How to Write a College Essay: The Ultimate Guide

We get it: writing a college essay is intimidating.

You have to write a 650-word essay—at once long enough to be intimidating and too short to tell your reader everything you’d like—and that essay, it feels like everyone is saying, will determine your ultimate fate in the world. How in the heck are you supposed to deal with that?

Have no fear! We’re here to walk you through writing your college essay through our step-by-step ultimate guide on how to write a college essay.

How to Write a College Essay in 4 Steps

Writing a strong college essay can feel overwhelming, but breaking it down into four clear steps makes the process much more manageable.

Step One: Identifying Your College Essay Topic

It all starts with your essay topic. To write a successful college essay, you have to choose a compelling topic that reflects something about your personality, experiences, and/or values.

Avoid One-Offs and Major Traumas 

Most kids start the college essay process with no idea of what they want to write their essays on, and that’s totally fine. In fact, it might be preferable. Often, when kids start the process with something in mind, it’s because they’ve had some generally huge, often quite terrible experience—a terrible car accident, a medical scare, the loss of a loved one—that looms large as one of the defining experiences of their lives. 

While it makes total sense that the time a drunk driver ran a red and T-boned your mom’s Corolla, sending you to the ICU for the week, would occupy a large tract of your mental real estate; that doesn’t necessarily mean it will make for a great essay topic. 

After all, you probably don’t make a habit of being in horrific car accidents, and you certainly didn’t choose to have your ribs broken and two vertebrae cracked. It’s something that happened to you, not something you chose to do.

Think Small, but Personal

Instead, look to smaller topics—hobbies and habits, pet projects and personal faves. The real reason that big traumatic experiences make for poor essay topics is that they are (hopefully) one-off events, whereas your character is best revealed by the stuff you do all the time. 

So, think of stuff that you do on the regular, and ask yourself what it reveals about you. You bake a loaf of sourdough every weekend, tweaking the rise time and whole wheat-to-white flour ratio each time, in search of the perfect loaf, recording the results in a notebook you keep stashed at all times in your apron? Awesome! You’ve got a great essay about your systematic pursuit of perfection. 

Or maybe you love to run Dungeons and Dragons games for your little nieces and nephews, delighting in inventing new perils for them to overcome and villains for them to vanquish? Wonderful! You’ve got a great essay about using creativity to bring your family together. 

Perhaps you’ve got a nutso golf swing that the dude at the pro-shop told you was crazy out of whack—at least until you showed him how it corrected your slice and added 20 yards to your drive? Congratulations! Your essay about how you have the courage to reject accepted wisdom to pursue unconventional solutions is well on its way to getting you admitted to your dream school.

Look Inward

Or, reverse the approach and start by looking inward, identifying some personal characteristic—your deep empathy for those who are suffering, your insatiable curiosity about the natural world, your delight in problem-solving—and then work backwards, finding examples from your life to illustrate that theme. 

If, for example, you’re focusing on your insatiable curiosity about the natural world, tell us about how you used to collect tadpoles from the creek behind your housing development, and how you convinced your mom to let you try to raise them into frogs using that old fish tank you found in the basement (even if they did eventually, well, croak on you). You might even want to discuss a few different examples that illustrate your main theme.
Regardless, remember that choosing a college essay topic that stands out is less about pointing to an insane, once-in-a-lifetime event and more about finding something small and specific to you and your personal values and character.

Step Two: Outlining Your College Essay

It’s hard to accomplish anything great without a plan. That includes writing great college essays.

The Master Plan

Planning out your Common App Personal Statement in advance will help you to stay organized, and—if you’re someone who struggles to write longer essays—help you to break the task into more manageable chunks. 

There’s no right way to write a college essay, but I’m going to lay out one common organizational scheme that works for a great many students. Rather than just telling one extended story that runs for a page or more, it’s an approach that uses a few different examples to illustrate an important aspect of the writer’s personality. But to make things more concrete, let’s pick up where we left off above, imagining that you want to focus on your insatiable curiosity about the natural world.

The Four Parts of a Thematic Survey College Essay

At HelloCollege, we call this a Thematic Survey structure. That’s because it doesn’t have one overarching story that it tells. Rather, it identifies one theme that is central to your identity, and then it surveys your life, looking around for a few different stories that all share that central theme. 

The Thematic Survey Outline

Want to turn your essay into a paint-by-numbers exercise? Check out this basic outline that can be applied to a wide range of different essays that focus on some specific aspect of your character. 

