When I applied to college, I wrote about a game. Every day at recess, my best friend and I played the same one: we were two orphans breaking out of an orphanage — a little bit Annie, mostly our own invention — and every afternoon we built that whole world back up from scratch.
I didn't write about it to prove I was imaginative. I wrote about it because that game was the truest thing I could point to about who I am: that I build worlds, that creativity and imagination are how I make sense of things — and that building worlds was exactly what I wanted to keep doing once I got to college.
That essay worked because of one quiet thing: it was about something. An admissions reader gets through thousands of essays a season, and the ones that blur together are the résumé in paragraph form and the beautifully-written piece you finish without being able to say what it was about. Here's how I get students to the other kind.
Built from the details of your one moment, not a theme anyone could borrow.
The honest thing the moment taught you, not the lesson you think admissions wants to hear.
It points past the story to who you are.
that recess game checked all three — only I could've written it, I meant every word, and it pointed straight at who I was becoming.