how to upload essay to common app

Do I need to upload my essay before submitting the application?

Jul 27, 2023 • knowledge, information.

Certain majors, such as Nursing, require the essay for application submission. Unless noted as required on the writing section of the application, you will be able to send your essay after you submit the Common App. Within 24 hours of submitting the Common App, you will receive a follow up email to create your student portal and have the ability to submit your essay there. 

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The 2021-2022 Common App Essay: How to Write a Great Essay That Will Get You Accepted

If you’re reading this, then you’ve probably started the very exciting process of applying to college—and chances are you may be a little overwhelmed at times. That’s OK! The key to getting into the right college for you is taking each step of the application process in stride, and one of those steps is completing the Common App and the Common App essay.

In this post, you’ll learn what the Common Application essay is, how to write one (including a free checklist to help you with the process), example essays, and much more. Let’s get started!

Table of Contents

What is the Common App, and More Importantly, What is the Common App Essay? Quick Facts on the 2021-2022 Common App Essay How Do You Write a Common App Essay?

What Should I Avoid in My Common App Essay? What Are Some Good Common App Essay Examples?

Common Application Essay FAQs

What is the common app, and more importantly, what is the common app essay.

The “Common App,” short for the Common Application , is a general application used to apply to multiple college undergraduate programs at once. It’s accepted by hundreds of colleges in the United States as well as some colleges internationally.

The idea is that the Common App is a “one-stop shop” so you don’t have to complete a million separate applications. That said, plenty of colleges still require their own application components, and the Common App, as user-friendly as it aims to be, can still feel like a bit of a challenge to complete.

Part of the reason the Common App can seem intimidating is because of the Common App essay component, which is required of all students who submit a college application this way. But never fear! In reality, the Common App essay is easy to ace if you know how to approach it and you give it your best.

So without further ado, let’s take a look at anything and everything you need to know about the 2021-2022 Common App essay in order to help you get into the school of your dreams. We’ve also created a downloadable quick guide to writing a great Common Application essay.

Quick Facts on the 2021-2022 Common App Essay

Below are just a few of the short and sweet things you need to know about the 2021-2022 Common App essay, but we’ll elaborate on some of this content later in this post.

How Do You Write a Common App Essay?

The million dollar question about the Common App essay is obviously, “How do I actually write it?!”

Now there’s something to keep in mind before exploring how to compose the Common App essay, and that’s the purpose of this task. You may be wondering:

• What are college admissions boards actually looking for?
• Why are you being asked to write this essay?

College admissions boards want to see that you can compose a compelling, well-crafted essay. After four years of high school, you’re expected to be able to craft a clear and concise piece of writing that addresses a specific subject.

So yes, you’re actually being evaluated on your essay writing skills, but the purpose of the Common Application essay is deeper than that—it’s to present the type of person and thinker that you are.

Regardless of which prompt you choose, colleges are trying to get a sense of how thoughtfully and critically you can reflect on your life and the world around you .

And furthermore, they want to get a sense of who you are—your interests, your personality, your values—the dimensional aspects of you as an applicant that simply can’t be expressed in transcripts and test scores . In short, you want to stand out and be memorable.

That said, there is no exact formula for “cracking the case” of the Common App essay, but there are plenty of useful steps and tips that can help you write a great essay.

(In a hurry? Download our quick and concise handout that sums up some of the keys to the Common App essay!)

1) Familiarize Yourself With the Common App Prompts and How to Approach Them

The Common App recently released the 2021-2022 essay prompts , which are almost the same as last year’s prompts, but with one BIG difference.

The prompt about problem solving (formerly prompt #4) has been replaced with a prompt about gratitude and how it has motivated you. According to Common App President and CEO Jenny Rickard, this change was inspired by new scientific research on the benefits of writing about gratitude and the positive impact others have had on our lives.

Additionally, the Common App now includes an optional Covid-19 prompt where you can discuss how you’ve personally been affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Now, let’s take a look at each 2021-2022 Common App prompt individually. You’ll notice that every prompt really has two parts to it:

• share, explain and describe a narrative, and
• reflect on, analyze, and draw meaning from it.

