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- Hi, I'm Sam.
- And I'm Gus.
- And today is part one of our three-part video mini series
about the common app personal statement essay.
- Dum-duh-duh-duh. - Duh-duh-duh.
(classical music)
- All right.
So this is one of the most momentous essays
that you're gonna write during
the college application process.
It's essentially--
- I would say one of the most momentous of your life.
- Potentially, yeah.
This is the personal statement that tells
an admission officer about who you are as a person,
the obstacles that you've overcome,
and tells them about your character.
For most of these schools, you're going to be writing
other shorter, supplemental essays,
but this is really the core essay that tells them about
who you are, what your character is,
and how you wanna tell your story.
The common application prompts, there's a few of them,
but they're pretty similar.
And essentially, you can decide first what you wanna
write about and then decide which prompt best fits
the story that you want to tell.
- You can also, if you don't feel any of the prompts
that they list really fit
what you're looking to write about,
you can make up your own prompt
and write an essay that's a little bit more creative.
- So here are three of the common application prompts.
Some students have a background, identity, interest,
or talent that is so meaningful they believe
their application would be incomplete without it.
If this sounds like you, then please share your story.
Or another prompt, the lessons we take from
obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success.
Recount a time when you faced a challenge,
setback, or failure.
How did it affect you, and what did you learn
from the experience?
Or discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization
that sparked a period of personal growth
and a new understanding of yourself or others.
The thing is, in order to write
an effective essay response
to any of these three prompts,
you basically need to address something
in all three prompts.
If you're talking about a background, identity,
interest, or talent that's meaningful to you,
in order to communicate that it's meaningful to you,
you need to show that you overcame some obstacles,
and you need to show that that led to personal growth.
And that's what leads to an effective story,
which is essentially the first part
of this three-part series, which is about the ideation
and coming up with the story that you wanna tell,
and making sure that it's a story that communicates
something about your personal growth
and about obstacles that you've overcame.
- So ideation is basically just a fancy way of saying
coming up with ideas for the essay.
And this comes really easily to some people,
and they're like oh, my college essay,
I'm absolutely gonna write about
this very important experience.
For other people, it's a little bit more like
well, I've kinda lived a big life.
How do I narrow down what I'm gonna talk about?
- And really what it comes down to is
telling a compelling story,
and a compelling story that reveals something
about you and your personality.
A useful exercise that you can do to sort of
get the wheels turning on this
is to think about your favorite TV show,
your favorite movie, your favorite book,
and what makes it a compelling story.
At the core of what makes a lot of these stories
that your find compelling, compelling
is that there's a protagonist who's overcoming a challenge,
and overcoming that challenge or obstacle leads
to some sort of valuable and important
personal growth for that protagonist.
- For example, if you're writing about oh, I won this really
difficult tennis tournament.
And at the end of the story is basically
I was really good at tennis at the beginning
of this tournament, and by the end of the tournament,
I was still so good at tennis - I still rocked at tennis.
that I beat someone else,
that's not compelling - That's not, yeah.
because you didn't grow at all.
You're just like I'm a talented person
who continued to be talented.
- So that's a good first step
in terms of ideation so that you can wrap your head around
what it means to be telling a compelling story.
Then start doing that for yourself.
So just write down a list.
There are no bad ideas at this stage.
- No idea's a bad idea.
- [Man In Black] Who's gonna start this off?
- I got it.
- Kirk.
- Let's kill these mother--
- Write down a list of times that you have overcame
obstacles and stories that you think would make compelling
stories because, as a result of that story occurring,
you feel like you changed or you grew.
Now there's an important difference here between
characterization and character, right?
Characterization, as you're talking about, say,
the character of yourself would include sort of a lot
of just aspects about who you are.
- Who are you? - Yu.
- No, not me. You. - Yes. I am Yu.
- Just answer the damn questions.
Who are you?
- Are your identity, your age,
the type of household you grew up in,
the type of activities that you do outside of class,
the type of academic passions that you have,
the type of aspirations that you have, right?
That's the characterization.
But what you want is for you to tell a story
that leads to saying something about your character,
which is sort of more traits that you have.
Does it say something about you bravery?
Does it say something about your passion?
Does it say something about your intellectual curiosity?
So you wanna make sure that you're telling a story
that gets all of the characterization aspects of you,
but then ultimately tells someone
about who you are as a character.
- I don't want you to tell us what you do.
I want you to tell us who you are.
- Also, don't feel like your story has to necessarily be
about an accomplishment that you've pulled off.
A lot of the best stories of personal growth
are times when it wasn't clear
that the person was victorious at the end.
It might have been a time that you lost really hard,
or a time when you didn't perform as well as you wanted,
but that experience led you to change how you behave.
- So, Gus.
What did you write your common app essays about?
- Let's see.
I wrote one essay about when I ran for the student
government presidency in high school.
And I had been a part of the student government every year.
I had been vice president every year.
And I was like now is my time.
And then I gave this speech in front of the student body
with a sock puppet, and I felt like this is
what the people want.
And then I lost.
I didn't even get vice president.
I didn't place.
I got fourth place of four people running.
And I wrote about how that was a real growing experience,
and I learned that you shouldn't be afraid to fail.
- Right.
So on surface, that was a story
about Gus' student council campaign.
It was probably funny 'cause of the sock puppet aspect.
He was able to sort of say a lot about his personality,
but ultimately what that story was more about
is how your perspective changed at the end of that
and how you realized that failure was okay.
- How about you?
- I wrote an essay about how in the second grade
I wrote a play called The Crazy Castle.
I wrote a role for myself,
which was Princess Britney Spears,
and I did it in drag.
And all of my lines were Britney Spears lyrics.
That's tangential to the core of it,
but characterized me. - Right, right.
- Yes.
- And then how I held rehearsals for my classmates
under the monkey bars and how we performed
it at the school talent show.
And how it wasn't great
but ultimately what didn't matter at all to me
as my second-grade self,
and then I extrapolated that
into my creative pursuits in high school,
was that it didn't matter to me
what the product was or how well it was received.
But I liked creatively collaborating
with others and putting something together
where I could get input from various people,
and that was what was exciting to me.
I loved working with other people and collaborating.
- Well, it seems like on the surface, right,
it's essentially a story about a young kid
basically putting on a self-written production
which is funny, but more meaningfully,
it's about the lessons that you took from that
and how it taught you what
is my passion in life,
is collaborating with other people in a creative way.
- Well, yeah.
So that can sort of show you, a little bit,
the difference between characterization and character,
and how you definitely need both,
and you need one to inform the other.
And as you're coming up with ideas
for that essay, and our examples could be helpful,
you can find more examples online or--
- 'Cause there's thousands online.
- Yeah, or just list out experiences that you've had.
Or if it's more helpful to you, do what we said
at the beginning of this video and think about
protagonist in your favorite stories,
in literature, or in cinema, or on TV
and come up with a list.
And then sort of see where you go from there.
In our next video, we'll talk about sort of once
you've locked down what story you wanna tell
and what you wanna say about yourself,
we'll talk about good approaches for outlining
the essay itself.
So stay tuned, like, and subscribe
so you can watch our next video.
And also if you want sort of more actual,
one-on-one, personal attention,
in terms of figuring out what type of stories
you wanna tell on your application essay
and a lot of the other nitty gritty aspects of that,
click the link below so you can connect
up with one of our academic experts.
And that'll do it.
All right, so until next, I'm Sam.
- And I'm Gus.
Peace.
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