The most common (untrue) thing I hear from teens beginning their college essay process is that they have nothing to write about. Nothing to say. Girl, that's a high aim! Monks train for years to attain that state of reverential silence. But most of us non-monk-types? We don't have nothing to write about. We just don't know how to bring it out, how to give it form and structure suited to the task. 30 seconds of "nothing" Take a minute (literally) and pause that belief, and watch your thoughts instead. Can you hear the non-silence? Can you hear the plenty? Most of us would ultimately agree: our mind never really stops talking to us. It repeats itself a lot too, in case we missed it the first time. Or the second. Just try to have complete quiet and stillness inside for 30 seconds and see how many life stories show up. Then follow where they lead as they slip over the horizon of your focus. And, of course, be their scribe! You work for them. :) And if you still (mistakenly) think you have nothing to write about, be a true committed spectator to that state. Watch your nerves fire and charge like Pac Man traveling around the twisting mysterious corners of your perplexing consciousness. It will eat those ellipses right up! Quick Exercise against "nothing" to write about For me, a great writing exercise to begins with listing brands. Yes, product brands. Start with your childhood. Make a quick list of brands in your household. (do it along with me!) Mine would look like this: -Ajax dish soap, St. Ives Scrub, Vaseline, Choc full o' nuts coffee, Jason's Jojoba Conditioner, Teddygrams And then I would build out more active memories from there, expanding each brand name into 1-2 sentences: My dad making his coffee at 4AM, smelling it when I couldn't sleep. The bowl of teddy grams next to my homework, which I did every day at the same spot at my parents creaking table. My mom's vaseline self-treatment for dry-skin, which soaked her feet while she Continue Reading …
Essays
Common App Essay Prompts 2025-2026 Are Live! How to start writing
Common App Essay Prompts 2025-2026 Are Live! Now Go Live (and Notice) Your Life! Common App Essay prompts are newly released for 2025-2026 college admissions, everyone's most relaxing season of life! Spoiler alert, the Common App essay prompts are the same as last year, which doesn't mean much to anyone who wasn't applying last year! Before you freak out (unless you enjoy a good freakout, which, by all means, you do you), I'm writing a post to make you happy. Note- The Common App website itself offers some basic resources for getting started on the personal essay, to encourage reflection. And this is a good time for reflection and introspection! When Should I Start My College Essay? Now-- Sort of. For most students, summer before senior year is plenty early enough to draft the essay proper, with the goal of a very strong draft before September hits. However, there are things you can do in the Spring of junior year that will lead you towards an incredible, magnetic Common App essay. This requires increasing your awareness, yes, but without trying too hard at all. It is possibly even pleasurable! I call this, how to write your college essay without writing it. Gather enough notes, and your college essay will start to crystallise for you. Really. How to Start Your Best Common App Essay Without Even Trying My 3-step college essay writing-ish process Notice your own thoughts, feelings, actions and passions Take Notes (in docs or voice memos) Organise your content What to notice to start your essay... Notice your own thoughts. Where does your mind go? When you're walking down the street, in your room, commuting? With family, your bestie? Doing something terribly boring? How quickly do you turn on something to listen to, and what are you listening to? How often are you looking up and out versus down at a device- yes, even while walking? What are you taking in? OK, my friend. TAKE NOTES. That's right- on Continue Reading …
College Essay Topics to Avoid or Rethink
College Essay Topics to Avoid or Rethink With 10,000 things inside you…why choose the few that aren’t the best bet for your college essay topics? If you’ve been on the planet roughly 17 years, you have PLENTY to write about. While I have seen students write great, successful college admissions essays on almost every topic imaginable, including ones we'll advise against here, there are some topics that take you into risky territory. Those risks may not be worth the possible strike against your admissions options. In the end, you decide. Certain college essay topics are considered particularly inappropriate to write about for this purpose (admissions) or are best to avoid for very specific reasons. These topics: don’t really focus on you and your growth wade deep into trauma from which you may not yet have adequate emotional distance Make you look like someone who makes destructive choices, and might do so again are cliche or predictable in story arc Are B O R I N G Are better handled elsewhere in the application Write those stories- but elsewhere It's NOT that those essay topics should not be written about, period. Many of them must be written about for the world–or your world–to go on with integrity and wholeness. In fact, nothing (at all) should stop you from writing about no-no college essay topics of burning importance to you for another purpose. Sometimes, we have to free-write a personal essay that is pulling at our heart, masticating our mind or freeloading off us emotionally. We get it out on the page, and set it to the side for another day. Only THEN can we craft one that is best suited for admissions readers and the application genre– which, like most genres, comes with its important constraints. As a coach, teacher, and person, I’m never a proponent of self-censorship. However, knowing your audience is a crucial part of admissions essay (and any writing) success. Here, I’ll lay out some of the most common Continue Reading …
Anatomy of a college essay (a primer)