Let’s take a look.

  Prompt #1: A snapshot of your story

Prompt: Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.

• Discuss a background, identity, or interest that you feel is meaningful to who you are and/or that or sets you apart from others.
• Reflect on why this attribute is meaningful and how it has shaped you as a person.

  Prompt #2: An obstacle you overcame

Prompt: The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?

• Recount a time you faced a challenge, setback, or failure.
• Reflect on how this affected you, what you learned from it, and if it led to any successes later down the line.

  Prompt #3: A belief or idea you questioned or challenged

Prompt: Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea. What prompted your thinking? What was the outcome?

• Explain a time that you questioned a particular belief or way of thinking.
• Elaborate on what prompted this questioning, what the outcome was, and why this outcome was significant.

  Prompt #4: An experience of gratitude that has motivated you

Prompt: Reflect on something that someone has done for you that has made you happy or thankful in a surprising way. How has this gratitude affected or motivated you?

• Describe the specific experience or interaction that made you feel a sense of gratitude. Make sure to explain who did something nice for you and why it was surprising or unexpected.
• Explain, as specifically as possible, how this feeling of gratitude changed or motivated you. What actions did you take a result? How did your mindset change?

  Prompt #5: An accomplishment or event that sparked personal growth

Prompt: Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others.

• Describe an accomplishment or event that sparked personal growth for you.
• Reflect on the nature of this growth and/or a new understanding you gained in the process.

  Prompt #6: An interest so engaging you lose track of time

Prompt: Describe a topic, idea, or concept you find so engaging that it makes you lose all track of time. Why does it captivate you? What or who do you turn to when you want to learn more?

• Discuss a topic, idea, or interest that is so engaging to you that you lose track of time when focused on it.
• Reflect on and explain why this interest is so important to you, and your method of learning more about it.

  Prompt #7: An essay topic of your choice

Prompt: Share an essay on any topic of your choice. It can be one you’ve already written, one that responds to a different prompt, or one of your own design.

• Discuss any subject matter or philosophical question of interest to you.
• Reflect on the implications of this subject or question, and how it has shaped you, transformed you, impacted your life, etc.

  Now keep in mind that to some degree, it doesn’t actually matter which prompt you choose to answer, so long as you write and present yourself well. But you obviously want to pick whichever Common App essay prompt speaks to you most, and the one you think will provide you the meatiest and most meaningful material.

This is an outstanding guide to choosing the right Common App essay prompt, but as a rule of thumb, the “right” prompt will probably stand out to you. If you have to rack your brain, for example, to think of a challenge you’ve overcome and how the experience has shaped you, then that prompt probably isn’t the right one.

Authenticity is key, so choose the prompt you can answer thoroughly.

2) Brainstorm

Whether you know immediately which prompt you’re going to choose or not, do yourself a huge favor and brainstorm . Take out a notebook and jot down or free write all of the ideas that spring to your mind for as many of the prompts that you’re considering. You might be surprised what ideas you generate as you start doing this, and you might be surprised which ideas seem to have the most content and examples to elaborate on.

Also, it’s important to note that your subject matter doesn’t have to be highly dramatic or spectacular. You don’t have to recount a near-death experience, an epic overseas adventure, a 180-degree turn of faith, etc. Your ordinary life, when reflected upon thoughtfully, is interesting and profound.

3) Answer the Question (and Stay on Topic!)

This may sound painfully obvious, but for some of us, it can be hard to stay on topic. Each prompt is posed as a question , so don’t lose sight of that and let your essay devolve into a story about yourself that never really gets at the heart of the prompt.

As you’re drafting your essay—say after each paragraph—pause and refer back to the question, making sure each paragraph plays some part in actually responding to the prompt.

4) Structure and Organize Your Essay Effectively

The Common App essay isn’t like many of the other argumentative essays you’ve been taught to write in school. It is argumentative in that you are essentially arguing for why you are a good candidate for a particular college, using your personal experience as support, but it’s more than that.

