A Wharton admit walks you through her essay writing process

Today I’m sharing a guest blog post written by one of my former students, Paris. 

Paris was very kind in sharing a very honest (and inspiring) account of her writing process for the Common App essay. She was accepted to several top-ranked business schools, including Wharton at UPenn, Ross at Michigan, and USC’s Business of Cinematic Arts program. 

I asked Paris to write about her experience because, very often, students struggle to let go of their preconceived notions about what a Common App personal statement “should” be. They are afraid that, if they actually write freely and authentically, they are exposing themselves to risk and failure. Paris is someone who put her trust in the free writing process, and she is proof that “being yourself” is not just a platitude but a winning strategy. 

Here you go. Enjoy.

The Beginning 

In the college application process, there was one thing I was dreading the most: the infamous Common App essay. Feeling pressure to encapsulate my entire life story in 650 words seemed like cruel and unusual punishment (and borderline impossible). Writing my Common App essay ended up being the hardest, longest, most tumultuous part of my entire college application process. 

Because it was so daunting, I pulled a classic student move; I managed to procrastinate through the entire summer before senior year. Even though I’d promised myself I would finish it before school started, August came. 

While I felt scared, I thought I knew exactly what I wanted my topic to be. I’d spent years reading “successful essays.” I’d read enough Reddit threads and listened to enough podcast episodes to know what traps not to fall into, like writing about an exchange trip or focusing too much on a family member. After some reflection, I realized that my activism was the biggest part of my application and my high school experience, so it seemed obvious I should write about why I became involved. 

My first (of many, though I didn’t realize it at the time) draft was about how hardship in my local community inspired my activism. Because I didn’t want to write a basic essay where I improved in a very linear, expected way, I wrote about my complex transformation beginning as ignorant, then apathetic, then empowered through advocacy. I wanted to include themes of loving my community and how advocacy empowers the self as well as the community. This was the result: 

Few people feel passionately about the county they grew up in. But living in [redacted] County my entire life, I was proud of our equality and recognized the privilege I had for this exceptional education. 

However, at 12 years old, I began to feel a dissonance between what I was taught and what I saw regarding equality in my county. After entering middle school in the downcounty cluster of [redacted] County, I saw firsthand the inequality in teachers, infrastructure, and academic performance, correlated with race. I was puzzled – Why? 

My research shattered my childhood beliefs. I discovered that [redcacted] County, the county I was proud and privileged to grow up in, was one of the most atrocious examples of redlining. The red and green on the maps made tangible the opportunity gap I saw in the downcounty: the more I researched the more I realized I didn’t know my county at all. 

At 13 years old, I learned to question my education. I felt disgusted and betrayed: angry at my community, but mostly angry at myself for my own ignorance.

In order to educate others, I eventually compiled the information to co-create a website that won [redacted] in the National History Day Competition. The State General Assembly gave me a standing ovation for my project. This opportunity should’ve made me feel empowered and honored because I met my goal of awareness but all I felt was cynicism–I was standing in front of adults with the real  power to make a change, yet all they did was clap. It felt performative, not productive. 

With my new knowledge, I began to notice even more of the inequitable opportunities in our school. However, I only felt apathy; I felt disillusioned with my ability to make change because if the adults in power weren’t resolving those issues, how could I?

Like most others downcounty students, I was apathetic towards our Student Member of the Board Election because every year the SMOBs promised change, but in our school, which needed it the most, nothing did change. The students most affected by the topics the SMOBs promised to address didn’t get any care from these consistently upcounty candidates. Despite representing 160,000 students, I knew the SMOB didn’t represent them all equally. At 14, I already accepted that change was impossible. 

But then, a future SMOB, from the downcounty himself, visited our downcounty school during his campaign. I've never seen the school come so alive with hundreds of adolescents cheering. I realized that if a 17 year old could light up our dingy cafeteria, maybe there was something to the power of SMOBs. 

Therefore, I joined the Special Elections Committee, with the dedicated purpose to ensure the SMOB election reached every single school. At the first meeting, when other teenagers motioned to call the meeting to order, I was shocked. The committee was entirely student run. I didn’t expect students to have the power to control an official election. 

While my positions in the SEC rose, I never lost sight of my original mission. The events I hosted, the school visits I organized, all were for my middle school classmates, trying to recreate their faces, joyful with the belief that they had the power to create change. 

Beginning from my work in the SEC, I became more politically involved and intentionally aware of the intersectional inequality in [redacted] County, from joining [redacted organization] to [redacted organization].