Part 1: Hook ‘em with a story.

• Direct a short movie.
• Include sense details, 1st person POV.
• 150-200 words

Part 2: Reflect!—What’s the story mean?

• What personality trait does it exemplify?
• Why does that trait matter to you?
• 100-150 words

Part 3: Minor examples

• 2–3 examples
• 1–2 sentences each (50–75 words per example)

Part 4: Conclusion

• 2–3 snapshots of you in college.
• How will you exemplify your trait in the future?
• 100–150 Words

Part 1: Hook ‘Em with a Story

Most kids know that a good essay should open with a hook, but what makes for a good hook? How should you open your college essay, and—more importantly—how shouldn’t you start your college essay? There are lots of ways to answer that question, but the one that I want to discuss here is to open with a cool story—especially a story that has lots of rich imagery.

Imagery (and here, I mean any sort of specific detail that captures any of your five senses) causes your reader to, well, imagine—to conjure a picture of you in their head doing something. That’s important, because, up until your Admissions Readers digs into your college essays, you’re just words and numbers on a screen: an SAT score, a GPA, a zip code, a list of extracurriculars. The opening of your college essay is the point at which you want to turn into something more than that in their minds. It’s when, in their head, you start to feel like a human being.

Conveniently, we’ve got a great example of such an imagery-rich story in your tale of raising tadpoles in an old aquarium. I personally like for the very first image of an essay to illustrate the essay’s main theme, so I might start out with a sentence like, “In my basement, surrounded by boxes of old clothes and forgotten toys, I crouched down to peer into the aquarium, to stare into the dozens of tiny black eyes and wonder what they were thinking as they stared back.”

With this image, you’ve accomplished a few different things: first, you’ve given us an image to picture in our heads, so that you immediately feel like a real person. Second, you’ve introduced your theme of curiosity about nature (at least we hope those eyes are natural) by showing us a time when you were, well, curious about nature. And third, you’ve piqued our curiosity: notice how I didn’t include the fact that those eyes belong to tadpoles? That’s intentional: at least for the space of this first sentence, we don’t know if you’re looking at fish, frogs, or some otherworldly phenomenon, and that mild uncertainty spurs us to read on to find out more.

Now, is your reader stopping to reflect on the fact that, based on this one sentence, you’re going to be writing about your curiosity about the natural world? Of course not, but that doesn’t change the fact that, at this point in time, they’ve had exactly one image of you in their head, and it’s an image of you contemplating a bunch of critters. This will set them up to think about everything else that happens in the essay in terms of your curiosity about nature, ensuring that your theme comes across loud as a bullfrog croak in the still, black night. 

Part 2: Reflect!

Having lured in your reader with your (tadpole) bait, you’re ready to reflect on the theme expressed in your first paragraph. Think of this as being sort of like the thesis paragraph, or what journalists sometimes refer to as the nut or nutshell paragraph. This is where you sum up in a nutshell what the whole essay is about. More importantly, this is where your reader gets to see you reflect on yourself and who you are—gets to see you staring face-to-face at the person on the other side of the mirror. 

It’s also where you come out and announce the theme of your essay. Try to avoid telling us too soon what the importance of your opening hook is. If you’ve told the story well—highlighting moments and images that relate to your theme—your reader should be able to sense that theme looming ahead of them even before you announce it here in the reflective bit.

But once you do announce that theme (“Ever since I received my first Fisher Price See ‘n Say Animal Noises toy, I’ve been fascinated by the natural world.”), start reflecting on everything that it says about you, asking yourself questions about why this theme is important to you. There’s no single way to do this, because meaning is so personal, and the questions you ask are going to change depending on the theme you’re writing about, but a few questions you might ask yourself if you’re writing about your curiosity about nature include:

• Where did this curiosity come from?
• Are there some aspects of nature about which you’re more curious than others? Are you more fascinated by animals than plants? By swamps than deserts? By biomes than individual species? Why?
• Do you share your curiosity with other people in your life? With teachers? With friends? With family members? What role do those interpersonal relationships play in your relationship to nature?
• Does your interest in nature relate to other values you hold dear? In conservationism? In a belief in the value of science? In a concern for animal welfare? Do you express the values elsewhere in your life?
• Are you more eager to learn facts about nature out in the real world or in a laboratory? Through the lens of a microscope or from the pages of a textbook? What might this suggest about your future endeavors?
• And, most importantly, how do you feel about all of the above?