The Common Application essay is essentially a narrative essay that is reflective and analytical by nature. This means that regardless of which prompt you select, you’ll be sharing something personal about yourself, and then reflecting on and analyzing why what you shared is important.

And even if this isn’t an essay format that you’re accustomed to writing, you can still rely on your knowledge of basic essay structures to help you. You’ll still need a clear introduction, body, and conclusion.

Let’s talk about those three pieces now.

Introduction

The purpose of an introduction is 1) to grab the reader’s attention and compel them to continue reading, and 2) to introduce the reader to the general subject at hand.

So the most important part of the introduction is a unique attention-getter that establishes your personal voice and tone while piquing the reader’s interest. An example of a good hook could be a brief illustrative anecdote, a quote, a rhetorical question, and so on.

Now, you may be wondering, “Do I need a thesis statement?” This is a great question and the simple answer is no.

This is because some students prefer to hook their reader with a bit of mystery and let their story unfold organically without a thesis sentence “spoiling” what is to come. This doesn’t mean you can’t have a thesis sentence, it just means you don’t need one. It just depends on how you want to build your personal narrative, and what serves you best.

That said, your essay does need a greater message or lesson in it, which is another way of saying a thesis . You just don’t necessarily have to write it out in the introduction paragraph.

It might help you to keep a thesis in mind or even write it down just for your own sake, even if you don’t explicitly use it in your introduction. Doing so can help you stay on track and help you build up to a stronger reflection.

Here are some examples of narrative thesis statements:

• I moved a lot as a child on account of having a parent in the military, which led me to become highly adaptable to change.
• The greatest obstacle I’ve overcome is my battle with leukemia, which has taught me both incredible resilience and reverence for the present.
• An accomplishment that I achieved was making the varsity volleyball team, which has made me grow tremendously as a person, specifically in the areas of self-confidence and collaboration.

As discussed earlier, there are two parts to each prompt: explanation and reflection . Each part should be addressed throughout the essay, but how you organize your content is up to you.

A good rule of thumb for structuring the body of your essay is as follows:

• Situate your reader: provide context for your story by focusing in on a particular setting, subject matter, or set of details. For example, you may frame an essay about an internship at the zoo with the phrase, “Elephants make the best friends.” Your reader knows immediately that the subject matter involves your interaction with animals, specifically elephants.
• Explain more about your topic and how it affected you, using specific examples and key details.
• Go deeper. Elaborate and reflect on the message at hand and how this particular topic shaped the person you are today.

Note that while there are no set rules for how many paragraphs you should use for your essay, be mindful of breaking paragraphs whenever you naturally shift gears, and be mindful of too-long paragraphs that just feel like walls of text for the reader.

Your conclusion should flow nicely from your elaboration, really driving home your message or what you learned. Be careful not to just dead-end your essay abruptly.

This is a great place to speculate on how you see the subject matter informing your future, especially as a college student and beyond. For example, what might you want to continue to learn about? What problems do you anticipate being able to solve given your experience?

5) Write Honestly, Specifically, and Vividly

It may go without saying, but tell your own story, without borrowing from someone else’s or embellishing. Profound reflection, insight, and wisdom can be gleaned from the seemingly simplest experiences, so don’t feel the need to stray from the truth of your unique personal experiences.

Also, make sure to laser in on a highly specific event, obstacle, interest, etc. It is better to go “narrower and deeper” than to go “wider and shallower,” because the more specific you are, the more vivid and engrossing your essay will naturally be.

For example, if you were a camp counselor every summer for the last few years, avoid sharing several summers’ worth of content in your essay. Focus instead on one summer , and even better, on one incident during that summer at camp.

And on that note, remember to be vivid! Follow the cardinal rule of writing: show and don’t tell . Provide specific details, examples, and images in order to create a clear and captivating narrative for your readers.

6) Be Mindful of Voice and Tone

Unlike in most academic essays, you can sound a bit less stuffy and a bit more like yourself in the Common App essay. Your essay should be professional, but can be conversational. Try reading it aloud; does it sound like you? That’s good!