Throughout my journey, I learned worse and worse facts about [redacted] County, from our atrocious school to prison pipeline, to racist data aggregation systems rooted in the model minority myth. The obvious reaction would be for me to hate my county; I would become disillusioned and cynical of change like I was in the past. 

But along with every inconsiderate admin, was a counselor that cared, with a Mr. [redacted], who told me my NHD project “wasn’t fair to whites,” was a Ms. [redacted], who told us we were saying something important, with every Board Member upholding traditional racist systems, was one hundred students testifying for equity. 

Now I’m 17, and I may not be on those cafeteria stages, but I’ve spent my entire high school career behind the scenes creating platforms for student voices to empower those apathetic ones. Through voter registration drives, leadership institutes, and running the SMOB election, my love for [redacted] County has only grown.

 I realized loving my community means holding it accountable. Pride doesn’t mean acceptance and anger doesn’t mean hate: it means acknowledging the flaws but using all my privilege and power to improve it. 

When I’m 18, and I leave [redacted[ County, I'll bring this insatiable passion for change, or what I call love, in whatever home I go next. 

When finished, I asked my sister to review my common app essay with confidence. I expected only minor feedback, but I was very wrong. She said it was too negative and overdramatic to the point of sounding fake. She had nothing good to say. I didn’t believe this feedback fully until others had similar responses. Looking back now, I understand how this essay doesn’t present a positive representation of me, despite the growth I tried to demonstrate. The essay tells my story abstractly, over a period of too many years to get personal. I was too focused on impressing admission officers, rather than showing them enough about my personality or how I think for them to see me as a real person.

I tried to edit different versions of this draft but I slowly started to realize it was hopeless. I wrote more drafts about different topics, from my business extracurriculars to theater but none of them felt right either. I was lost. 

The Middle

Now, it was September. I had no essay, and I was getting stressed. I only had a month and a half before my early action applications were due. This is when I met Tara. 

After showing her some of my drafts, Tara echoed the previous feedback that I had received: my writing was too dramatic and didn’t actually help me show off my personality to admission counselors. 

Because I was back at square one, she explained an alternative writing process: the concept of free writing. She told me to word vomit onto the page about anything I thought without giving myself limitations. From there, we could find and develop an essay. It was scary completely restarting with so little time left, but with no other options, I decided to try it. 

The first time I tried to free write, I remember sitting at my computer with my empty doc open and wondering why I paid someone just to tell me to “just write.” It seemed too good to be true: could a word vomit dump onto a page result in the college essay that could get me into my dream school? 

But I tried it. I wrote and wrote and wrote until I had a dozen pages of disconnected paragraphs. I name-dropped people in my life, cursed, wrote huge run-on sentences, and expressed both the positive and negative of my extracurriculars in a way that I would rant to a friend or in a diary entry. Some of the paragraphs were detailing my experiences with as many specifics as possible, while some were broad reflections on how I spent the last four years of my life. I didn’t worry about creating one cohesive thought and instead allowed myself to write about contradicting, complex ideas. The themes that emerged were ones that I never expected to write about, and instead came about organically. It was so much easier to write about what I truly loved rather than try to force myself to create an inspirational, perfect story about my life. 

The result was a page or two about my business extracurriculars, a couple of pages about my advocacy experiences, and several pages about my theater experiences. There was more about theater simply because I had the most fun writing about theater. While free writing, I fully committed to writing what I felt most passionate about because it was easy to write about them.

In the pages of free writing, there were very fun but unusable ideas. Here are some of the excerpts of (very rough!) free writing that helped me brainstorm but I definitely did not use: 

From that hallway there’s the school chorus room, which to us is our “green room.” That’s where we gather before every show, putting every member on the loud bleachers for our preshow ritual. You’re not allowed to tell people what we do in there, so all I can say is there’s a lot of jokes and yelling and hand squeezing and honoring and a man circle that sound hates because it fucks with the microphones. The preshow ritual is one of my favorites part of drama because it’s one of the few moments that every single member comes together at the same time. 

During tech week, there’s a bonding that impossible to replicate when you spend 7 hours with one another for a week straight. Tech week is the first time that I cried to my now best friend that I met through drama in freshman year. You are forced to bond when you face the same shitty panera dinner, get punished over the awful rehearsal, all pray for the mics finally to start working (they never do). 

However, when you write ten thousand words, a few hundred of them will be gold. Here are a few excerpts of my free writing that later became the bones of my final essay: 

During intermission, it seemed like everyone disappeared. I wandered through the empty wings and backstage area, it was creepily quiet. It took the second night of shows to realize that everyone went into the props closet to sing along to dancing queen and buttercup. 50 bodies jumping around in the costumes closet and dancing and pulling out tambourines, I finally felt like I fit in completely. No one wondered who I was or what my role was, everyone accepted one another as equals. I couldn’t feel self conscious about my dancing because no one was looking at me. 

