Before we talk about writing a Common App college application, let’s talk about reading one.
The first thing to know is that admission officers don’t score each component separately. Rather, everything you write (personal statement, supplements, activities list, COVID-10 response, and recs) feeds into one “personal” score.
The personal score is basically the college’s guess about how you’ll perform academically and contribute to the college’s community when you get on campus.
You should also know that colleges struggle to make the pieces fit for many applicants. It can be like building Mr. Potato Head from the stuff at the bottom of an old toy chest. Mrs. Potato Head might come out wearing something that looks like a stethoscope, so … I guess she’s pre-med? She might have a trombone, so … maybe she’s a member of the band?
There’s a better way. This article will show you how to write each Common App section so that they form a picture of you succeeding on campus. Colleges want to know that you’ll fit in; that you and the school will be a good match. To convince them, you need to write your application holistically, and make sure your content fits together into a personal brand.
Our aim is to craft great puzzle pieces that come together to produce a magnificent picture — you, succeeding in your BioChem major and helping to revive the school’s lackluster band in your free time.
Here are the Common App insights we learned by working as essay coaches and tutors for tens of thousands of applicants:
You want every piece of your Common App to say: “I’m going to succeed in college and beyond.” That’s what college admission readers are looking for.
Please don’t let it scare you. This is easier than you think. First, let’s get into their minds as they come to your application in the pile.
By the time they start reading the written components of your Common App, they will have reviewed your academic profile (grades, SAT/ACT scores, curriculum). They’ll know how you stack up academically with other candidates. That’s why admissions officers need your essays, recommendations, activities list, and additional information. They use these to distinguish which academically similar students seem to have the most potential for college success.
How can an essay show “potential for success”? By spotlighting experiences you’ve had where you’ve shown potential. More specifically, colleges look for experiences that show one or more of 5 special traits:
Before you move on to the Common App elements below, decide 1 to 3 of the traits that resonate most with you. You can create a free Prompt account to take our 5 traits test. The writing that follows relies on your knowing which traits you should be putting at the center of your writing.
Once you know about the 5 traits, you’ve got everything you need to succeed in your Common App writing. Here’s our 2-step process to distinguish yourself (and make writing the application a lot easier):
This process will take 1-2 hours. It takes time to brainstorm all the many times you’ve shown some of the 5 traits, thinking through all the many meaningful experiences you’ve had in high school.
But by the end, you’ll have a big pile of great experiences from which you can build your application. Ideally, you want all your most compelling content to fit within each application. That is, for each school, you’ll map it to the Common App essays and questions (including Additional Information), as well as to each school’s supplemental questions.
The easiest way to brainstorm is by using our free brainstorming tools (just create an account). However you do it, be sure to get a second opinion about what experiences really are your most compelling. This is part of our coaching and feedback process and you should get that second opinion, whether or not you use our services.
Often, colleges say things along the lines of: The personal statement is a place for us to get to know you. And now you know how unintentionally misleading that can be.
They mean they want to know what kind of person you are behind those SAT scores and grades. Are you the type of student to whom it all came easy and who will just drift in college? Or are you a student who made interesting things happen around them? The type of student who is going to do well in college and beyond?
Meanwhile, most students take them at their word. They think:
These are extremely common mistakes. The issue is you’re not showing the real you colleges want to see. Not to repeat ourselves, but they’re only interested in the real you that does things. The real you that shows potential for success.
After you create your free Prompt account, our platform will walk you through how to transform your best experiences into a powerful Common App essay.
Or you can read our comprehensive How to Write the Common App Essay guide.
However, if you just want the gist, here it is:
Again, we spell out every aspect of how to approach the personal statement essay in this guide.
* It doesn’t say much more about celebrating. But you don’t need us for that.
One more thing on the Common App essay. Some prompts tend to produce better essays than others. Here’s a little more guidance for choosing your prompt.
This year’s 7 prompt choices are:
We discuss how helpful each of these is (and what to be careful of with the others) in fully our guide The Best Common App Essay Prompt.
Bottom line:
Ultimately, the hard work here should be in brainstorming what experiences you want to write about. Not choosing the prompt. A great way to help you get the very best essay content is to ask for feedback, either from someone who knows you well (parent?) or from college essay experts (like us), or both.
Many colleges have supplemental essays — extra essays for just their school. They include common ones, such as Why Us, Why Major, and Describe an Activity, as well as idiosyncratic ones, unique to each school.
These contribute to your personal score just as much as your personal statement and activities list do. They matter. The best way to tackle them is to look at the supplements you’ll need to write for each school. Then, map the content you brainstormed to the supplements, so you don’t miss anything you must cover.
You can access a list of every supplement for every college on your Prompt dashboard, including ones required or optional for specific majors, programs, and scholarships offered by a college.
While we do have 2 small exceptions to this rule (see our full Covid-19 question guide), generally, only write this response if you experienced a major life disruption as a result of Covid or a natural disaster.
By “major disruptions,” we mean things like family members who became extremely ill or even passed away; family members losing their jobs; experiencing housing or food insecurity; or having to take care of siblings (perhaps helping them with Zoom elementary school); limited access to learning resources, such as the internet; or even needing to take a job. These kinds of things do, unfortunately, continue to happen to students in 2021.
Things that don’t qualify as “major disruptions” include struggles with distance learning or having projects/internships/classes canceled. Most students experienced struggles like that, and those experiences are unlikely to form the basis of a strong response in this section.