Be mindful, however, of not getting too casual or colloquial in it. This means avoiding slang, contractions, or “text speak” abbreviations (e.g. “lol”), at least without deliberate context in your story (for example, if you’re recounting dialogue).

You’re still appealing to academic institutions here, so avoid profanity at all costs, and make sure you’re still upholding all the rules for proper style, grammar, and punctuation.

7) Revise and Proofread

This one is a biggie. Give yourself time during your application process to revise, rework, and even rewrite your essay several times. Let it grow and change and become the best version it can be. After you write your first draft, walk away from it for a couple days, and return to it with fresh eyes. You may be surprised by what you feel like adding, removing, or changing.

And of course, make sure your essay is pristine before you submit it. Triple and quadruple check for spelling and usage errors, typos, etc. Since this isn’t a timed essay you have to sit for (like the ACT essay test , for example), the college admissions readers will expect your essay to be polished and sparkling.

A tried and true method for both ensuring flow and catching errors is reading your essay aloud. You may sound a little silly, but it really works!

What Should I Avoid in My Common App Essay?

Resume Material

Your Common App essay is your chance to provide a deeper insight into you as a person, so avoid just repeating what you’d put on a resume. This is not to say you can’t discuss something mentioned briefly on your resume in greater depth, but the best essays offer something new that helps round out the whole college application.

Controversy

Okay, now this one is a bit tricky. On the one hand, you should write boldly and honestly, and some of the prompts (the one about challenging a particular belief, for example) are appropriate for addressing potentially contentious topics.

But that said, avoid being controversial or edgy for the sake of being controversial or edgy. Be steadfast in your beliefs for the greater sake of the narrative and your essay will be naturally compelling without being alienating to your readers.

Vague Stories

If you have a personal story that you’re not entirely comfortable sharing, avoid it, even if it would make a great essay topic in theory. This is because if you’re not comfortable writing on the subject matter, you’ll end up being too vague, which won’t do your story or overall application justice. So choose a subject matter you’re familiar with and comfortable discussing in specifics.

Unless they really, truly serve your essay, avoid general platitudes and cliches in your language. It is definitely encouraged to have an essay with a moral, lesson, or greater takeaway, but try to avoid summing up what you’ve learned with reductive phrases like “slow and steady wins the race,” “good things come in small packages,” “actions speak louder than words,” “you can’t judge a book by its cover,” and so on.

What Are Some Good Common App Essay Examples?

There are tons of Common App essays out there, including these Common App essay examples accepted at Connecticut College, which include explanations from admissions readers about why they were chosen.

But let’s take a look here at two versions of an example essay, one that is just okay and one that is great.

Both Common App essay examples are crafted in response to prompt #2, which is:

Essay Version #1, Satisfactory Essay:

During my sophomore year of high school, I tore my ACL, which stands for “anterior cruciate ligament,” and is the kiss of death for most athletic careers. This injury ended up being one of the greatest obstacles of my life. It was also, however, a turning point that taught me to see opportunity amidst adversity.

It was particularly awful that I was just about to score a winning goal during a championship hockey game when I was checked by a guy on the opposing team and came crashing down on my knee. It was pain unlike anything I’d ever felt before, and I knew immediately that this was going to be bad.

For the few months that followed the accident, I was lost, not really knowing what to do with myself. I didn’t know who I was anymore because hockey had been my whole world and sense of identity. Between working out, attending practice, playing home and away games, and watching games to learn more, it was my lifeblood. Losing my ability to play took a toll on me physically and emotionally and I grew lethargic and depressed.

And then one day I heard my school would be adding an advanced multimedia art class for those students who wanted to continue studying art beyond what was already offered. I had taken the handful of art classes my school offered and really enjoyed and excelled at them—though I had never considered them more than just fun electives to fill my scheduled, as required.

After a couple of weeks of the class, I began feeling better. Suddenly I wanted to draw or paint everything I looked at. I wanted to share the world around me as I saw it with others, to connect with people in a way I’d never done before. I met and made friends with many new people in that art class, people I would have never known if I hadn’t taken it, which also opened me up to all kinds of new mindsets and experiences.