This last point applies to virtually every essay topic and is probably the single most important element in your whole essay. Discussing your feelings about your theme gives your reader the most personal possible understanding of the aspect of your personality or character that you’ve chosen to highlight in your most important college essay. After all, education—real education, true education—is at least as focused on your emotional relationship to whatever you’re studying as it is focused on facts and figures.

Part 3: Minor Examples

With your big, cinematic opening and your soul-searching reflective sections behind you, this is the easy part of your essay. With your frog story, you’ve already given us a powerful, immersive description of your interest in nature. Now, we just want a little evidence that that wasn’t some weird one-off in your life, so give us a couple more (brief!) examples that support your theme. Ideally, these should be different sorts of experiences than in your opening hook section, and maybe they even reinforce some of the ideas and feelings you explored in your reflective section.

You might, for example, discuss here how you love helping your grandfather work in his garden, helping to tie off his tomato plants to their trellis and to identify what is an encroaching weed and what is a tender shoot, drinking in the bright yellow sunshine. Or maybe you write about learning to identify different different local plants with your Scout Troop. Or about drawing cells undergoing mitosis that you viewed through a microscope dissecting the thin membrane between the layers of an onion in your AP Bio class.

These examples should tie-in clearly with your theme, but they don’t need to be the same sort of rich, sensory detail-saturated story you tell in your opening. A topic sentence followed by a couple sentences on each, and you’re done here.

Part 4: Conclusions

There are lots of ways to end a college essay (HelloCollege Essay Coach Gina Twardosz lays out six in a recent blog post), but the approach I suggest to kids most often is to tell us how your theme relates to your future in college. 

One of the most valuable functions that a conclusion can perform is to tell us why we should care about what we just read. Conveniently, there is a very obvious reason that someone should care about your college essay: because it makes a case for why you should be admitted to college.

So, I recommend concluding your essay by painting a picture of yourself embodying your essay’s theme once you’ve gotten to college. Perhaps you imagine yourself at a real university laboratory participating in actual scientific research. Or maybe college will be your big chance to combine your curiosity about nature with your interest in politics so that you can take classes on environmental public policy (a topic your high school didn’t have the resources to help you investigate). Or maybe you want to jokingly call back to your essay’s opening image and promise not to keep any frogs in your dorm room, no matter how many flies your roommate’s unwashed gym clothes attract.

Of course, all of this is a little, well, b.s. Obviously, you’re not already a college student, but by showing that you can imagine yourself as a college student, you show your readers that you have a goal that you are working towards, that you know who you hope to one day become, and you’re thinking about how college can help bring you closer to your ideal future self.  

Your other goal here is to get your reader imagining you as a student at their school, so don’t be afraid to use some of the same rich imagery you used in your opening here in the conclusion as well. If you can get your admissions reader to think of you as the Ghost of Freshmen Future, haunting the campus in their mind, it’ll feel like the most natural thing in the world for them to tick that Admitted box, to transform you into a living, breathing college student.

An Example College Essay Outline

So, what’s all this look like in practice? It doesn’t have to be anything fancy. Here’s the outline I wrote up for our nature-loving tadpole farmer:

The Hook: Raising Tadpoles

• Opening image: Staring into aquarium
• Plot point:
  • Saw tadpoles in creek
  • Caught them in Nalgene and brought home
  • Convinced mom to let me use aquarium
  • Researched how to care for tadpoles
  • Tadpoles grew up into frogs 
• 150–200 words

Part 2: Reflect!—What’s the story mean?

• Main theme: Curiosity about nature
• Stuff to think about:
  • What parts of nature do I most care about?
  • Animals, ecosystems
    • Who helps me? 
  • Mom, bio teacher, pet store employee
    • Values?
  • Science, conservation
    • Want to study in lab and out in the world
    • How do you feel about it?
• 100—150 words

Part 3: Minor examples

• IDing plants with Girl Scouts
• Studying onion mitosis
• 1–2 sentences each (50–75 words per example)

Part 4: Conclusion

• How will you exemplify your trait in college?
• 2–3 snapshots of you in college
  • You in a lab coat, injecting a lab rat
  • Enviro Policy classes
  • Roommates gym clothes joke
• 100–150 Words

The first thing to notice about the outline above is that it’s over 150 words, which is just to say that, with even a sketchy outline completed, you’ll likely have already written a quarter or so of your essay.

