The myth of the "unique" essay topic

In 2018, a Wall Street Journal article reported that admissions officers at the University of Pennsylvania read 500 applications per day. Currently, Upenn requires the Common App personal statement as well as three supplemental essays. That means that an admissions officer reads...drumroll...2,000 essays every day!

In my seven years of reading college essays, I have probably read around 10,000 essays. It's crazy that an admissions officer will clear that number in just a week.

Because of the sheer number of essays that admissions officers read, it is difficult (maybe impossible?) to choose a unique essay topic.

Gaelle Pierre-Louis, a former admissions officer at Georgetown, said, "I feel as if most essay topics that students think are original, we have seen them so many times."

Eva Ostrum, who worked as an admissions officer at Yale, tells us something similar: "Another really common mistake is that students feel they have to write something that makes them look different. When you’re applying to a highly selective college, there’s nothing you can do that looks different based on the actions themselves. Every admissions officer has seen someone who does what you do."

And yet, I've seen students, in an effort to stand out in the application pool, try to find a truly unique essay topic. An essay about Rubik's cubes. An essay about thinking in the shower. I always appreciate when students are striving for originality, because at least it's not another essay about why joining the debate team made them a more confident person! But at the same time, there is a trap in thinking that you've found that unicorn topic. Because I've read multiple essays about Rubik's cubes and multiple essays about thinking in the shower.

The first piece of advice that I give to my students is to focus less on finding an original topic and more on finding a topic they simply feel excited to write about. There is a whole process I take them through, which you can read about here, but it really boils down to this: pick something small and pick something you want to write about. Even if you come up with the best topic in the world, if your heart and soul isn't in it, the essay will fall flat. As Harry Bauld, who worked as an admissions officer at Brown, said, "There are no good or bad topics for college essays, only good or bad essays."

Once you've chosen a topic, assume that an admissions officer has read at least a hundred essays about the exact same topic. This shouldn't discourage you, though. It should inspire you. Think about it this way: "How can I write an essay about this topic in a way that only I can write about it?" A good way of measuring whether you've written an essay that is distinctly "you" is to imagine twenty essays about the same topic taped up on a wall. Would your friends and family be able to pick out which one is yours?

Even if an admissions officer has written many essays about the same topic, there's hope! Eva Ostrum puts it this way: "It doesn’t matter what your essay’s about. It’s how you write about it." Gaelle Pierre-Louis, the former AO from Georgetown says something similar:  "We have probably seen the topic before, but it is more about the perspective you bring with the topic."

The easiest way to make your essay uniquely "you" is to make sure that your essay is full of details and specific examples. Instead of saying, "My family and I drove in our car," write, "My family and I drove in our Subaru hatchback covered in bumper stickers." Populate your essay with the people, places, and things that make up your daily life. I.e. "As my best friend Jake always says..." and "When my friends showed up to Mr. Sander's office." And, perhaps this is most important, make sure that your writing resembles how you actually sound when you talk to friends and family. Write how you talk, then polish.

And lastly, to close, here's a bit of calming advice from Eva Ostrum:

"I think students would be surprised to know that admissions officers aren’t looking for anything exotic. The more specific examples you can use, the more you can make it a story with very specific details, the better. You want to be able to picture what the person looks like, what it would be like to sit in a room and have a conversation with the person. The essay should make the admissions officers feel like they’ve had a conversation with you and want to learn more. It’s not more esoteric than that."