Drama is the only thing that brings such different people together. From randomly suggesting to work together on a shared discord server, the One Act Vicky and I wrote is the thing I’m most ever proud of. Because it was completely mine but also wasn’t. It was completely mine like a baby that I carried from conception to birth. But also, it wasn’t. It’s every single person that gave us a joke, or made a prop for a stupid joke, or made a set piece for us, or listened to our makeup ideas and translated them into real looks. It’s every audience member that came and watched the show with us, and every actor that turned the characters that we made up into a character they owned, not us. It’s scary to make something that you are responsible for, but it’s cool because you aren’t because everyone is playing a role and they own a bit of it too. 

After our opening speech, Vicky and I ran down into the audience to in the pitch black dark auditorium to our special reserved seats (very cool), and watched the curtain open. While I had written the lines, saw them performed at dozens of rehearsals, oversaw the set construction, and heard the sound cues, there was something so special to disappearing into the audience as another faceless member, with the spotlight on stage, not on us. I was proud of the actors whenever I saw them effortlessly hit their blocking, but I was more proud when I released myself from the role of the director and became entranced in their character’s struggles. And the show wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t a Shakesperian masterpiece or a play as good as Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s that I was inspired by. That’s because it was made by us, all of us teenagers. But that’s what made it cool too. That we did this without adults guiding us, which is very different from the fall and spring plays we put on, which an adult directs. 

Through free writing, I realized that in my initial drafts, I had been censoring myself so much because I thought it wouldn’t fit within an archetype of what I thought a college essay should be.  Before free writing, I was hesitant to invest time into writing about a topic that didn’t seem optimal for my application: choosing to write about my silly high school theater experiences over my serious community-wide impactful activism seemed like a mistake. Yet, by disregarding seriousness or strategy, I realized how much personality, passion, and potential there was in this topic. Even in these very rough excerpts, there were glimpses of themes and tone that made it into my final essay. 

I started having hope that maybe I would have a Common App essay that I was proud of in time. 

The End

After I completed my free writing and realized that my topic should be about theater, the hard part was far from over.

Cutting from thousands of words to 650 felt so desperately impossible. I would’ve been completely overwhelmed without Tara. First, she helped me identify what parts of my free writing were most interesting to an outside observer. After we realized that my experience of writing a one act play with my friend was the topic with the most interesting ideas, we focused in and started to highlight the most interesting themes. I expanded further on those themes and wrote even more. Then, she helped me organize my material so that it started to take the shape of a traditional college essay, and I could start to cut down the thousands of words. While I wrote every word, this was a collaborative process where Tara helped me figure out my essay’s focus, organization, and which reflections were most and least important. 

After many drafts and many cuts over weeks, I eventually made it to 650 and clicked submit by the end of October. Here is the final result:

All we said was “Yes.”

A week before the script was due, Victoria and I laid on the floor of her bedroom, constantly pitching new ideas. We said yes to every joke we thought of. Victoria found handcuffs in the exploding prop closet? We made them an integral plot device. Yes. We realized we were both obsessed with Taylor Swift? We secretly hid her lyrics in the climactic speech. Yes.

I barely knew Victoria, but three months earlier she half-jokingly suggested we submit a script together for our theater club’s yearly One Acts Festival. This show, unlike the fall/spring performances, is completely student-run: no adults involved. Even scarier, it’s only performed once. Yet, I said “Yes.”

After many 1AM facetimes, our play, Once Upon A Knight, was born: a silly gay fairytale adventure featuring an outlaw and knight that fall in love. The play is a bit too meta, what I call “campy,” but insanely enjoyable. 

Although the show featured divorced trolls, sword duels, and “kidnapped” princesses, this was the most personal I’d ever gotten with theater. Before One Acts, I wrote (much more serious) scripts by myself in my bedroom, refusing to share even with close friends. I proudly spent years only in crews, moving stained donated couches between scene changes in the dark. 

But for One Acts, I couldn’t hide in the dark. I had full ownership, and therefore responsibility: it was terrifying. But as we began rehearsals, I realized I didn’t. Because for the play to come alive, we shared it with hundreds of cast and crew: it became Ray’s (who fixed the handcuffs), Alex’s (who built the bridge), and Julia’s (who threw the plastic fish onstage when the outlaw said “fishy”). 