The second thing to notice is that it’s sloppy. Don’t get obsessed with getting your formatting perfect or scrubbing out every typo. The goal here is to get your ideas in order.

The third thing to notice is that, even though it’s sketchy, it still identifies the examples you’re going to talk about. That’s because, if you’ve got an outline that lays out what each individual idea in your essay is, when it comes time to draft your essay, you can really focus on getting the words right and not have to worry about the ideas.

Step Three: Drafting Your College Essay

So, now you’re ready to start writing, but you’re staring at your arch nemesis: an empty page.

Fill the Empty Page

Empty pages are scary, so start by filling it up. Fill it with all the work you’ve already done. Throw your outline on there at the top of the page (and scroll up regularly to double check that you’re sticking to the plan). Does 650 words seem like too big of a rock to roll up the hill? Break it into manageable chunks. Your opening anecdote only needs to be 150–200 words. That’s only twice the length of this paragraph.

Break it into Pieces

You really want to make this task feel manageable? Set different deadlines for each section of the essay. You’re gonna write your opening this weekend, then your reflective bit by Wednesday. You figure you can knock out your side examples by Friday, which leaves next weekend for your conclusion. Voilà! You’ve written a rough draft in a week and small change—and you did it without ever having to tackle more than a paragraph or two at a time. 

Having trouble meeting the deadlines you’ve set for yourself? Talk to a parent, teacher, or even a friend. Tell them your plans, and ask them to check in with you to see if you’re meeting your deadlines. Ask them to set real-world consequences if you don’t meet your deadlines. You didn’t finish your conclusion by the start of your next school week? You now owe your friend five bucks—and you’re super-motivated not to let it drag out till Wednesday, because then you’ll owe them ten.

Let Your First Draft be Bad

They’re called rough drafts for a reason: they don’t need to be perfect. They shouldn’t be perfect. See, right there, I screwed up and wrote the wrong thing, but the beautiful thing about writing is that you can return to what you’ve written again and again to improve it. 

Not sure the best way to start? Start crazy simple: “I was at the creek near my house and saw some tadpoles.” Is this as good an opening sentence that I imagined earlier? No, it’s not. 

But you know what else wasn’t as good as the opening sentence I imagined earlier? My first version of that sentence. My version above is good because I revised it to be good, not because it emerged from my keyboard fully and perfectly formed. If I can’t do it perfectly on my first try (and remember, this is my job), it’s even less likely that you can pull it off.

Write, Don’t Edit

In grad school, I had a colleague who would write his papers with his computer monitor turned off, to prevent him from editing as he went. This forced him to keep moving forward and not get bogged down in trying to say what he wanted perfectly on the first pass.

Now, that’s not advice that’s going to work for everyone, but the broader advice remains: most people write drafts better if they’re focused on getting their ideas onto the page and not on getting everything perfect, so make an effort not to immediately re-read what you’ve written. 

Check Your Outline

These days, I’m lucky to have two monitors when I work, so I pull up my outline on one and draft in another. But even before I could afford a second screen, I used to print out my outlines and prop them up next to my laptop screen. That’s because outlines are the roadmaps to the writing process. Just like, when you’re traveling through an unfamiliar city, you want to regularly double check Google Maps to ensure you’re still headed in the right direction, when you’re writing on unfamiliar topics, you need to regularly check in with the plan to make sure you’re on track.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t ever deviate from the plan. Sometimes, a paragraph will take an unexpected left-hand turn and deposit you somewhere unanticipated and wonderful. When your writing takes you on such an unexpected detour, you don’t need to necessarily double back and start over—especially if the view is good. But it does mean that you should go back and revise your outline so that you can plan for how you’re going to get back to your intended route.

Step Four: Revising Your College Essay

With a draft complete, it’s time to edit your college essay for clarity, coherence, and grammar, making revisions to strengthen your message and ensure it’s polished before submission.

Ask for Feedback

Before you start revising your essay, you may want to ask a trusted reader for feedback. Getting feedback is essential to writing a great essay, but a quick word of advice: Limit your feedback to two or three trusted readers.

If you show your essay to 20 different readers, they will pull it in 15 different directions—some of them opposing. That’s not to say that their advice will be bad, only that you can only follow so many directions at once. With two or three readers, you can balance their feedback and still steer the essay in a single direction. Much more than that and you’ll tear it to pieces.