Understanding the anatomy of a college essay is not where most admissions guidance starts, but it can be where YOURS starts. You might have thought your college essay was just no more than a loaded 650 words with a central thesis and some compelling take-aways. You know, your most solid self-reflective prose and an ambassador of some facet of your innermost being. Yes, it’s that! But it’s also composed of other vital parts. If you’re new to this body of work, here’s an anatomy lesson. Your college essay has words (of course!) as its cellular building blocks. But it also has: A beating heart Lungs A skeleton Muscles A vascular system A nervous system Whether you’re an anatomy geek like me, or you like slightly hard-to-calibrate metaphors, or are bored of reading the same old same old about this admissions artifact, I see you! For the nuts and bolts, you can read my posts about the college essay timeline and writing process. Here’s a primer on the parts of your college essay. The beating heart The beating heart of the college essay is that moment when your reader can see inside to your vulnerability. The thing which, if grasped hard and pulled, you might not live without. The thing that almost hurts you to show on your sleeve. The thing you’re afraid to admit, but which is part of the alchemy that makes you you. Without a moment in the essay where I arrive at- and FEEL- the heart of the matter, it may not have the emotional energy the best writing needs. The lungs The lungs of the college essay have everything to do with the pace of the writing. The pace of the writing has everything to do with the reader’s ability to take it in what you are talking about. There is a reason we don’t normally inhale for 30 seconds straight. What would we do with all that oxygen? It’s important to strive for variable sentence length, the way you might breathe a little harder and faster to walk up stairs than to walk to your bathroom. Continue Reading …
College Essay Writing Timeline (A Primer)
College Essay Writing Timeline - A Primer (For parents and curious teens!) Parents of high school juniors and seniors often ask me about the college essay writing timeline and process. At first, the process is shrouded in institutional mystery, because the only part parents really know about is the end goal, or product. But how, and when, do we get there? And is there some kind of magic wand to expedite? There can be a lot of pressure on this one precious piece of writing, and there are ultimately some non-negotiable deadlines and no magic wand. However, if you understand that there is a process, and the college essay writing process produces reliably good results you might exhale. In fact, I hope parents exhale a lot! (Here’s 2 minute guided breath from Dora Kamau) I’m going to describe my recommended (optimal) timeline first, because it’s the first question I get (“When should a student start? How long should it take?). In a separate post, I’ll cover the college essay process, which can occur over a longer or more compressed time period. Later posts will be devoted to the ANATOMY of a college essay. If you’re already feeling overwhelmed about all things college, and prefer to talk directly to an expert and fellow parent, book your 30 min complimentary consultation HERE. Timeline for college essay writing process Spring Start When asked about the college essay process after all their applications have been submitted, students are rarely stressed to have started early. However, I think you can start too early. The college essay you write in Feb of junior year–even if you take a class or have guidance– is rarely going to be the one you send to schools. It’s the throat-clearing, orchestra-tuning round. And it has value as that. That said, all writing teaches you about writing, which teaches you about your thinking, feeling, and self. No effort is wasted! Between winter of Junior year and submissions season is a lot of months. You Continue Reading …
Is it cheating to use Chat GPT to write your College Essays?
A controversial take on a hot industry topic: is using Chat GPT to write your college essay cheating? Maybe, maybe not. It’s all about how you use it. Duke University announced this week they would no longer assign a numerical value to the essay as part of a student’s application: the rampant use of AI and of college writing coaches and consultants (like me!) skews the essay as a metric of a student’s independent writing ability. However, it can still give useful insights into their character. When is it cheating to use a tool? You can almost always cheat in life– including cheating on your college essay. So the question is, will you? Which begs the question, in the age of AI, is using Chat GPT to write your essay considered cheating? It depends. And it's not a new question. In college, I took a torturous 8AM Ancient Greek language class: Thucydides & The Peloponnesian War. Think: convoluted grammar, and geopolitics of long-dead people and long buried wars. Bellicosity, and weak dining hall caffeine. In a perfect world, independent work (or homework) is designed to enhance or embed learning. It’s designed for you to struggle a bit to retrieve the knowledge your ego thinks you’ve stored and mastered. However, at 2AM, when you’re stuck in a thorny section of translation, with pages left to go, and even caffeine has given up on you, what do you do? In the late 1990’s, there was no Chat-GPT, but you could look up the entire English translation of the Ancient Greek writers online- sometimes with word-for-word correspondence. You could get that homework done, correctly, on time, and by a 2:30AM bed time. Pretty tempting. Two obvious issues with cheating on your work: 1) Ethically, you didn’t really do the work by yourself. 2) The next time you hit that problem, you haven’t learned anything about how to solve it. The only thing you know how to do is where to find someone else’s answer. How to use Chat-GPT for your college essay- Continue Reading …