to make a Common App account and begin to complete early to middle drafts of the Personal Statement and PIQs.
Around this time of year, September to October, we ideally are finalizing the Personal Statement and supplemental essays in time for early action and early decision deadlines. It's really important to note that your Common App will be due by your earliest early action, early decision, or regular decision deadline. This is… this can be as early as October 15th, at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Texas at Austin, and Texas A&M, for all you engineering students.
In November and December, kind of fall, winter, is when all supplemental essays and PIQs need to be done in time for regular decision. And then for all those straggling, rolling applications, you'll finish those in January to February.
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Tyler Fair: With our students, on the ILUMIN essay team, once we've discussed and explored all these different guidelines and tips, the next step is to apply these big takeaways we've just discussed to your own essays, so students can feel really confident and prepared to submit your own application.
At ILUMIN, our hourly essay consulting program matches students up with a member from our wonderful essay team—people like me—to go through any essays, from any school, at any stage in the process, whether you're working on UCs, the Common App supplemental essays, or all three. We can walk you through everything from brainstorming to proofreading.
Now is a great time to sign up and get some structured support, as senior year really kicks into gear.
And that's everything we have to share with you today! How much time do we have for questions, Anna?
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Anna Lu: We have so much time for questions. If anyone has any questions, now is the time to shoot them in the chat or in the Q&A. If no one has questions, then I'm just gonna assume that you guys did a fantastic, 120%, perfect job explaining everything, but we'll give everyone a few minutes just to see if anyone has any questions. And if not, then I think we're good.
But okay, we have a question here: “Are the questions for the Common App the same every year?”
Kyra Jee: Hmm… good question. They change once in a while, but this set has been very, very familiar to us for a long time.
I think that if they do change, they typically are not changing all at once, so you'll see some that are going to be this; even if you're a freshman right now watching this, you'll probably see a couple of those prompts, if not all of them, in your own year. But even if they do change, I think what you'll find is that a lot of them are still asking these really open-ended questions.
The Common App isn't trying to limit you to just talk about one kind of part of your life. It really is asking you to talk about an important part of your life, which, of course, could happen in any time and in any way. So even if they're [the prompts are] not the same, I think you'll find that a lot of this self-reflection, the vulnerability, the authenticity that we're looking for is… they will still be trying to prompt that from you in different words.
Anna Lu: Another question: “What is considered a too-gimmicky hook?”
I think a lot of us who have gone through high school have had experience with starting off with a rhetorical question all the time, or trying to insert a very broad, general theoretical question in the beginning, or trying to make a joke in the beginning. So how much is too much?
Tyler Fair: Hmm. Yeah, I would say that it depends on this—I like to take it essay by essay. And for me it depends on the essay.
I have had—particularly with the Common App Personal Statement—people, you know, go through the dialogue in their head from the very get-go and kind of use that as a hook. And I think—and maybe [in] other genres, that might be considered too gimmicky, but for Common App, it tends to work really well.
Yeah. And like I said, it tends to be a case-by-case basis.
I don't know if you have any other thoughts, Kyra.
Kyra Jee: I think a good rule of thumb is: if you've seen someone doing it, then replicating the hook or the gimmick means that a lot of other kids have seen that gimmick, and admissions readers have seen it, too.
So popular, unfortunately, was students writing essays that kind of said, you know… they would answer the prompt, and then they'd like, you know, line break, line break: “And I didn't write this myself. ChatGPT wrote this. Isn't this incredible? This is why I want to be in computer science.” And I saw so many of these in like a 6-month span of students who, what with a very genuine and, you know, incredible interest for machine learning and artificial intelligence, and a lot of the triumphant and interesting things that generative AI can do… but, you know, I'm only one person, my team is only so many people, and we saw that many in 6 months.
So: remember that your goal with the Common App is to show how you differ from other students and what your own passions and values are within your field. So again, rule of thumb: if you've seen it happen before, then I would probably not do it on purpose.
And I also would steer clear of trying a ChatGPT-oriented gimmick—even though some schools are varying as far as they’re looking at policy on it—I would say, as a reader, most of your readers will probably be a little bit more impressed with AI work that maybe you have developed or generated yourself versus borrowing from another source.
Anna Lu: Another question—more prompt-specific, because we mentioned religion and Prompt #3: “Are there biases on the admissions readers’ end if a student addresses Prompt #3 and talks about a religious topic?”