Evaluation the Execution of Your Outline

If the goal of your rough draft is to plop your ideas onto the page in whatever form you can, the goal of revision is to sculpt those ideas into their best possible form. To do this, compare your rough draft against your original outline.

First, evaluate your general execution: Did you stick to your plan, or does the essay wander in unexpected directions? Does the essay have a clear central theme that you stick to closely? Do your paragraphs have clear, simple topic sentences that transition from one idea to the next? (Seriously, I cannot express to you how much your essay’s paragraphs need clear, simple topic sentences.) Do you feel like your essay captures an important feature of your identity?

Simplify Language

Once you feel that the major pieces are in place, it’s time to inspect your individual sentences. The first thing I do when approaching a student’s prose is to ask if the vocabulary can be simplified. That’s right, simplified.

This probably comes as some surprise. Many students think that they should include in their college essay myriad highfalutin exemplars of their vocabulary erudition (aka lots of fancy words so they sound smart). Don’t.

Fancy words are useful when they serve a purpose that simple words cannot, but your reader won’t be impressed by your ability to navigate to thesaurus.com. Nine times out of ten, simple words will do the job more effectively. More importantly, straightforward vocabulary will recede into the background of your reader’s attention, leaving them space to attend to your ideas, your story, and, well, you. 

Worse still, if you’re trying to deploy fancy vocab that you don’t quite understand, odds are good that you’ll misuse a word. Now you’ve not only distracted your reader with a fancy term that doesn’t contribute anything extra to your story; you’ve also proven that you don’t understand language even as well as you think you do.

At the end of the day, the quality that admissions readers value most highly in a college essay is authenticity, and if you’re trying to sound like a 40-something college professor, you won’t sound like a bright, inquisitive, hard-working teenager—and bright, inquisitive, hard-working teenagers make for much better college freshman than do 40-something college professors.

Proofread

Once you feel that your story is well told, your sentences well-constructed, and your words well chosen, it’s time to give your essay its final polish by proofreading for grammar and mechanics. Most high schoolers don’t have flawless grammar, so this is probably a group endeavor, but as your essay’s author, you are still its first line of defense.

Look for those little colored squiggles that Google Docs or MS Word places beneath words or phrases it thinks may be sketchy, and consider employing a grammar checker app like Grammarly, but be careful about following Grammarly’s advice all the time: doing so can trigger AI detectors. I always recommend that students using Grammarly throw their essays into an AI-detector like GPTZero, to ensure that they don’t trigger admissions offices’ detector software. 

Once you’ve checked and re-checked your essays for grammar and mechanics (with or without the assistance of grammar apps), you need to enlist someone whose grammar you know to be immaculate to give your essay a final once-over. This might be your parent, but you might do better asking an English teacher or a HelloCollege Essay Coach. They might not love you like your mom and dad do, but they almost certainly spend more time thinking about punctuating dependent clauses, and that’s what really counts here.

Once you get a clean bill of health from your proofreader, your Common App Personal Statement is finalized and ready to submit. Congratulations!

Supplemental College Essays

So, that covers the Common App Personal Statement, but if you want to know how to approach your Supplemental Essays (the essays that go out to just one individual school, with prompts like, “Why do you want to attend our college in particular?” or “Please tell us about a leadership experience”), let me point you to our “How to Write Supplemental Essays: The Ultimate Guide” blog post. (We’ve also got blog posts for specific schools’ Supplemental Essays, including those for the University of California system, UChicago, Columbia, Harvard, Northwestern, UPenn, Stanford, and Yale, as well as, for any of you who just hate writing essays, a post on colleges with no Supplementals at all.)

Supplemental Essays can still be a lot of work, especially if you’re applying to a large number of selective schools, but they’re usually more straightforward, requiring you to simply present information rather than search your soul, which may be a refreshing change of pace after the deep reflection of your Personal Statement.

Frequently Asked Questions

Still got questions? No worries! Here are answers to a number of common questions about college essays not addressed above.

Conclusion

Please remember that the advice here is general, but your case is, of course, specific. That’s just to say that, while the overwhelming majority of advice here should apply overwhelmingly to the overwhelming majority of students, your particular situation will, no doubt, require you to deviate here or there from the plan. 

To help know when to make such deviations, we highly encourage you to work with a trusted advisor—a parent, an English teacher, a HelloCollege Essay Coach—to help you recognize when you should deviate from the well-trod path and blaze your own trail.