by Marie Todd
A Stress-Free Brainstorming Plan for Your College Essays
As you enter your senior year of high school, the pressure is on to write your college application essays. And for many people, the anticipation of writing their application essays is often more difficult and stressful than actually writing them. To maximize your chances of getting accepted to the school of your choice, you want to present yourself in a way that is substantial and authentic, but where do you start? In this post, we outline a plan for positioning yourself to write winning college essays, with minimal stress.
You probably already know why writing application essays is so daunting. For one thing, you have to talk about yourself and make a good impression on a group of faceless people who will be judging you and deciding whether to accept you. You must reveal important things about yourself, but you cannot know for sure whether what you think is important will impress the admissions committees. You likely haven’t had much experience with taking a “personal inventory” and writing about your experiences in a way that conveys your abilities and interests. How do you know which of your life experiences the adcom will consider significant? What if you think something is a great idea or story, but the adcom doesn’t agree?
At the beginning of this process, you might consider soliciting possible essay topics from your parents, teachers, and/or other trusted adults, but you worry about feeling pressured to then use those ideas. And with your busy academic and extracurricular schedule as a high school senior, finding the time and emotional space to figure out what you want to say to the college adcoms will probably be challenging.
Here’s the good news: Whether you have three months, three weeks, or three days to work on your essays (we recommend three months, if at all possible), this process we present in this post will set you up to write quality application essays – and maybe even enjoy doing it.
Here are the seven key steps:
1. Collect all the essential information.
With your list of target colleges in front of you, visit each school’s website and download any school-specific application essay questions. If the schools to which you plan to apply use the Common App, go to the Common App website to download its application requirements, the Common App essay prompts, and your target colleges’ supplemental essay prompts. Print out this information and/or save it to your dashboard.
2. Start the brainstorming process.
Focus first on the essay questions that appeal to you most. Then let yourself free-associate with whatever images, words, memories, and experiences come to mind in response to these essay questions. Write down your thoughts without questioning, censoring, or analyzing any of them. This exercise is called “freewriting.” You might be surprised by what comes up and how useful your ideas turn out to be. If you find yourself stuck and struggling to generate ideas, you can invite your parent(s) or another trusted adult to brainstorm with you. The goal is to produce a variety of interesting and relevant ideas and examples.
3. Set aside what you have written so far.
Take the results of your brainstorming session and put them away for a while. Ideally, let your ideas marinate for a few days (or hours if you’re on a tight timeline). You will have jump-started an important creative process in your mind, and you’ll be able to return to your ideas later with fresh eyes.
4. Get some exercise.
As you probably already know, exercise isn’t just great for your body, it also stimulates intellectual creativity. Engaging in some kind of physical activity can help clear your mind and open the door to new and original ideas for your essays. Keep a pad and pencil or pen handy so you can jot down any ideas that suddenly come to you.
5. Return to your “freewriting” and read it out loud.
Go back to the notes you made when you were brainstorming and read them out loud to yourself, paying close attention to how they sound. If you feel comfortable doing so, you can read them to your parents as well – or to another adult who will listen in a nonjudgmental manner, such as one of your teachers.
6. Identify key ideas.
How did the ideas and examples in your freewriting resonate with you and, if applicable, your trusted listener? Identify where your energy, honesty, convictions, and interests lie. Which of the topics are you most excited to write about? Which topics will allow you to convey what is valuable to you? At this point, you should be starting to home in on your essay themes.
Now that you have identified the topics and stories to focus on in your essays, you are ready to begin writing!
Marie Todd has been involved in college admissions for more than 20 years. Marie has both counseled applicants to top colleges and evaluated more than 5,000 applications for the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts; College of Engineering; School of Kinesiology; School of Nursing; and Taubman College of Architecture. Want Marie to help you get accepted? Click here to get in touch.
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