If you think you might want to tackle the Covid-19 prompt, we walk you through how to make the decision and how to structure your response in our guide.
If there’s one section that we’ve heard pains admissions officers every year, it’s the activities list. Applicants tend to rush this part of the application. Don’t do it!
Their loss can be your gain — if you spend some time here, you can really differentiate yourself with your effort and thoughtfulness.
Extracurriculars are the best place to show off the 5 traits. For example:
The easiest way is to log into your Prompt account and navigate to the guided tool for putting together your Activities List.
Here are our general tips:
Focus on impact. Besides the 5 traits, colleges also want to see sustained engagement, leadership (whether official or unofficial), and impact. Prioritize your list based on these 3 factors. Do your best to quantify the impact you had, and to show concretely the leadership actions you took.
Top 3 tips for writing strong descriptions. There’s much more to say here, but this is a solid start.
Examples of great descriptions.
For many, many more examples, hop over to our activities list guide.
Think creatively about what activities to include. What matters is not that the activity has a formal title. What matters, as you know, is that you had impact and demonstrated some of the 5 traits. Here’s a list of non-traditional activities you might include:
You may need to use the Additional Information section. Some students have good reasons why their Activities Lists are short — their commute may be hours long, or they may have suffered from a debilitating illness, or something else.
Similarly, some activities need more than 150 characters to describe fully. If you practice gymnastics at an exceptionally high level, to the exclusion of almost everything else, you might need to explain that more fully here.
Bottom line: if you need to explain something, add “(See add’l info.)” to your description, and say a little more there.
Get feedback from an impartial person. Yeah, this is a common refrain of ours. That’s because it’s really hard to evaluate your own contributions without an outside perspective.
In our experience, students often inflate less-than-stellar accomplishments, while totally ignoring unique and fascinating achievements that colleges would love to see. Get someone else to think your list through with you. We’re experts at uncovering and finding the best way to present student experiences or work on this with a parent or guidance counselor.
If you’ve followed our process, you matched your brainstormed comment into the essay and question “slots” available for each school to which you’re applying. Include the Additional Information section in that mapping — as we’ll show below, it’s a great place to provide more context about problems you’ve faced, or to clarify things that might otherwise be confusing, or even to share a little something extra about yourself.
However, only start on this section after you’ve written everything else.
At that point, you’ll be able to see if there are great items you’d wanted to use elsewhere, but that just didn’t fit — maybe Additional Info is the place. Or, maybe the thing you intended to talk about here got incorporated into other essays. Great news: it’s absolutely acceptable to leave this section blank if you don’t have anything compelling to say.
For most students, it’s not an easy call. Get another perspective on this one. Call in admissions experts, or make yet another appointment with your college counselor.
What to avoid in the additional information section. The common errors we see basically boil down to:
Writing style: short, short, short: Related to the above, keep whatever you add to this section succinct. You can turn a great, non-redundant essay you’ve got in your pocket into a list of interesting bullets, but don’t cut and paste it in. The admissions people have read a lot of essays by this point, and will likely appreciate simpler nuggets of information.
Include any important but missing context about your potential to succeed.
Here are the main ones students often use:
Colleges want a fair assessment of your quality of character and of mind — something you just can’t do for yourself. That’s where letters of recommendation come in.
The problem is that recommenders often write vague, impersonal letters. Common mistakes include giving an overview of your transcript, talking about your future plans (for a high school student?), and filling in the rest of the page with cliches.
Here’s an example of the bland stuff that does nobody any favors:
“She was a strong student, worked well with others, and impressed me with her consistent effort.”
Yikes! How can you avoid sounding so boring?
The easiest thing to control is who you choose as a recommender. Your job is to find the people who can shed light on:
What all this points to is choosing someone who knows you well. Ideally, they’ve known you for more than a semester. Examples might be teachers you’ve had for (ideally) more than one class; coaches; guidance counselors, and even work supervisors. You might have been a teacher’s best student ever. But if they didn’t get to know you well, it could be hard for them to be your advocate.
Someone who has a strong personal relationship with you will be more likely to give specifics, to talk admiringly about a few ways in which you really shone, and even pepper in those great anecdotes that might make your whole application spring to life. They don’t need to give a laundry list of accolades, just a few vivid examples.
That being said, it’s also great if the person had a front-row seat to your moment(s) of glory. Ask yourself: Who has seen me achieve, excel, overcome adversity, or outperform? So long as they’re invested in you, these people should do splendidly.
In addition, think about using your recommenders to show off the diversity of your academic strengths. For example, if you’re strong in math, instead of picking two STEM teachers, pick another in humanities or social sciences, to show off your range.
Besides choosing your recommender, you can also give them a little help. Ask them if they’d like you to provide an outline. They may say no, but they’re likely to be grateful for some help — as will your admission readers when they get a much better letter.
For this, keep it simple. List out the points you’d like your recommenders to include with specific examples of what you’ve done. Avoid any general platitudes (i.e., don't ask your teacher to say you were the best student they ever had).
You can use this list as a guiding framework, providing 2-3 specific examples that the recommender can include in each category:
Asking people for favors is hard. As always, pull in that loving grownup or advice-spewing college essay expert (yes, I’m talking about us) to give you a second opinion, and tell you you can do it.
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