<p>For those of you who got into top schools, what did you guys write for your essays? I’m having a hard time thinking of a topic…</p>
<p>I wrote about my TI-83+ and got into Duke, Cornell, Northwestern, Carnegie Mellon, Rice, and WashU.</p>
<p>really?</p>
<p>what did you talk about?</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Driving down the road, thinking about my identity at college, then coming back into senses. (One of those frame stories, it was one page only single spaced because I used the phrase “ink laced sheet of paper”), got me into Cornell, NU, Rice, Emory, Pittsburgh (Full Tuition), Case</p></li>
<li><p>Procrastination, got into Duke, WL at Penn. I guess this didn’t work well.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Shower curtains.</p>
<p>Got into all schools I applied to. (MIT, Pton, UChicago, ND, UMich)</p>
<p>I find darthevil and ducktape’s responses slightly amusing - a very vague and seemingly unrelated answer that leaves you wondering “How the heck does writing about this subject get you into a top college?”</p>
<p>I’m still a junior so it’s a few months before I’ll need to start writing an essay, but I think I’ve got a good idea of what I’m going to write.</p>
<p>What is it?</p>
<p>Rabbits, nerf balls, inner tubes, tetrahedrons, auditors. That kind of stuff. Banking on that to get me into MIT, Stanford, Cornell, CMU, among other nice engineering schools :)</p>
<p>But seriously. Write something you’re passionate about. Write something that makes the admissions officers think “Wow this student’s passions really fit with what our school does!”. Make the colleges think that you are an excellent fit for them, just as you decided that they are an excellent fit for you.</p>
<p>i wrote about how i sprained my ankle by tripping over a curb less than 8 hours before a huge cheerleading competition… talked about my involvement with it and how we started the first compeition squad for my HS agianst the wishes of our coach and w/o funding… and then how i went on the next day barely being able to walk and then winning first.</p>
<p>someone told me dont do sports injuries… but idk it worked for me. guess cauase i talked about my passion for cheerleading and stuff like that too.</p>
<p>got into BC, villanova, lehigh, penn state, udel (w/ 16k scholarship). only rejected from penn</p>
<p>Katrina. It wasn’t the typical sob story that has probably been written 1000 times though. It wasn’t just an overview of ‘it changed my life so much!’ Because, well, it did. Why overhype something that’s obvious and the adcoms have probably heard countless times? It was more focused on one specific moment of return… and how that went.</p>
<p>So I guess my topic would be ‘water lines.’</p>
<p>In at WashU, Duke, Johns Hopkins, UNC, Georgia Tech psp semifinalist, and so on. (common app essay and twisted it to fit a few other prompts). This essay was seriously my baby though. I poured my soul into it.</p>
<p>wrote about my summer @ stanford…ironically it didn’t get me into stanford :(</p>
<p>i don’t know if this is useful, but i wrote about playing a duet with my sister at a big piano competition after many long hours of practice, thought i had it perfect, messed up and lost synchronization with my sister, and how i overcame it. my other essay was about my travels abroad with my family, realizing the role of family, etc.</p>
<p>…i got into UCLA, but i don’t think the essays helped me too much.</p>
<p>i think one of the tricks is to write about something really random. i wrote about being a minority as a white girl, because i’ve always been in predominately asian schools. i framed it around describing myself as a “nai huang bao” which is a chinese steamed bun that is white on the outside, and yellow on the inside. i got into hamilton ED.</p>
<p>Just write about the obstacles that you have been able to overcome in life. They want to see growth through the hard experiences you’ve had. Different people have different life situations and they just want to see who well you’ve been able to deal with what life throws at you. I stuck to this philosophy and got into Harvard, Stanford, and Rice</p>
<p>Writing about a Cinema class got me into Duke, ND, USC, UCLA
Writing about a Sign language class at USC and UCLA</p>
<p>For Harvard I wrote about a scar and moving from texas to Ca… But I got waitlisted
and for Penn I wrote about a scar and all the stereotypes about philly and I guess that worked</p>
<p>But then again… at the end of the day I Really believe without a 35 it all wouldnt have been possible :)</p>
<p>I was boring and wrote about why I was majoring in math. Pretty straightforward.
Got me into Caltech (only place I applied).</p>
<p>bathrooms.</p>
<p>I don’t really think that it matters what you write about as long as you write a well constructed, interesting essay. (And I have edited many on this site, it’s not the content, it’s the structure and ability to write that makes essays either great or awful, generally speaking.) I wrote about why my grades were not fabulous, (not directly, but indirectly, because my essay was about all the stuff that I do…) I got into Amherst ED.</p>
<p>Some major problems I’ve noticed with people’s essays:
[ul]
[<em>]People write about things they aren’t actually passionate about just to stand out or to look how they think colleges want them to look.
[</em>]People over-intellectualize their essays. These essays are not academic papers. You can talk about the classic or reference your favorite works, but if you need a bibliography, you’re doing it wrong.
[<em>]People write about a scenario that says nothing about them. This is oftentimes the case for people who have focused primarily on grades in high school. Since you can’t write about your grades, many don’t get the concept of writing about *yourself</em>.
[/ul]</p>
<p>I may add more later. Gotta go to school.</p>
<p>I wrote about how I came to choose the major I applied to my schools with. It was more of a passion/“blaze your own trail” type of essay. It got me into Georgetown EA, BC EA, and Brown. 
Neither Yale nor Dartmouth took me, but I wonder if things would’ve been different if I hadn’t made a typo on the Common App.</p>
<p>The moral is, the topic doesn’t matter. I chose, probably, the most generic topic possible, but I believe it was the most … revealing thing I’ve ever written. I didn’t use any “big” words (other than the ones I normally use in normal conversation); I didn’t use proper grammar either (I wrote it as if I were speaking, but I DID use the proper punctuation of convey that).</p>
<p>EDIT: I agree with everything d4r73v1l said. ^^^^</p>
<p>For my common app essay (which I sent to 8 of the 10 schools I applied to) I wrote about my summer in DC studying politics and seeing political figures speak. I talked about not only my love of politics but also what it led me to see about myself in terms of academics. It was fairly generic but it said a lot about me, and I got into all the schools to which I sent it. My UChicago essay was really odd and not really an essay I’d send to any other school, so the topic isn’t really pertinent. I swore in my Georgetown essay, mostly because I had already gotten into my #1, didn’t think I stood a chance, and was pretty fed up with applying to college in general. I probably wouldn’t have gotten in anyway, but in retrospect it probably didn’t help.</p>
<p>I wrote about dancing. I’m a guy, awkward as no other, and an engineering/science major, but I’m pretty sure there was more of me in that essay than the rest of my app. Admittedly I didn’t apply to any real hard schools, but I figured I’d chime in. I agree with the others saying that it isn’t so much what you write about, but how you write it. I think it helps to try and make it unique to you, though if everyone tries that I’m sure there is overlap. If you’re boring, and as such the essay that represents you is boring, then write about someone else ;)</p>