What Kind of College Essay Should You Write?

Before you start your college essay, I think there is one question you should ask yourself that most people completely skip.

What kind of essay actually suits me?

I don't mean whether you should write about your grandmother, your robotics project, your childhood, or that one summer that changed your life. I mean: what shape should your essay have? Trust me, most people underestimate this step.

Because I've read a lot of essays where the writing is perfectly good, the story is interesting, and yet something feels slightly off; rushed and not particularly compelling. Usually, the problem isn't the topic, rather that the student is trying to tell their story in a way that doesn't really match who they are.

Some people genuinely have one thing they've been building towards for years. Their activities make sense together, or they have a pronounced spike. There is a clear thread running through their interests, and you can almost see the person they are becoming.

Other people are the complete opposite. Their activities are all over the place. They do debate, then volunteer at an animal shelter, then somehow end up researching medieval architecture. Trying to turn all of that into one neat "journey" can feel completely artificial. And oftentimes, may be unsuccessful and unnecessarily difficult.

And then there are people whose most interesting quality isn't really what they do at all. It's the way they look at things. They notice things other people don't; have a strange obsession, a particular way of thinking; or some little perspective that is hard to explain on an activities list.

Spoiler alert: I was a mix of the last two!

These people probably shouldn't all write the same essay.

So, before you decide what your personal statement is about, I would first figure out what kind of story you actually have.

Here are a few of the main approaches I would consider.

1. The Journey Essay

This is probably the most natural choice for students who have a clear thread running through their application.

Maybe you've been interested in engineering since you were ten. You started making little inventions at home, joined your school's robotics team, began researching sustainable materials, and eventually started working on your own project.

Or maybe your "journey" is less academic. You grew up translating for your parents, which made you interested in language, which eventually led you to study linguistics. Or you started volunteering because you wanted to help people and slowly realised that the problem you were trying to solve was much bigger and more complicated than you had imagined.

The most important thing here is that the essay shouldn't just be a timeline.

Please don't write:

I did this. Then I did this. Then I did this. And now I want to study this at university.

That's just an activities list with connecting words! The interesting part is how your thinking changed along the way. This demonstrates maturity, self-awareness, and (we love to hear it!) growth.

Maybe you started with a very simple idea and then discovered it wasn't so simple. One question led to another, and you pivoted to push further. Maybe you thought you knew exactly what you wanted to do, and then something happened that made you rethink it.

The progression doesn't have to be dramatic in itself, it just has to be real and backed up with concrete steps you've taken, or activities you've pursued.

Ask yourself:

Is there one interest that has followed me for years?

Can I trace how one experience led naturally to another?

Has my understanding of something changed over time?

Did I ever discover that something I thought was simple was actually much more complicated?

Is there a question I have kept returning to?

When I look at my activities, do I see a clear story developing?

If the answer to these questions is yes, this might be your essay. Bonus tip: if you have known for a long time what you want to study at university, this is also probably your essay because your activities are likely to align with it.

So while your activities list tells the admissions officer what you've done, your essay shows them why you kept doing it, and what you've learned along the way.

2. The Mosaic Essay

So for those people who really, really don't have a clear thing. It's completely okay!

Let's dismantle the idea that you must have a defined "spike" running through your activities to have a shot at these universities. You absolutely don't. Taking yours truly as an example: I did competitive debate, animal-inspired engineering projects, gender advocacy, recycling campaigns, authored a book on Vietnamese history, kick-boxing, you name it!

That is why I chose this essay structure (and a combination of the next one). Because there was actually a common thread throughout my activities, though it was certainly not as obvious. That was my love of exploring new things and ideas, and solving a problem within it.

Maybe you play tennis, bake sourdough, tutor children, read Russian literature, run a recycling project, and spend an unreasonable amount of time looking at old houses on Google Maps. If you tried to find one grand passion connecting all of those things, you might end up inventing one that isn't actually there!

