most cliche college essay topics

The 3 Most Common College Essay Topic Clichés and How to Cure Them

1. The “Person I Admire” Essay

Is your dad the most important person in your life? Have you recently been coping with the death of a loved one? Do you plan on following in the footsteps of your high school mentor? Believe it or not, more than one person reading this article answered “yes” to at least one of those questions. Although we all have different relationships with the people we admire, essays on this subject often veer off the narrative cliff into an ocean of similar sob stories. These stories also run the risk of focusing too much on the influential figure or family member and not enough on the student writing the essay.

Remember, this is YOUR college application – not your grandpa’s, not Abraham Lincoln’s. Admissions wants to know about YOU, and what makes you a uniquely good fit for their school. If a person has had a significant impact on your life – sad or happy, negative or positive – focus on one important moment in that relationship. If you want to be just like your dad, when did you realize this? If your mother was sick, how did you help her manage her illness, and what did you learn about your own abilities to face life’s greatest challenges? Is there an unexpected way you can find joy or hope in a moment of sadness? Telling a simple story that is specific to your own life and experience will make all the difference here.

2. The Sports Essay

The crowd goes wild as you score the winning touchdown and are carried off the backs of your teammates….in a cast! Because you did the whole thing with a broken leg! Victories, injuries, and teamwork are the most common themes sloshing around the bucket of vague sports essays. This topic presents an opportunity for students to describe how they surmount different kinds of obstacles – an opportunity almost everyone takes. Surprisingly, the challenges of playing soccer in Ohio are quite similar to those of playing baseball in Montana. And serious athletes with sports-heavy resumes who also write about sports run the risk of boring admissions to tears with their one-note applications.

The sports essay is actually a huge arena in which a student can showcase his or her creativity. It’s time to abandon the simple narratives of bones broken and medals won. Put your unique perspective on display by describing how the skills you gained from athletics transfer to other areas of your life (or vice versa). Turn your favorite sport into a metaphor to describe another aspect of who you are. Or, if you still can’t resist telling one of the more common kinds of sports stories, dig into the details of that story. Try to isolate a small moment within the larger story that was significant or surprising. A victory isn’t just about winning or teamwork – maybe it’s also about the way your friend made you laugh on the bus before you even set foot on the field.

3. The Volunteering Essay

“…but it turns out that, when I thought I was helping them, all along they were really helping me.” Stop! Pull at our heartstrings no longer! If you, too, have been changed by your community service, you are not alone. That is an amazing side effect of doing good deeds that affect others. Millions of students across the country and around the globe donate their time to worthy causes (something that makes us very happy), but the mere act of volunteering is no longer enough to distinguish you from your competitors. Common pitfalls of the volunteering essay include saccharine storytelling, repeating your resume, and parroting the Wikipedia page of your organization of choice.

Ideally, you should donate your time to a cause that is truly significant to you. Thousands of people do the Breast Cancer walk every year. They all follow the same route and see the same sights, but what about the story that led up to you taking that first step? Ideally, the service itself should be the reward – not the “lessons learned” from the people who benefit from your service. Or, if you truly experienced personal growth through volunteering, try to isolate a particular moment or relationship that can illustrate the change you observed in yourself. Showing, not telling, is the key to writing a unique and engaging volunteering essay.

About Thea Hogarth

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Written by Thea Hogarth

Category: College Admissions , Essay Tips

Tags: cliches , college application , college applications , college essay topic , common app , editing , writing

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Your chance of acceptance, your chancing factors, extracurriculars, what are the most overused college essay topics.

Hey y'all, I'm preparing to start writing my college application essays, and I want to avoid cliche topics. What are seen as the most overused or common topics that I should try to steer away from?

A very thoughtful question, understanding what sounds cliche to admissions officers can indeed help make your essay stand out. Here are a few commonly overused topics that may not add much uniqueness to an applicant's profile:

1. Sports Victories or Injuries : Stories about how a loss in a sports match led to fortitude, or how a sports injury led to resilience, appear quite often. Unless you have a truly unique angle, it's better to avoid such topics.

2. Big Moves or Adjusting to a New Environment : This might be moving to a new state, a new country, or even just switching schools. Admissions officers read many essays about this experience, so unless your story is very unique, it will not stand out.

3. Trips to Exotic Locations or Service Trips : Writing about a transformative summer trip where you helped build houses can feel superficial and overdone. It's difficult for admissions officers to understand whether such trips genuinely affected you or were just a privileged experience.

4. An Immigrant's Story : The stage of transitioning from one culture to another is something that many students write about, making it one of the more common tropes in college essays. Avoid cliches in this category like adjusting to a new place, learning a new language, food clashes, and more.

5. Winning or losing a competition : These topics often do not provide deep enough insight into your personality beyond the surface level of success or failure.

While these are common topics, it doesn't necessarily mean you should totally avoid them. If you feel strongly about a topic and believe you have a unique angle or personal insight, by all means go ahead. The key is to show who you are, your growth, and how you think.

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Cliché College Essay Topics

Thinking about writing one of your college essays set in the world of sports? Maybe you worked really hard to swim a best time in your most important event, the 100-yard breaststroke, and, while you never broke 1:01, you learned valuable life lessons along the way? Or maybe you got injured during a baseball game sliding into third base and you were out for most of the season, but you persevered to come back even stronger? Or maybe you came in last place in the mile, but realized running gives you joy even if you’re not particularly fast? If any of this sounds like something you intend to write about in any one of your college admissions essays, we do encourage you to think again .

A big reason our students at Ivy Coach so often earn admission to their dream schools is that they present to admissions officers at elite universities as wonderfully weird. Through their singular pursuits — be they award-winning science researchers or animal rights activists — they dare admissions officers not to offer them admission. Writing about sports, writing cliches does not achieve that objective. In fact, writing about sports will all but assure that applicant will fail to differentiate themselves in the highly selective admissions process. To put it in sports lingo, it’s a no-win game.

So while we very much giggled at the recent New Yorker cartoon by Ali Solomain in which a mother consoles her son on the soccer field, ““Someday, you can turn this crippling loss into a really triumphant college essay,” we urge our readers not to heed such advice. No admissions officer wants to read about your losses on the soccer field. Or in the swimming pool. Or on the gridiron. Hopefully you get the idea. And, while you’re at it, avoid writing about music, community service, grandparents, travel, and illnesses. All essays executed on such topics will undoubtedly fall into the category of utter cliche drivel.

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