Kyra Jee: Hmm. That's a very good question.
So, you know, we are protected from discrimination on a certain number of qualities and topics, and that still applies for universities. A lot of university webpages themselves will also include their discrimination statements—or anti-discrimination statements—as a university, knowing that students are often talking about personal parts of themselves and personal beliefs and stories. So that is definitely an important thing to know.
But I will also say that college admissions is still kind of subjective, and that colleges are looking for fit admissions. Officers will often say that they're not just looking for the highest scores or the longest resumes, but they're also looking for fit for the culture and environment of the school. So, you know, how that might translate to admissions responses to a particular individual topic or value, I think that would depend on the institution.
But it’s… I think it's worth knowing that you have essays that do both. You have essays that specifically ask students to talk about what their understanding of identity or diversity [is], or how to speak with people who have different beliefs and values than us… [it] is a topic that's becoming more and more visible on more and more university supplemental essay prompts, even beyond the Common App Prompt #3 that you're mentioning here.
But by and large, I often am encouraging students to talk about the things that matter most to them, and that they are… they feel most strongly about. So a little bit of nuance in there.
Anna Lu: I feel like with college essays, nuance tends to be the answer.
Speaking of nuance, someone has asked: “How many hours are needed to produce a personal statement and the supplementals?”
Kyra Jee: Also a good question! Well, I will say that with ILUMIN and with our essay team, we do—at least for our hourly essay consulting—we do sets of hours, as 5 hours or 10 hours, to work alongside an essay specialist, like Tyler or other members of our team.
And oftentimes, if a student is only working on PIQs, and maybe the Common App, we usually end up recommending doing the 5 hours with us, because that is enough time to be brainstorming from the very get-go to make sure that your prompt topics are not just the first things that come to mind, but the best topics that will be the most valuable or meaningful to you, and then also work our way through revising and editing and things like that.
Typically, if a student comes to me and they say, “I'm applying to the UCs, and I'm applying to a really wide list of in-state private schools and out-of-state public and private schools, and I have a lot of supplemental essays”, then typically, I'm going to nudge them more towards the 10 hour [package], because we have a lot of great ways to recycle content between essays.
But it's still really important to be writing to the specific prompts that schools are asking. So I think the “how many essays?” is probably depending on how many supplemental essays you're working on, right—and then also what your level of confidence is as a writer, and trying to translate out your experiences into rough drafts, iterative rough drafts.
Tyler Fair: Yeah, just to—I can speak anecdotally. The students who I felt were most successful that I've worked with over the last 3 years have usually worked with me between 30 [minutes] and an hour per week, and then we're doing writing between that to kind of come with a new draft each time. And they usually did have between 10 to 15 hours that they would pay to work with me.
Anna Lu: It's also probably worth mentioning, along the line of supplementals, that there are all kinds of supplemental essays that different colleges will offer. So sometimes you'll have a supplemental essay that's as simple as, “Why do you want this specific major?”, as we kind of mentioned before.
And sometimes… I think one of the most kind of infamous supplemental essays might be the University of Chicago's, which requires a lot of creativity, because their prompts tend to be very unique and strange on purpose, so that will probably take more effort to brainstorm and hash out and write drafts, et cetera.
But you know, if it's something as simple as… well, “simple”... relatively more simple than, you know, the “Why major?” essay, then that's just a different situation altogether.
Any other questions, feel free to shoot them; this is probably our last call. These are great questions so far, though! Thank you so much, everybody.
All right. In that case, that is our webinar. Thank you guys so much for coming; more information on the package that we talked about can be found on our website. Again, if you look at this slide, we have a very limited time offer for 10% off both, either hourly essay consulting package—whichever one suits your students needs more—so feel free to apply this code. And if you have any other questions, please feel free to contact us at this email address.
Thank you so much for joining! We'll be having more webinars in the future. As someone asked previously, this recording will be sent out to everybody, so if you missed something, or if you want to go back and reference any of these lovely slides that they prepared, you are fully able to do that on our Youtube channel in the future.
So thank you so much for joining us, everybody! Oh, sorry—wait.
Kyra Jee: One more thing for today.
If you also just have questions about how hourly essay consulting works, too, you can also find us. You can find me at the other end of this email, too. So if you just have some curiosities or some questions about our program, or working with students: please feel free to reach out anytime, and I'd love to answer any more questions that might come up after today.
Alright, thank you so much, everybody!