This is where the Mosaic Essay can work really well.

Instead of following one story from beginning to end, you bring together a few seemingly unrelated parts of your life. The trick is that, by the end, the reader should realise that they weren't actually unrelated.

Another example: you write about the way you reorganise your bookshelf every few months, the fact that you always ask people where they're from, your obsession with fixing broken objects, and your habit of taking the long way home.

On paper, that sounds like four completely random things. Can you guess where they tie together?

But maybe the thread connecting them is that you are constantly curious about how things fit together. You can't leave a broken object alone. You want to know people's stories. You rearrange your bookshelf because you keep finding new connections between ideas.

Now the essay isn't really about bookshelves or broken objects, but the way your brain works.

That's the point of this kind of essay. You aren't trying to prove that every activity you've ever done is part of one carefully planned master plan. You're showing that there is something consistent underneath the apparent randomness!

Ask yourself:

Do my activities look scattered on paper?

Are there patterns in the things I choose to do, even if they don't look connected?

What personality trait seems to appear everywhere in my life?

What do I repeatedly notice that other people don't?

Are there little habits I have that say something surprisingly accurate about me?

If someone followed me around for a week, what would they notice? Are there traits that people close to me consistently notice about me?

What do completely different parts of my life have in common?

If you have a scattered application, don't panic and don't invent a "spike" just because you've heard that colleges like them. Trust me, I've been there too and I know how it feels! But it's not the right answer.

Maybe the interesting thing isn't that you have done ten different things, but why you keep doing ten different things.

3. The Lens Essay

This is for the person who has a particular way of looking at the world.

You might write about something incredibly ordinary: the food your family cooks, the way your parents argue, the bus route you take to school, your grandmother's handwriting, the collection of objects on your desk.

The thing itself isn't necessarily extraordinary. Your relationship with it is what makes the difference.

Maybe you grew up moving between countries, and now you instinctively notice the tiny differences between how people greet each other. Maybe your family speaks three languages at home, and you've become fascinated by the fact that the same person can sound like a slightly different version of themselves depending on which language they're speaking.

The essay isn't really about languages.

It's about identity, belonging, and the strange ways we become different versions of ourselves.

That's what I mean by a lens. You take something specific and use it to let the reader see something much larger about you. A word of caution though: this essay is the one that can lean most abstract. I would try as much as possible to ground the essay in concrete activities that are present in your application, and stray as far away as possible from rambling or philosophical musings. This story should be deeply personal, and the best way to do that is by keeping it anchored.

I like this approach because it can reveal a side of you that your activities list has absolutely no way of showing.

Ask yourself:

What do I notice that other people seem to overlook?

Is there something completely ordinary that I think about in an unusual way?

What topic do I find myself returning to without meaning to?

Is there an object, place, ritual, or habit that has a strange amount of meaning to me?

What conversations do I keep replaying in my head?

What is something I understand differently from the people around me? Do I find that sometimes my perspective is unique?

If your biggest strength is your perspective rather than your résumé, this could be a good direction. For me, I framed my worldview to be cross-continental puzzles; moving around a lot (really, a lot!), I learned to see the world as something to explore, full of problems to solve! And I framed my activities as a manifestation of that, showing my character and personality as much as possible.

Sometimes the most interesting thing about a student isn't what they've accomplished, but what they notice. Personally, I love this essay structure because I think it allows the admissions officers to truly connect with how you think, understanding so many facets of you in the process.

This essay could be a story of how you've developed that worldview, and how you keep applying it. Why is it useful to you? How has it shaped you uniquely into you?

4. The Tension Essay

Some of the most interesting people are full of contradictions.

Maybe you're naturally incredibly competitive but hate competition. Or you could be a very private person who somehow became the president of your school's debate club. What if you love physics and spend your weekends writing terrible poetry?

The temptation here I've seen students fall into is to write an essay saying, "I am both X and Y, and that's what makes me unique."

I would avoid that.

