Writing about cultural heritage, bad grades or personal flaws, music, sports, drama, politics, or a family member’s serious illness in college essays is tempting, but dangerous. We show why these topics can hurt students with admissions teams and how to handle them well.
Sad news. Some of the most common application essay topics are also the ones most likely to get you into trouble, according to an analysis by our essay experts.
These include:
Why don’t these topics lead to strong essays? Briefly, it’s because they don’t focus on your particular, individual strengths. Rather, their focus is generally on someone or something else.
Let’s take an in-depth look at each of the topics that can lead to trouble, why they tend not to work, and how to go ahead and write about them successfully, if that’s what you really want. (BTW, here are some of the best college essay topics.)
It makes perfect sense that students so often write about the topics listed above. Who doesn’t feel strongly about their cultural heritage? Who doesn’t love thinking about the things to which they’ve devoted their extracurricular time — whether that’s music, sports, drama, politics, or something more unique (Robotics? Knitting?).
Similarly, if you’ve had a sick family member, that experience likely formed a huge, meaningful part of your life. Discussing it, thinking about it, and analyzing it will matter to you. Same with your own flaws or an experience with bad grades. These are likely things that you are grappling with; obstacles that matter deeply to you; or the catalysts to deep insight into the life you want to live.
So we understand the urge to tackle these topics. (And in fact, we’ll show you how you can do so effectively, in many instances.) But, when it comes to college admissions, these topics can lead to some extremely harmful traps.
The problem with the topics listed above is that admissions officers want to know about you. Specifically, they’re trying to figure out whether you’ll be successful in college (and beyond). In our experience, the best way to show you have what it takes is to write an essay that shows you have one of the 5 Traits Colleges Look for in Applicants. (These are Drive (grit), Initiative, Contribution, Intellectual Curiosity, Diversity of Experience.)
Therefore, we suggest brainstorming which of your experiences show off these traits and writing about a topic that you come to via that exercise. Assuming you’ve read almost any other of our articles, you know all this already. (If not, go explore those links above!)
Let’s examine these topics in turn to see how they can lead you astray, and how you can write about them successfully.
It’s no surprise that culture is one of the most common application essay topics. The problem is that, unlike you, the admissions officer doesn’t feel deeply about your background, family, culture, ethnicity, or religion. At least, these aren’t things that are going to move your application into the “accept” pile by themselves.
However, there is a way to write about your cultural heritage that will win the admiration of college admission readers. Basically: write about how you have interacted with and shone through that heritage.
For example — Your school didn’t celebrate Chinese New Year. You decided to change this. You worked hard, amassing support, figuring out when and where and who could come in to do a lion dance, persisting when you were initially told it wouldn't work and making it happen.
Guess what? That sounds like a winning college admissions essay. This is because this story discusses your cultural heritage while also showing off your drive, initiative, and diversity of experiences.
Any number of cultural topics would work well, so long as you make sure that the bulk of the essay focuses on the actions you have taken. (And not on teaching admissions officers about the origins of Black History month, or whatever it might be. They can always learn about that in their own time! Not in their “do I accept this student or not” time.)
These are the absolute most common topics, which makes a ton of sense. The problem is that students tend to write about them rapturously — we call it the “makes me feel alive” trap.
For example, if you talk about how performing in the school play “makes you feel alive,” what are you really saying about yourself? The admissions officer is learning nothing about your personal characteristics. They just know there’s something out there that you like — not how hard you worked to achieve that thing or the discipline with which you approach it.
The best thing to do here is to switch the focus from “playing soccer makes me feel alive”— to “my relationship with soccer shows what a potential-filled person I am.”
Again, find ways to tie your love of the extracurricular or activity to your personality traits. For instance, where has your love of music taken you? Maybe it’s taken you to a lot of indie venues around town for concerts? Maybe it’s taken you to the Philharmonic! Maybe it led you to learn three instruments on your own, or to learn to read music, or sight-read, or to compose. All of these are examples of intellectual curiosity (with some drive and initiative thrown in). All of these will lead to much stronger essays than “music makes me feel alive.”
Politics is a trickier sub-set of the extracurricular topics. Many students get fascinated by politics in high school, and generally that’s a great thing. But, on top of the issues we explored above, there are additional problems involved in writing about them in your college essay.
First, it’s so easy to upset your reader, who may disagree with you — in fact, they may vehemently disagree with you. This is not the impression you want to leave on admission officers. Second, as with all the topics we’re talking about here, this topic can lead you away from you to focus on something extraneous, in this case: goings-on in the world.
As with the other topics, the fix is relatively easy (with the caveat that it’s hard to predict whether or not your issue will offend your reader): focus on your actions. For example, talk about the intellectual curiosity you’ve exhibited in learning deeply about politics, or talk about the drive and initiative that went into your run for office or your taking on a political issue.
But be extremely cautious in choosing what political issues to share with admission readers. If you worked on a campaign to increase bike-riding in your city, that *might* be less contentious than a campaign to reduce abortion access, but even bike issues can raise hackles with many people. Politics ignites passions!
The pitfalls here are two-fold. First, you don’t want to focus your essay on someone other than yourself. The admissions team is interested in you because their job is to evaluate you, not your mom or sibling. Second, you don’t want your essay to come off as too self-pitying or passive. This could unintentionally show you in a bad light.
Instead, this essay could be successful if you focus on how the illness changed you, and particularly on what actions you take now that are different.
For example, if your mom was seriously ill, maybe you developed a number of important skills as you took greater responsibility at home — empathy for your younger siblings, responsibility for running the household, etc. Or, perhaps your little sibling’s rare illness led you to research this illness deeply and develop an expertise in many aspects of her care and related issues. These scenarios could lead to great, authentic essays where the focus is on your initiative or your intellectual curiosity (active), and not on a bad thing that happened to your family (passive).
It’s hard to shed light on your greatest strengths when talking about bad grades. The story is generally “I got a bad grade, worked really hard, and then got all As.” But it’s raising not-great questions, such as, why weren’t you working hard in the first place?
If a grade is truly bad and you feel you can explain the circumstances, save that for the Common App Additional Info section or its equivalent. (See our comprehensive Additional Info guidance.)
Writing about personal failures can be some of the most beautiful, meaningful, inspiring literature out there. You can find such writing in the memoir section of the library. We recommend leaving it there (and not introducing it into your college essay) for a few reasons.
The main problem is that a college essay should focus on your strengths; writing about personal failings is a real mismatch for this essay’s “job.” Secondarily, it’s simply really, really hard to write about this topic well. (You can hone your craft in college and write that wrenching memoir by the time you graduate!)
Finally, we do think there are some extremely narrow exceptions here where you can pull it off. That’s generally where the failure led to lessons learned that form the bulk of the essay (the essay should mostly talk about the actions you took post-failure). For example, you could write about failing in your run for student council, with a focus on what that failure added to your life.
Note on mental health issues: This is another extremely tricky area that is generally worth avoiding in college essays. For more on thinking through this topic, see our article on the Additional Info section.
Want help getting started with good essay topics? A great place to start is at our College Essay Help Center.
More articles on our admissions-boosting methods:
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