by Marie Todd
Best Circular Brainstorming Method for College Applications
In our post “A Stress-Free Brainstorming Plan for Your College Essays,” we outline the basic process of brainstorming to prepare for writing your college essays. In this post, we offer a more-detailed, “circular” method that can help you uncover additional ideas and stories.
This circular method is also called “clustering.” To begin, write the essay question you are brainstorming for – or the main topic of the essay question – in the middle of a page of paper and draw a circle around it. Then, start mining your experiences for stories and ideas that relate to the question/topic. Whenever something comes to mind, write a phrase about it somewhere on the piece of paper, draw a circle around it, and then connect that circle to the central question/topic with a line.
Next, make little clusters of images and phrases that go with the words and ideas you’ve thought of, circling them and connecting them to the respective “balloon” of words you have written down. When you feel that you have run out of ideas, start fresh with a new image or phrase that you write in another area of the paper, once again circling it and connecting it to the question/topic in the center of the page. Keep coming up with fresh ideas and images until you have determined which one you are most interested in. Sometimes you will be able to identify your strongest idea by how big its cluster is, or sometimes because you are inspired to start a new cluster on a second page because you are excited about what you are remembering and contemplating. Many believe that this act of “encircling” ideas is a powerful writing tool because pattern-making appeals to the creative mind more than linear thought and lists do.
Let’s go through this exercise with a hypothetical applicant named Sam and using the following Common App essay question:
The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?
Sam struggled with learning to read as a child but eventually became a tutor for underprivileged kids in math and reading. Using the circular method of brainstorming, Sam can start “bubbling” related experiences:
- His personal struggles with learning to read (such as dealing with feelings of embarrassment and inadequacy) and how he overcame them with the support of his teachers
- His first day as a tutor and how nervous he felt
- Discovering that one of his students was painfully shy and even had difficulty making eye contact with him
- Wondering how he could get the child to feel more trusting and open
- Talking to the tutoring center director to get their suggestions on bringing the child out of their shell
- Trying a particular learning technique that had helped him as a child
- Reading books and articles about how to create trust with young, shy children
- Having a breakthrough moment and getting his first smile from the child, who then started demonstrating real progress in math and reading
- Lessons he learned about himself and others from this experience and how those lessons might benefit him in the future
Notice how each of these memories and ideas that Sam circled, or “bubbled,” connects to the essay question, while showing how he tackled the problem he was facing. Finding a way to connect with and support the young child that Sam was tutoring was partly an intellectual challenge, but it was even more of an interpersonal and psychological challenge, one through which he gained important insights.
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.
