College Essay Topic Ideas

Most four-year colleges require an application essay.

The essay is a vital part of a college application because it gives you a chance to flex your writing muscles and show the admissions officials who you are as a person. Draw from your well of life experience. These topic ideas will help stimulate your imagination and compose an essay that just might get you into the college of your dreams.

Hard Times

Severe illness, such as cancer, makes a hard but authentic topic.

If you have survived a difficult experience or dealt with a hard issue in your life, write with honesty about how the issue affected you, where you derived the strength to endure it and what you learned and how you grew from the experience. Hard times you may wish to write about could include a parent's alcoholism, the death of a close friend, the loss of a beloved trout stream to pollution or growing up in severe poverty.

Choices

Handled correctly, the end of a youthful romance is an acceptable topic.

Write about a time you had to make a tough decision. Explain the circumstances that led you to have to make the decision. Show why you agonized and the pros and cons of each side, and why you eventually made the decision you made. Touch on the consequences and lessons of that choice.

Tough choices many young people face include whether to confront a friend who cheated on a test, which parent to live with after a divorce and whether to euthanize an aging, ailing pet.

Rite of Passage

Camps offer rite of passage experiences for teens.

Identify an experience---formal or not---that marked a transition period from one stage of your life to another. A rite of passage could be as small (yet hugely significant) as gifting childhood dolls to a younger sibling or as large and dramatic as killing your first deer or taking a weeklong canoe journey in the wilderness with other teenagers. Show how you came to embark upon this rite of passage, how the experience challenged you and how you changed as a result of it.

References

• Carleton College: Admissions: Essay Tips

Resources

• Connecticut College: Admission--Essays that Worked