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What Essay Topics are Colleges Sick of Reading?
hayisforhorse
108 replies17 threads Junior Member
Our lives are made up of many influential moments, but which ones are colleges sick of reading about? Struggles with chronic illnesses? The strange yet profound “Costco” or “Pizza Hut” style essays (evaluating how a visit impacted life)?
I am considering writing about how my Crohn’s Disease impacted my life, but if this kind of essay is overdone and colleges are sick of it, then I’ll need a new topic.
17 replies I am considering writing about how my Crohn’s Disease impacted my life, but if this kind of essay is overdone and colleges are sick of it, then I’ll need a new topic.
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Replies to: What Essay Topics are Colleges Sick of Reading?
I like that idea! Develop it as something that helped me find my passion and something that changed me for the better, rather than the struggle itself.
Also, kudos for knowing so much about Crohn’s! Many don’t know much about it, so it’s refreshing to hear that others understand the struggles that come with the disease.
Regarding illness, if it has impacted your grades or ability to do EC, sometimes you can have your GC mention that you've had a health issue that impacted those things. Just in case that is one reason you were thinking of writing about it.
There are some topics that should be avoided, simply because they don't show you in your best light, regardless of how authentic they are.
There's a time for revealing your warts. Your college essay is not that time.
Variations on a theme.
The key isn't to pick an interesting topic necessarily, or to have a gimmick, but to write about that topic in a compelling way. Sometimes, you really do have an unusual story to tell--a college classmate of mine wrote about being the child of a funeral director and growing up in a funeral home--but if you don't, just be real.
http://www.****/uploads/1/0/9/5/109505679/hack_the_college_essay_2017.pdf
“No, you’re going in vain,” she mentally addressed a company in a coach-and-four who were evidently going out of town for some merriment. “And the dog you’re taking with you won’t help you. You won’t get away from yourselves.”—Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
There’s a look you get when people see your scars. Not the scars we term our bad moments, the emotional ones. No, these scars are physical, a tight line of soft, purplish bumps rising above your skin that looks stretched, as if one movement might tear that seam of flesh apart even though it’s been there for as long as you can remember. And if you didn’t know what to look for you might not notice the stares but you do know what to look for because you’ve seen it before. Not once. Not twice, but more times than you can count between your fingers and toes combined and you know that because that’s how you measured things when you were younger, when this all started, when you started to watch, and when you started to expect. It is an orchestra of looking: me looking at them, them looking at me, and avoiding, avoiding each other because don’t let her see the frown, the pinched brow, the wide eyes. Looking, watching, searching, frowning—they will do all of this until you become not just a girl with a scar, but a girl whose scars hold her together. This is the undeniable thought that you read from their faces when their sad, heavy eyes betray their stagnant smiles. No, I can’t read minds, but I can read people.
By the time I was eight years old, I had eight visible scars. Today, I have nine. But sometimes what you see is not the full story. In fact, if nine is a quarter, the total is nearly forty; 9 visible, 31 not. Forty sutures. Forty operating rooms. Forty vital signs falling, falling, then crashing on the screens of monitors. Forty scars. Forty stories. And yes, scars are stories. These jigsaw lines crawl across my skin like a foreign language dances across the pages of a book, entirely unknown and therefore frightening, and still more, strikingly beautiful–I am a walking contradiction. My doctors called them “battle scars”, and looking down into the open face of my four-year-old self they would say “they make you tougher”. Too young to see the sadness that hid behind their masks, I smiled, grinning because I was special, grinning because I was strong. But now, standing there exposed, bare skin visible in the world beyond the locked doors of the pediatric ward, I forgot the way I had smiled, I forgot how amazing those lines are; what they show, what I faced, and what I overcame dissipates with just one look. Isn’t it funny how quickly that feeling can disappear beneath someone else’s gaze? And it is here where I exist suspended between the realms of beauty and terror, caught in a dichotomy of human nature where I don’t quite fit. So, what next?
Next, you wear a bikini. At eighteen, I had avoided bikinis because of the obvious lack of clothing, a shortage of fabric which threatened to unveil what I so carefully hid. For years, I denied my past, hid beneath my smile, and pretended I was "normal". Until one day, I was tired. I was tired of hiding, tired of smiling, tired of searching endlessly to avoid the stares, the sad eyes, and rejecting my body. Yes, sometimes your body doesn’t obey your mind and sometimes it never will, but that day I realized it doesn’t even matter. You see, society may give you the cards, but only you can play them. So go ahead, put on your bikini, and make the one choice you have left: to finally choose you. And that day, I chose me.