Topic of Choice: Pretend It’s Still There

The Common Application folks announced a couple weeks ago that they will be keeping the same essay prompts for this college application season. If you use the Common App to apply to colleges this fall, you will have five prompts (or questions) to respond to with your college admissions essay. Before last year, students also had the option to simply pick any topic they wanted–but that was dropped last year. And it caused a big controversy in college app circles.

I was among those who thought the option to write about any topic should have been kept. But many people in the college admissions industry (mainly counselors from high schools and private admissions consultants) ultimately weighed in on the debate as a non-issue, since the five prompts are broad enough to allow almost any topic anyway. (more…)

If your essay starts by relating something that happened, the reader is going to dive right into it and not stop until they are satisfied–until they know what happened.

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