The Common App’s New Essay Prompts Are Out: Why You Shouldn’t Care!

The Common App’s New Essay Prompts Are Out: Why You Shouldn’t Care!

As a college admissions consultant, I pretty much make my living off teaching students how to write. While The Edvisory operates in a highly competitive landscape and we often find ourselves having to pitch to prospective students and their families, we’re lucky to have a set of secret weapons that often seal the deal for us- our two black binders, both of which are full of successful Common App and UCAS personal statements from years past.  

Source: https://meghanarcuri.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/shutterstock_88937638.jpg

I was a writing tutor at Harvard and our Head of UK Advising, Daniya is a former journalist with a bevy of experience in academic writing.  Writing really matters to us.  Not surprisingly, our signature College Application Boot Camps are largely essay writing workshops.

You may then be wondering what the CEO of a consultancy that hangs its hat on the quality of its student essays is doing telling people that they really “shouldn’t care” about the Common App’s new 2017-18 Essay Prompts (which by the way, we’ll be covering in detail during this year’s Boot Camps)?

Nonetheless, I unabashedly subscribe to an admittedly unconventional mantra- the prompts (or essay questions, themselves) don’t really matter.  The whole point of these essays is to make an applicant come alive to an admissions reader in a way that can’t be done with other application components such as activity lists and transcripts. They are meant to reveal facets of your personality- such as what makes your tick, what grinds your gears, what inspires you- that enable you to make connections with admissions officers, connections that will hopefully make these officers push to make you a part of next year’s freshman class.

Hence, we treat prompts as goal posts or points of inspiration.  When we present them to our students, we simply take a cursory look at what they are, and use them to organize our brainstorming activities.  However, if that’s not working and if we feel a student is obsessing over what prompt to choose or not focusing on the right themes, we toss them out the door and concentrate on simply letting our students tell their story.  We worry about adapting these stories to fit the prompts, most of which are highly open-ended, at a later stage. We actually have an extensive Adapting and Tailoring presentation during our Boot Camps which shows our students exactly how to do this.  What’s more important is that we’re focusing on extracting the juiciest, most compelling stories that our students can serve up given their particular set of life experiences.  

That being said, the new Common App prompts can be found here:  

http://www.commonapp.org/whats-appening/application-updates/common-application-announces-2017-2018-essay-prompts

Obsess at your own risk!