As the school year comes to a close, members of the junior class are preparing to change gears. As they’ve spent much of their time preparing for final exams and standardized testing, something new is coming into view: the college application essay. For students getting ready to apply this fall, they will soon have to condense their identities into a few hundred words, making the college process feel rapidly immediate.
The personal statement, the center of the Common Application, is a different sort of writing from regular school assignments. The prompts don’t ask students to evaluate academic knowledge, but instead to reflect on personal development, identity or significant challenges. This essay provides admissions officers a glimpse of who a student is beyond numbers, and so it often adds a distinct layer of pressure to the junior year experience. “Diving into the essay process has made me more aware of the competition ahead,” junior Angie Shen said.
Now that college is quickly approaching, rather than a far-off thing, the vibe among her peers has changed. “It’s like, ‘Oh, this is actually competitive and real,’ when everyone starts brainstorming,” Shen said. “It’s not just something we talk about in the future, it’s happening now.”
Looking at the timeline is shocking enough, but the essay has creative requirements that pose their own challenges. While structured academic papers ask for a degree of distance, personal statements call for a vulnerability that students find challenging to embrace. “The hardest part about starting the draft is coming up with the right topic to write about,” junior Amron Daniel said.
The pressure to be special makes the ordinary seem inadequate. “The hardest part is definitely what to write about,” Daniel said.
Students want to find a topic that is unique to them, but it’s hard to know which story best represents who they are to a college. Students struggle with what to say. But the details of when to write are a big part of it, too. As students look to the future of senior year coursework and extracurricular leadership roles, a primary concern is time management. “Getting a jump on the writing process is so valuable in managing the workload that’s coming up,” junior Genevie Bulles said.
Students hope that working on the essay over the summer will ease some of the pressure of the first semester of senior year. “If [students] start early, it takes a lot of that pressure off,” Bulles said. “It lets you actually think about your prompts and edit your drafts without having to worry about school deadlines at the same time.”
That rush to create the perfect personal statement is a sign of something larger for the junior class. Students are faced with the challenge of balancing their present academic commitments with important decisions about their next steps. Writing the college essay becomes far more than just an acceptance requirement but defining who they want to be in the future.
