Different people have different writing styles, but I think for many Anne LaMotte’s advice to write terrible (she used a more colorful word) first drafts has some merit. Beginning writers, and most kids have not written anything like a college essay before, can get so stymied in trying to make something perfect that they’ll waste too much time on something that will never really gel into a good essay. Again, my younger son tried another topic first, but he felt it just didn’t end up feeling like it worked for his main essay. Ironically, he came back to it later when he realized that with some adjustments it would work for another prompt for a second required essay.
I thought the Many Voices essay even with its epiphany showed a story from her life and gave you a sense of who the writer was… And I thought it also did what @lookingforward regularly suggest- that you should be showing qualities the college wants. My kids didn’t write their essays with particular colleges in mind. They picked colleges they thought would like who they were. Everyone got pretty much the same essays - with some tweaking for the Why ___ College and of course sometimes there were optional or supplement essays that were unique to that college.