We’re all familiar with the common adage, “When one door closes, another opens,” and this is exactly what happened for me. I might never have pursued art more seriously if I hadn’t been taken out of hockey. This has served as a great reminder for me to stay open to new opportunities. We never know what will unexpectedly bring us joy and make us more well-rounded people.

Areas for Improvement in Version #1:

• It lacks a compelling hook.
• The discussion of the obstacle and reflection upon it are both a bit rushed.
• It could use more vivid and evocative language.
• It uses a cliche (“one door closes”).
• It is somewhat vague at times (e.g. what kinds of “new mindsets and experiences” did the writer experience? In what ways are they now more “well-rounded”?).

Now let’s apply this feedback and revise the essay.

Essay Version #2, Excellent Essay:

My body was splayed out on the ice and I was simultaneously right there, in searing pain, and watching everything from above, outside of myself. It wasn’t actually a “near death” experience, but it was certainly disorienting, considering that just seconds before, I was flying down the ice in possession of the puck, about to score the winning goal of our championship game.

Instead, I had taken a check from an opposing team member, and had torn my ACL (or anterior cruciate ligament), which is the kiss of death for most athletic careers.

My road to recovery included two major surgeries, a couple months on crutches, a year of physical therapy, and absolutely zero athletic activity. I would heal, thankfully, and regain movement in my knee and leg, but I was told by doctors that I may never play hockey again, which was devastating to me. Hockey wasn’t just my passion—it was my life’s goal to play professionally.

For the few months that followed the accident, I was lost, feeling like a ghost haunting my own life, watching everything but unable to participate. I didn’t know who I was anymore because hockey had been my whole world and sense of identity. Between working out, attending practice, playing home and away games, and watching games to learn more, it was my lifeblood. Losing my ability to play took a toll on me physically and emotionally, and I grew lethargic and depressed.

And then one day I heard my school would be adding an advanced multimedia art class after school for those students who wanted to study art more seriously. I had already taken the handful of art classes my school offered and really enjoyed them—though I had never considered them more than just fun electives to fill my schedule, as required. And, because of hockey, I certainly had never had afternoons open.

After a couple of weeks of the class, I began to feel alive again, like “myself” but renewed, more awake and aware of everything around me. Suddenly I wanted to draw or paint everything I looked at, to bring everything I saw to life. It wasn’t just that I’d adopted a new hobby or passion, it was that I began looking more closely and critically at the world around me. I wanted to share what I saw with others, to connect with people in a way I’d never done before.

My art teacher selected a charcoal portrait of mine to be showcased in a local art show and I’ve never been more proud of myself for anything. Many of my friends, family members, and teammates came to see the show, which blew me away, but also I realized then just how much of my own self worth had been attached to people’s perception of me as a successful athlete. I learned how much better it feels to gain self worth from within. Unlike hockey, which I’d trained to be good at since I was a toddler, art is something that made me much more vulnerable. I didn’t do it to try to be the best, I did it because it felt good. And getting out of my comfort zone in this way gave me a sense of confidence I had never known prior, despite all my time on the ice during high-stakes games.

Today, I’m back in skates and able to play hockey, but will probably not play professionally; while I am disappointed, I’m also at peace with it. We make plans in life, and sometimes life has other plans for us that we have to adapt to and embrace, which is the more profound lesson I’ve learned in the healing process. We can crumple in the face of obstacles, or we can look for a silver lining and allow ourselves to grow into more complex, dynamic, well-rounded people. I don’t know what the rest of life holds for me, but I do know that I’m going to keep making art, and I’m going to keep opening myself up to new opportunities and experiences.

Strengths of Version #2:

• It has a compelling hook that draws the reader in.
• It has a clear beginning, middle, and end (expressed as an introduction, body, and conclusion).
• It directly addresses the prompt at hand and sticks to it.
• It focuses on one specific incident.
• It is well balanced in its explanation of and reflection on a given experience.
• It uses a clear, unique voice and tone as well as vivid, evocative language.
• It has a logical and cohesive flow.
• It is highly personal while also polished and professional.