In theater, people not only accept my weird ideas, but dedicate themselves to bringing them to life. But they’re not doing it for me out of friendship; they’re doing it for themselves because they own the handcuffs, the bridge, and the fish. When I was crew, my utmost pride in moving the couch didn’t come from an inherent passion for furniture, but rather came from specializing in this niche task to fulfill a need for a community I cared about. No matter our role, in theater, we all share and own equally. 

On show-night, Victoria and I ran into the pitch-black auditorium and watched the curtains open. In my 7 productions, this was the first I would watch from the audience, not the wings. I was no longer the director: I couldn’t interrupt or critique. I could only trust.

While it’s weird that my greatest accomplishment is so intangible, it’s cool because it only exists in the fleeting moment hundreds of students chose to share, and hundreds of audience members chose to receive, in vulnerable unity. Being forced to witness frees me to join this harmony. 

The narrator began: “In an exotic faraway kingdom, called Delaware…” When we submitted our script, this was the moment I looked forward to yet dreaded the most. I clutched Victoria’s hand and held my breath. The audience laughed. I released my breath. As more laughter followed, I began to let myself laugh too.

My role in theater had always been faceless so I thought directing a One Act would be the most self-centered thing I’d ever done, but it actually was the most selfless. Because I wasn’t forcing hundreds of students to do bidding for my grand vision, but instead generating new opportunities for ownership. The more ideas I shared and the less I kept private, the more others could own. Theater is so selfless and selfish—it’s completely symbiotic. 

Now, I’m constantly sharing: from writing verbose TV show reviews for friends to broadcasting my experiences with racism in voter registration drive videos. All because theater forced me to share roles, responsibility, ownership, scripts, credit, meals, characters, and dreams. In theater, I can’t hold back. 

Now, I only say, “Yes.” 

When submitting my essay, at first some part of me was worried it was not serious enough for some of these very prestigious schools. This essay was not in the style, topic, or theme I intended for my Common App essay to be in the slightest. But I realize now that this essay was by far the most fun and interesting to read out of any draft I’ve written, and the admission officers, who are human (even though I also forget sometimes), would enjoy this one the most. 

I was accepted into the majority of schools I applied to and got ~$1 million in merit scholarships. The schools I got into, the majors/programs, and the merit aid I got are as follows:

• University of Pennsylvania - Wharton

• University of Southern California - Business of Cinematic Arts (55 person program and most competitive major) (Full Tuition Scholarship)

• Emory University - Business Scholar (15 person scholar program) (Full Tuition Scholarship)

• University of Michigan - Ross 

• UT Austin - Canfield Business Honors Program (100 person honors program) (Out of State) 

• UCLA - Business Economics

• American University - Business Honors (80k merit) 

• Emerson College - Business Honors (120k merit aid) 

• Pace University - Business (125k merit aid) 

• University of Maryland - Business Honors (20k merit aid) 

• Oberlin College - Economics (130k merit aid) 

• Waitlisted at Harvard

• Waitlisted at Berkeley 

I believe that my Common App essay was crucial in my acceptances. While the other elements of my application were strong, I didn’t have any mindblowing extracurriculars or crazy prestigious awards that would have guaranteed a spot into elite colleges. The Common App essay complimented the rest of my application by revealing a side of my personality and life that didn’t necessarily show itself in my academics or extracurriculars. While theater was listed in my activities section, this essay explained why it mattered to me more than 150 characters could have (the maximum character count for the Common App activities section), especially because none of my other extracurriculars were related to theater at all. However, this essay didn’t just show my relationship to theater, but explained my commitment to communities, my perspective on leadership, and my mindset on collaboration, which could all be applied to every other part of my application. Because I chose to write about theater in my Common App essay, I was still able to write about and expand on my other extracurriculars and interest in business without being repetitive in the supplemental essays, such as the “Why Us” and “Why Major” essays. 

The free writing process resulted in an extremely original essay; not only could no one replicate the individual experience I wrote about, but also the conclusion and themes in the essay themselves are unique and genuinely reflect how I approach my life. I’m sure it helped my application stand out from the thousands of other students that also had very similar extracurriculars to me and all As.

Usually, when I look back on old writing, I cringe. But a year later, I’m still so proud of how silly, complex, and most of all authentic my essay is. I stand by every single word I wrote in my essay, and I am proud that I didn’t have to exaggerate or lie in order to get into elite colleges.

My biggest advice to all those in the process now is to not let your preconceived notions of what a Common App essay should be to limit you. Don’t come into the process thinking you have to write about a perfect theme or accomplishment or sob story or journey. Detach yourself from your expectations of what you think the admission officers want to hear. Contrary to what I believed coming in, the Common App essay writing process doesn’t have to feel stressful and forced. It’s possible to have fun writing an essay that stands out because it’s completely true to yourself: the choice is yours.