Right now, somewhere, a rising senior is staring at the Common App prompt waiting for inspiration to strike. They’re thinking about what sounds impressive. They might even be quietly consulting ChatGPT.
All of that is the wrong move.
The college application essay is not a highlight reel. And it is definitely not a place to sound like every other applicant who has ever typed “I’ve always been fascinated by…”. (If I had a dollar for every time I’ve read that opening, I’d be retired on a yacht in the Mediterranean.)
Start Before You Know What You’re Writing
You don’t need a topic to start writing. You need to start writing to find your topic.
Brainstorming is writing. It’s where you throw everything at the wall—the summer reorganizing your grandmother’s shelf of mystery novels, the video game you’ve logged 400 hours into, the inexplicable attachment you have to a specific flavor of Pringles (all real topics from students I’ve worked with, by the way)—and see what sticks. The unguarded stuff is exactly where the essay lives.
The instinct is to reach for something impressive: a leadership role, a service trip, a hardship overcome with grace. Those essays can be good. But they can also read like a thousand others, because a thousand other students had the same instinct.
You’ll Know It When You Find It
At some point something will feel different. A topic will seem too small, too weird, too specific. That feeling is the signal.
Your real voice—the one you use texting your best friend—sounds nothing like, “I’ve always been fascinated by the intersection of science and society.” That sentence has been written approximately four million times. Resist the urge to sound polished. Resist AI for phrasing help. Students were sounding like AI long before AI existed, and admissions officers reading fifty essays a day have finely tuned radar for prose that doesn’t sound like the person who supposedly wrote it.
Write It Badly. Then Write It Badly Again.
The actual secret: write a version you’d be mortified to submit. On purpose. Not rough—genuinely awful. Get it completely out of your system. Think of it as unclogging the pipes: the good writing can’t flow until the bad stuff has somewhere to go. Then write it again. By the third draft, you’ll have something real.
Start Now, Not in September
All of this takes more time than you think.
Start in June and you have room to find the essay, not just produce one. Start in September and you’re still finding the topic when you should be refining the draft. Start in December—and this happens every year, to students with strong grades and good intentions — and you’re on a very fast track to submitting something that doesn’t represent you.
The bad drafts start now. The good ones will follow.
Download Nikki’s free 20-page College Application Essay Brainstorming Guide at studentcoachingservices.com/essayguide—over 100 prompts, frameworks, and examples to help your student find the essay only they could write.
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