Hopefully these examples have given you ideas of how you can take your Common App essay from good to great. If you have more questions about how to write a Common App essay, keep reading our FAQs below.

How much do I actually have to write for the Common App essay?

Last year, the Common App essay was capped at 650 words with a minimum of 250 words required. The best essays tend to range between 500-650 words.

Think of it this way as you start to draft: 500 words is one single-spaced page (250 words is one double-spaced page), so you should write roughly a page to page and half of typed, single-spaced content.

Where can I find the official Common App essay prompts?

Here are the 2021-2022 Common App essay prompts , which are the same as last year’s, with the exception of a new prompt #4 and the addition of a Covid-19 Common App prompt .

Do I need a title for the Common App essay?

A title is not required for the Common App essay, but you are, of course, more than welcome to include one if you’d like.

Where can I go for more information about the Common App essay?

All of the necessary information for the Common App and the Common App essay can be found on the Common Application home page.

For further reading, here are some posts that tackle and dispel common myths about the Common App essay:

Myth: The Common App essay must sound professional. Myth: Colleges can’t tell if someone helps write a common app essay.

If you haven’t already, you can download our free Common App essay checklist .

Happy Writing!

There you have it! The Common App essay can actually be quite rewarding to write if you give yourself enough time to prepare for it thoroughly. Remember, it’s all about you, and you’re the authority on that! So hunker down and don’t forget to have fun in the writing process.

We’d also love to hear from you! What questions or concerns do you still have about the Common Application essay? What are you thinking about writing on?

Comment below, and good luck!

Nadyja von Ebers is one of Magoosh’s Content Creators. Nadyja holds an MA in English from DePaul University and has taught English and at the high school and college levels for twelve years. She has a decade of experience teaching preparation for the AP exams, the SAT, and the ACT, among other tests. Additionally, Nadyja has worked as an academic advisor at college level and considers herself an expert in all things related to college-prep. She’s applied her college expertise to posts such as UCLA Admissions: The SAT Scores, ACT Scores, and GPA You Need to Get in and A Family Guide to College Admissions . Nadyja loves helping students reach their maximum potential and thrives in both literal and virtual classrooms. When she’s not teaching, she enjoys reading and writing for pleasure and loves spending time in or near the ocean. You can connect with her on LinkedIn !

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Common App Essay Format

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Need to format your Common App essay? Follow our top tips to get this step completed as quickly as possible.

1. Use a word processing tool

Should you type your essay directly into the online common application or should you use a word processing tool? Answering this question is your first step in formatting your essay. Either option is possible, but at Studential we recommend using the word processing tool as it allows you to easily plan, check and correct your essay while offline. In any word processing tool, such as Microsoft Word or Google Docs, you will be able to format your essay.

For example headings using bold, UPPERCASE, italics or underline whichever is your preference (ours is Bold). You will be able to create paragraphs and check not only spellings and grammar, but also word counts. If you’re struggling for a word, most word processing tools provide thesauruses, synonyms etc. These are really useful and can spark ideas.

2. Check your word count

A very important fact is being able to check your word count (remember it is 250 to 650 words for your essay) and continue to recheck and refine it, until it is within this very strict word count. If you’re asking family and friends to proof read and check your essay before you submit it, you’ll also be able to set ‘track changes’ on the document so you can accept or reject their suggestions.

3. Add your essay

Once you’ve formatted it as you want it, the next stage is to cut and paste your essay into the correct field in the online Common Application.

Italics, bold and underline formatting from your word processing version should still be saved when you cut and paste. However occasionally when you cut and paste there may be formatting issues after you’ve pasted it. Don’t assume it’s all pasted correctly. Recheck it and reformat where you have to. For example, has the last line pasted in ok?  Do you have any line breaks or spaces that weren’t meant to be there? Are there capitals or lowercases which are incorrect? Is all the punctuation the same as the original? The online application essay field will also create block formatting of paragraphs and new paragraphs will not be indented. Instead there will be one line of space between each paragraph. This is normal for all online common applications and cannot be changed.

