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Many people think that they need a fancy internship or an international community service trip to make a competitive resume. We disagree! In fact, we love it when our students have jobs. And they don’t need to be prestigious-sounding jobs, either. Many, many, many students across this country work in order to help their families, save for college, or just accrue a little spending cash. And admissions counselors (who have jobs themselves) will not only understand, but they will respect the effort.   

If you’re applying to college, you are in the midst of an experience that is all about you. It is you applying to college, after all. These are your grades. Your activities. Your test scores. And your essay. And it is all about you. Which takes us to the title of this post: How to write a college essay about yourself.

If there is one thing you should know about us at The Koppelman Group, we love food. We love cooking food, we love eating food, and we love working with students to write about food for a college essay. Food is a truly universal subject. We all eat, and so we each have a relationship with food. Over the years, we’ve helped dozens of students incorporate the universal nature of delicious (or not so delicious) carbs and condiments into acceptance-winning essays. 

Moving is a nearly universal experience, which is actually a really good thing when it comes to writing college essays. One of the biggest misconceptions about college essays is that if you don’t have something truly unique to say, you and your essay are going to fall into a pit of half-read applications from which no acceptances ever materialize. If you didn’t hear us say “misconception,” let us reinforce that this is a myth. The idea that a 100% unique never-done-before totally-novel essay is a winning essay is a total lie.

The people who know you the best are probably, for 99% of people, your family. You’ve spent more time with them than anyone else, whether they are biological, adopted, or chosen. So, you have the most history with them, and the deepest stories with them. There is a lot of fodder in there for essays! It makes sense, then, that you would think to write about your family in your college essay.

What do you think of when you hear the word “community”? Does a specific organization, group, team, or even class pop into your mind? Or maybe it’s a feeling — a sense of closeness, support, and reciprocal care. The coolest thing about community, though, is that there isn’t one kind of community. Communities come in all shapes and sizes, and what one person looks for in a community (let’s say, loudly supporting cheerleaders) might be the exact opposite of what someone else is looking for (bookworms with that quite kind of confidence). No matter who the community is comprised of or why it has come together, though, communities all have one thing in common: they bring people together.

Death is a universal human experience, but, while we love when students write about something universal for a college essay, death isn’t like other universals. This is because it’s almost always, and practically unavoidably, dark. Writing about other universals, like food or friendship, are assumed to be positive by the reader. As soon as they get a sense of the topic, they feel a warm fuzzy feeling. But writing about death isn’t like this. It gets depressing fast. Like literally from the get-go.  

If you’re sitting down to write your college essay but have no idea what to put on paper (or, more likely, the screen), we’re here to help. Writing a college essay can be scary and overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. One of the ways to make it fun is to write about something you love, something you cherish, and something that is close to you — and often that means your culture.

Picking a topic for your college essay can be intimidating, to put it lightly. In 650 words, you are supposed to distill yourself into an essay that is both a convincing argument for offering you admission and a literary masterpiece. That’s a lot. But picking the right topic for your essay can be the key to the puzzle. With the right topic, things flow.

We love jobs. We love summer jobs, and we love after-school jobs. We love part-time jobs, and we love seasonal jobs. We advise nearly all of our students to get a summer job that pays real money to do real work, as opposed to an internship — which is also good but different. Many colleges even prioritize applicants who have real-world work experience, so getting a job pays you at work and in the college admissions process. Because of this, a summer job is nearly always a great topic for a college essay.

The College Essay is mythical in status, but at the core it’s just an essay. Like any essay, it needs to say something, and preferably something interesting. As part of your college application, what it says shouldn’t be obvious, but it should make sense. You shouldn’t be repeating something elsewhere in your application, but what you say should resonate with the reader because it makes them feel like they’ve gotten to know you a little better than they would have without it. In 650 words, you need to do all of this while sounding smart, self-aware, and like someone they have to say yes to. That’s a big lift, but we’re here for you.

We get it. You pressed submit on your personal statement and now you’re wondering: Did spellcheck miss something? What if I wrote a really bad essay and got rejected early and YIKES now I want to change it? And, if so, what do I do next?