If you’re like many college applicants, you may feel that choosing a topic for the Common App personal statement (the main, 650-word essay that they’ll likely be sending out to all or most of the colleges to which they apply) is a daunting topic. After all, there are so many potential topics to choose from, and 650 words—about a page and a quarter, single-spaced—isn’t terribly long.
Plus, it’s common for Counselors and Essay Coaches to tell kids that their Personal Statement should show who they are and where they come from, but most college applicants have spent seventeen or so years circling the sun, amassing experiences and accomplishments. So, with that in mind, do college essays need to have a single topic?
Do College Essays Need to Have a Single Topic?
The short answer is, yes. But how are you supposed to narrow down your entire life into a single topic?
Sure, you could write about joining the debate team in order to confront your fear of public speaking, but then how will your admissions officer know about your deep relationship with your grandmother and the connection with your Indian background that arose from learning to cook her signature palak paneer recipe? If you’re trying to follow your counselor’s (very solid!) advice to convey who you are as a person, how are you supposed to do that when there are so many facets to who you are? Wouldn’t it be easier (I can hear you thinking) to talk about a bunch of different things in your essay, so we can understand everything that makes you you?
It all depends on how to define “topic.”
What is a College Essay Topic?
So, what do we mean when we talk about an essay’s topic? Most people, when they give examples of college essay topics, focus on a specific role or set of experiences: an essay’s topic is “battling leukemia” or “helping my dad work on the family car” or “coming up with the winning design in the robotics competition” or “summiting a mountain with my Boy Scout troop.”
This, I want to argue, is the wrong way to think about your essay’s topic.
To explain why, I want to make a brief detour to Athens in the 4th century BCE so that we can talk about Aristotle. (I know, I know—bear with me. I’ll be quick.) Aristotle was, of course, in addition to being Plato’s greatest student and Alexander the Great’s greatest teacher, one of the most influential of the ancient Greek philosophers, and one of Aristotle’s most influential moves as a philosopher was to distinguish between the subject and object of whatever he was analyzing (its hypokeimenon or ὑποκείμενον versus its pragma or πρᾶγμα, if you want to get fancy about it).
Okay, back to subjects and objects. Aristotle, to answer a question like, “What makes an animal an animal?” would begin by looking at an example of an animal (say, an alligator). In this instance the alligator—the specific example by which Aristotle made his larger point—was the object of his analysis, whereas the broader concept that Aristotle was investigating, in this case, “the nature of animals,” was the subject of the analysis.
The Subject and Object of your College Essay
So, what the heck does this have to do with understanding whether your college essay needs to have a single topic?
Aristotle’s distinction between subject and object helps us to see that any discussion of a topic has two different components: it has the specific example being analyzed (its object) and the deeper theme or category that that example is supposed to cast light upon (its subject). What I want to argue is that your college essay needs to have a single subject, but it may have many objects.
So, what’s that mean in practice?
What it means is that most students, when they think about their personal statement topic, fixate on an individual experience or activity (the essay’s object) when they ought to focus on the deeper theme that that experience exemplifies (the essay’s subject). Importantly, that deeper theme is you or, more likely, some aspect of you—your determination, your curiosity, your empathy.
That’s because the essay’s subject (you and your character or personality) is what your audience is really interested in. Your admissions officer is happy, of course, that you know how to make your grandmother’s palak paneer recipe (the secret, btw, is a pinch of amchur powder to brighten the flavors), but they’re enrolling you as a student, not a cook.
Therefore, what they really care about is your interest in your own cultural identity, which your experience cooking with your nani exemplifies and which you will be bringing with you to college. Likewise, they don’t mind that, against all odds, you overcame your 5’ 3” height to become a star on the varsity basketball team, but they’re really not all that concerned with your three-pointer. Rather, they care about the tenacity that you developed as you pursued this goal, because they hope you’ll employ the same tenacity in your studies and in your career beyond.
In short, the object of the essay (what most kids think of as its topic) is really just a vehicle to get your audience to its real topic—its subject: you.
You are the Topic of Your College Essay
This realization, that your essay’s real topic is you—or, more precisely, some particular quality of yours—reveals the importance of a focused subject. Of course you want to focus your essay on yourself. Your Common App Personal Statement exists to serve a very particular function: to get you into college. Letting your focus stray too far toward anyone or anything but yourself simply won’t serve that purpose.
But really, you want to get even more focused than just you as a subject, since, hopefully, there is a lot of you to go around: you’re curious, you’re adaptable, you care deeply for those suffering or in pain. There’s no way, in a page and a quarter, to even list all of your many fine qualities, let alone to cram your entire existence—all of your rich experience, your most private desires, your all-but-unspeakable fears; your mind, your body, your very soul—into just 650 words.
Singular Subject, Abundant Objects
Okay, so you’ve narrowed your essay’s subject down to a single subject, do you need to focus on a single object, just one single story or activity, that demonstrates this desire?
Not necessarily. It might be the case that you have a rich and complicated story that you want to explore over the course of 500 or so words, but just as often, students find it’s easier to present a series of examples.
Let’s just say that, for example, you want to showcase your desire to be of service to the less fortunate. You start out by discussing the time that you crawled into a sewer grate to rescue a box of drowning kittens, then follow up with a meditation on your time tutoring your middle school-aged nephew on geometry, then close by describing your work at a local food bank.
Though these are three wildly different activities, they all share a common theme—service to the disadvantaged—that will unite the essay, despite the obvious dissimilarities between crawling into a sewer and explaining the alternate exterior angle theorem.
A Note on Too Many Objects
It’s important to note that there is a need for a direct relationship between the variety of the various objects that your essay examines and the strength of the essay’s subject. Basically, if you want to talk about a bunch of far-flung examples, they need to have a clear thematic relationship. This is to avoid the Box of Chocolates essay.
In the 1994 Best Picture Winner Forrest Gump, the film’s protagonist famously declares that “My momma always said, ‘Life was like a box of chocolates: you never know what you’re gonna get.‘” Students often take a similar approach to their essays, choosing some complex metaphorical central image onto which, like a Christmas tree, they hang discussions of several seemingly unrelated aspects of who they are.
I’ve seen dozens of such essays: “Here are ten random things on the floor of my bedroom that capture who I am,” or “My wall is covered in dozens of photos of me doing unrelated things with with unrelated people,” or even “My life is like a bag of Chex Mix: you never know what you’re gonna get.” I’ve even seen essays structured around the image of a Christmas tree, broken down by different ornaments.
The problem with this approach is that, in a 650-word essay, if you’re going to briefly discuss three (or, worse, twelve) different objects, there won’t be space to develop any one theme about yourself (and remember: that theme about some particular aspect of your personality is the essay’s real subject). What you’re left with is an essay that feels like it’s more about its objects—often literal objects: a pair of dirty gym shoes, a photo of friends at the beach, the rye cracker from a bag of Chex mix—than it is about you.
Conclusion
So, does your Common App Personal Statement need a single topic?
Yes, given its narrow aperture, your essay needs a limited focus. But that’s not to say that you can’t talk about diverse parts of your life provided they all share a common theme (or subject, to put some respect on ol’ Aristotle).
Remember: your entire existence will not fit into 650 words, so limit yourself to one facet of your personality, but there’s no reason that that single facet can’t refract through it, gemlike, the brilliant spectrum of thoughts and experiences that characterizes your life.
