Imagine your life and your personhood as a spiderweb. At the center of this beautiful intricate web—the strongest part of the web, the part that is the most interconnected to the outside layers—is who you are. What makes you tick? What fuels you to get out of bed in the morning? What are the values you hold near and dear to your heart? That’s at the heart of the spiderweb of you. And in the world of college applications, the center and foundation of your spiderweb is the common app essay.
The common app isn’t a place to tell your officer what you do or your many achievements in high school (that’s what your resume and supplements are for). It also isn’t a place to tell the officer how others see you (that’s what your teacher recs are for). Rather, it’s an opportunity for you to present what you believe lies at your core. It’s not about what you do, but about why you do it. In fact, it doesn’t even have to address what you do in any explicit way; the goal is for your reader to understand your driving forces and how those fuel the rest of your application (the many things on your extracurriculars list).
So now that you have established the heart of your spiderweb, imagine the rest of you encapsulated in the outer circles of the web. All that you do is thematically connected by your common app. The rest of your spiderweb reflects the various activities that you consider important in your life. For me, there were a few different categories: volunteering (door-to-door food drives and Sunday school teaching), writing (playwriting and poetry events), and journalism.
So, I made sure that for every college I applied to, I managed to hit all of these aspects of myself, no matter how many or how few supplement questions there were—I’d manage to fit it in somehow. Each college app ended up looking like a slightly different spiderweb of Cassandra, with my topics broken up in different ways based on the questions. I’d find creative ways to tackle the same topic but from different lenses so I could best adapt the same essay to different schools and their needs.
In addition to the activities I did outside of school, I wanted to highlight various sides of my personality. Tenacity, compassion, creativity, and courage are all naturally displayed through my essays about my extracurriculars, but I also wanted to show that I have a sense of humor and am a very passionate fangirl. Those sides of me emerged in the way I approached some of my extracurricular-centered essays, like when I described myself as a secret spy (journalism) or wrote about couch potatoes (my first ever play). I also demonstrated those aspects of myself through less formal essay questions like Stanford’s roommate essay (I talked about my love for Marvel) and Yale’s “What course would you teach?” essay(you guessed it—a class about how the MCU reflects the post 9/11-world).
Oftentimes, students get too caught up in the nitty gritty of formulating their essays in response to the question. Of course it is important to answer the question, but what’s more important is that you capture the most important parts of yourself throughout your common app primarily, and then the myriad of supplemental questions. Don’t let the question grip you so tightly that your answer is manufactured; rather, bring your passions to the page and see how you can answer the question through the lens of your passion.
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