4. Beware your internet browser

Different browsers e.g. Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome may paste slightly differently, so if you struggle first time, try re-loading the online application using a different browser and then cut and paste again. Alternatively if this still doesn’t work, it’s about trying a different word processing tool. If you think you’re within the word count but it’s saying you’re not or your paragraphs are formatting incorrectly after you’ve cut and pasted them; the best idea is to cut and paste into Notepad (for windows users) or TextEdit (for Macs). Then from here cut and paste into the essay text box. This is because Notepad and TextEdit strip out all the formatting and just paste plain text. This may mean you need to create your paragraphs again but all the weird and wonderful formatting issues will most likely disappear.

5. Preview your essay

Once your essay is uploaded you can preview the page, once you’ve saved your changes and pressed continue. To double check the Common Application across all sections including your essay, you’ll need to fully complete every field and requirement and start the submission process. At this time you’ll have the option to save a pdf version to your computer. Don’t worry if you suddenly realize you’ve missed something. Since 2015/16 applications, the online system lets you make unlimited edits after you’ve submitted your first application.

Further information

For more tips and advice on putting together your common application for college, please see:

• Common Essay Prompts
• Choosing A Common App Essay Topic
• Common App Essay Introduction
• Common App Essay Conclusion
• Editing Your Essay

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A User’s Guide to the Common App for Transfer Students

What’s covered:, what is the common app for transfer students.

• Steps to Completing the Common App for Transfer Students

Where to Get Feedback on Your College Essays

Looking to transfer colleges? The Common App is making it easier than ever with the new Common App for Transfer Students. All required materials are now in one place, so you don’t have to worry about staying on top of multiple applications and websites during an already stressful time in your life.

In this article, you’ll find tips and step-by-step instructions on how to fill out your transfer application and feel great about what you submit.

The Common Application, or Common App, is a platform used by many schools for the college application process. Since schools typically ask for the same data when it comes to personal information and a general essay, the Common App provides a singular place where applicants can enter their information. The platform then allows your selected schools access to your application. Some colleges may have individual supplemental essays that you’ll need to write, but your personal information and Common App essay are only entered once.

In the past, transfer students would have to fill out applications through each school’s transfer applications. However, the Common App now has a program available for students who are looking to transfer, making the application process that much easier.

Step 1: Creating and Logging into your account

When you go to the Common App website and click “Create an Account,” it will ask you whether you are a first-year or transfer student.

Choose “Transfer Student.” You will be asked to provide personal information to create your account.

Step 2: Navigating the Dashboard

Once you’ve created your account, a page will appear where you can add programs that you would like to apply to, arranged in alphabetical order.

You can either add directly from this list by clicking on the plus sign or search for a school using the search bar at the top of the page. Once you choose programs, you will be given the chance to review your choices and proceed to your application dashboard. If you click “Skip for Now,” you will be taken directly to your application dashboard. 

Step 3: Filling out the Common App for Transfers

Personal information.

Clicking on “Personal Information” will open this menu. 

To fill out each section, just click on the individual headers. You will need to provide communication preferences, demographics, and contact information for yourself and your parents/guardians. The Common App also offers options for financial support through the “Common App Fee Waiver” section.

Academic History

In this section, you will need to fill out your past academic information. This includes any high schools and colleges you attended; coursework you completed at your past colleges; your GPA(s); standardized test scores such as the SAT Subject Test, AP or IB tests, College Level Examination Program exams, or Senior Secondary Leaving Examinations; and Continuing Education Courses you’ve taken.

Supporting Information

This section is where you can take the opportunity to include anything that is specific to you that will help you stand out during the application process.

Things to list under “Experiences” include community engagement, extracurricular activities, family responsibilities, hobbies, volunteering, work, internships, research, and other meaningful experiences. “Achievements” can be both academic and professional. For “Documents,” this will differ based on the school. Typically, you can upload a resume, military transcript, or visa documentation if needed, and schools will list on their website whether they require any additional documents. Finally, the “Affirmation Statements” section is simply a list of statements affirming that the information you have provided is your own and that you will take responsibility for your own application process.

Program Materials

In this section, you will be provided with information about any individual application requirements for each college you are applying to.

