Choosing a memorable topic for the personal statement essay

What are the essay topics that stick with an admissions officer? For Eva Ostrum, a former admissions officer at Yale, it was the essay by an applicant about how, every day on her way to school, she passed a building where pigeons rested. "It was about something mundane, but it really grabbed my attention," Ostrum said.

Here are some other essays that admissions officer said stuck with them:

• Debates about pulp/no pulp orange juice with the family at breakfast

• Sitting in the middle seat of a very small family car between two contentious siblings

• Secretly eating brownie mix in the bathroom (you can read this essay here)

• Getting extremely sweaty during one's first day working as a greeter at the zoo

None of the essays listed above are Big or Important. But that's exactly why they're memorable. When you think about your own memories, isn't it the little things that end up sticking with you? For me, when I think about the day I graduated college, I don't remember much of the ceremony or celebration dinner but rather a single image of my sister and I walking near a fence on our way to the restaurant. Why? I'm not sure. But that could be the beginning of an interesting essay.

The same principle is at play when we study for an exam. Mnemonic devices are helpful because they attach bits of information to something more concrete: a place, a person, a funny image. It makes sense that, among the thousands and thousands of essays that admissions officers read, they remember the hyper specific, concrete essays. The brownie mix essay I mentioned above, for example, caused the admissions officer who read it to hunt down the student during accepted students weekend so that he could gush about how much he loved it!

And the fact that admissions officers remember these essays is important.

For many Top 20 universities, an admissions committee makes the final decisions about an applicant's fate. During these committee meetings, an applicant's file is not usually opened back up. Rather, a summary sheet or a "soundbite," written by the admissions officer(s) who read the file, is reviewed. On this summary sheet, the applicant's essay might be summarized in just one sentence. According to Sara Harberson, who worked in admissions at Upenn, “Most people weighing in on the decision do not read the application at all or in its entirety. They rely on that Soundbite (or whatever the admissions office calls it) written by the AO.”

Here is a real example of a "soundbite" from a Stanford admissions officer:

"PE: owning identity, politically active in a conservative community, metaphor of parallel parking, quirky but it works."

This is a great example of how a student attached something more significant (political activism) to something mnemonic and unextraordinary: parallel parking. When the committee of admissions officers reviews that application, the admissions officer is much more likely to remember this student's story that one who wrote an resume in essay form about their political accomplishments.

One important distinction I want to make: what I am talking about here is not searching for the most unique essay topic but that an admissions officer has never seen before. I've written previously about why that's a doomed approach. You don't need to find that unicorn essay topic. You just need to find a topic that is memorable for you, that sticks with you for some reason. It likely will be memorable for an admissions officer, too. I have another post that walks you through how exactly you might find that topic here.

Lastly, I will end with a little story told by Becky Munsterer Sabky, who was an admissions officer at Darmouth College. Here, she talks about how she regretted her own choice of essay topic once she saw how the admissions process actually worked:

“I, like many other college applicants, felt the pressure to write something substantial. My experience with refugees from Cuba was substantial. My counselor told me to write the refugee story. My parents and English teacher agreed. And so, I did. I wrote with passion about the men who braved the Atlantic for freedom. Their story was important. My story was … fine. It likely didn’t get me admitted to colleges. It likely didn’t get me denied. When I wrote my essay, I didn’t have the perspective of the thousands of other essays being written by college-bound young people. I didn’t know that it would have been more personal, and thus more memorable to an admissions officer, if I had written about how my loss in a local jingle competition inspired me to become a better writer. (I still mourn the loss of first prize, a backyard garden sculpture, which my ninth-grade self so desperately wanted.) I didn’t know that admissions officers weren’t looking for “substantial” topics but heartfelt ones."