The interesting (and often deeper) question is what happens because you're both X and Y.

Maybe being shy has made you a very different kind of leader. Constantly moving has made you unusually good at making friends quickly. Your love of science has actually made you more interested in art, because you're fascinated by the same question of how humans make sense of the world.

The contradiction should actually do something in the essay: explain something about how you think or behave.

Ask yourself:

What are two things about me that don't seem to belong together?

What would someone assume about me after seeing only one side of my life?

What part of myself do people usually misunderstand?

Have two different sides of me ever pulled me in opposite directions?

Is there something I used to see as a weakness that I now understand differently?

What tension in my life is still unresolved?

This can be a particularly good approach if you feel uncomfortable trying to reduce yourself to one label.

You don't have to! People are complicated. Your essay can be, too, and that's okay!

5. The Question Essay

Some students are defined less by what they've done and more by what they can't stop wondering about. They're incredibly curious, and they love the pursuit of a very specific (or even not-so-specific) question.

For some examples: you could've spent years thinking about why people trust algorithms more than humans. Or why your family remembers the same event completely differently. Or why some environmental problems receive enormous attention while others barely get discussed.

You might not have an answer yet, and that's probably better. Admissions officers love people who are humble enough to admit they don't know it all, and especially who are curious enough to keep going!

A good essay doesn't always need to end with an answer.

You could write about where the question came from, how you initially understood it, what complicated your thinking, and why you're still interested in it now. What obstacles did you face along the way? What did you realize while pursuing the question? How does it tie to a deeper theme, and to who you are as a person?

This can be a really nice option for students who are deeply curious but don't necessarily have one obvious extracurricular "spike."

The question itself becomes the thread running through the essay.

Ask yourself:

What have I been wondering about for years?

What do I research even when nobody asks me to?

What genuinely bothers me because I don't understand it?

Have I ever completely changed my mind about something?

What question connects different parts of my life?

What am I still trying to figure out?

If you have a question that keeps following you around, don't feel like you need to solve it just to write an essay.

It could even be better to just show the reader how you think through a question. You could uncover something much more interesting than simply giving them the answer.

So, Which One Is Right for You?

Now that you know this, what should you do with it?

I certainly wouldn't choose your essay structure by asking which one sounds the most impressive, or which one you think has the most "potential".

I'd start by looking at your application as a whole. Your application, your combination of activities, awards, interests; it's distinctively yours and yours alone. So you clearly have a story already that only you can tell! How you tell it depends on the story you already have.

So start with: What does the admissions officer already know about you?

And then:

What are they missing? What else do they need to know about me so it all makes sense?

If your activities list already screams "future engineer," your personal statement doesn't need to convince anyone that you love engineering. It could show them the person who stays up until 2 a.m. wondering why something works the way it does, or the person who is so obsessed with animals that they want to build things that move like them.

If you've done twenty different things and none of them seem to fit together, don't force yourself to come up with a fake passion that magically explains everything. You already have a real story that is strange, specific, and completely you. There are already so many different ways you can tell it.

If your application is packed with awards and accomplishments, your essay shouldn't mention a single one. And if your application is very academic, perhaps what the admissions officer needs is to meet the person who makes terrible jokes, calls their grandmother every Sunday, or has an irrational hatred of raisins.

Your personal statement doesn't always needs to add another impressive thing to your application, but the thing that's missing.

So before you decide what your essay is about, ask yourself:

What part of me would an admissions officer never know unless I told them?

What do I want them to understand that my activities list can't possibly explain?

When they finish reading, what do I hope they understand about the person behind my application?

Then, and only then, think about structure.

Maybe you have a Journey, a Mosaic, a Lens, a Tension, a Question; or a unique combination of them!

But if you take away anything from this post, it's that you shouldn't feel confined to any structure, not even the ones I have laid out here; they are just starting points. The most important thing is finding your story, and strategically choosing which way to tell it would best show who you uniquely are as a person.