Clicking on the button for a college will take you to its page in the Common App. “Home” houses contact information for the school, while “Questions” is a list of demographic questions compiled by the college itself. You will have to fill these out in addition to the “Personal Information” section of the Common App, as these questions are specific to each school. “Documents” is where you can upload any documentation, while “Recommendations” is where you can include any academic, personal, or professional letters of recommendation.

Step 4: Submitting the Common App for Transfer Students

While there are less sections for transfer students than for first-year applicants, the typical requirements are the same. In addition to personal information, students are still asked to provide essays, letters of recommendation, and information about extracurricular activities. Ensure that you leave time to thoroughly review your application. The Common App notifies you about any unfinished sections, but it’s best to look over everything yourself as well.

Registration for the 2021-2022 Common App for transfer students closes on July 29 at 5pm ET, so you must create your account before then. Deadlines for individual school applications differ, so be sure to consider deadlines that may have already passed when looking at schools.

After you’ve reviewed your application and have made sure you are ready to submit, go to “Submit Application.” 

Your progress bar should be completely filled. When you reach this point, click the “Submit” button. The following steps will only become visible to you once you’ve completed your application; if anything is missing, the button will be grayed out, like in the screenshot above.

Once you click “Submit,” you will be able to review your application for the last time, so take the time to thoroughly go over each section. After that, you will be directed to the payment portal for the college to which you are applying. If you have requested a Common App fee waiver, you will not be required to make a payment at this point.

Once your application fee is submitted, sign and date your application and click “Submit” on your Common App. 

Writing college essays is a daunting task. Sometimes it can feel like you’re not even sure where to begin . Luckily, CollegeVine provides peer and expert essay review to make sure that you feel like you’re putting your best foot forward.

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The Admissions Strategist

Common application essays: the complete guide (2023-2024).

For many high school students, the most dreaded part of applying to college is writing the college application essay. And almost every student who applies to universities in the U.S. will write a Common Application (Common App) essay.

That’s because the Common App is an online college application form used by over 900 colleges. Most of the universities ranked in the top 100 nationally by U.S. News and World Report accept the Common App, including the Ivy League schools.

In this post, we’ll ease your college essay dread by sharing the 2023-2024 Common App essay prompts and tips for answering them successfully. 

Common App Essay Format

Let’s start with some basics about writing your Common App essay! 

• Essays must be 250-650 words. We recommend aiming for about 500 words. 
• You can use a standard five-paragraph essay structure for your Common App essay, with a clear beginning, middle, and end. If you’re comfortable branching out from this structure, feel free! As long as your essay is organized and well-written, the number of paragraphs is not important. 
• The Common App platform will not allow you to indent (tab) your paragraphs, so add an empty line between each paragraph to separate them.
• Type your essay in a separate Word document, then paste it into the Common App platform. The font should be standardized once you paste your work in. In case it isn’t, use a 12 pt., single space, simple font like Times New Roman or Calibri. 
• Avoid all caps, bold, underline, and italics because they can look more conversational than professional. The same applies to emojis, hashtags and excessive exclamation points.

Professional, easy-to-read formatting is important. But the content and quality of your writing is even more i mportant. So, let’s look at the Common App essay prompts. There are seven total prompts, and you can choose the one that most inspires you. 

2023-2024 Common App Essay Prompts

The seven Common App essay prompts for 2023-2024 are:

Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.

The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?

Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea. What prompted your thinking? What was the outcome?

Reflect on something that someone has done for you that has made you happy or thankful in a surprising way. How has this gratitude affected or motivated you?

Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others.

Describe a topic, idea, or concept you find so engaging that it makes you lose all track of time. Why does it captivate you? What or who do you turn to when you want to learn more?

Share an essay on any topic of your choice. It can be one you’ve already written, one that responds to a different prompt, or one of your own design.

How to Choose a Common App Essay Topic

With seven prompt options, how do you choose the right one? And once you’ve decided on a prompt, how do you decide what to write about?

After reading through the Common App essay prompts, it’s a good idea to choose three favorites. Then, brainstorm a list of topics for each of your selections. After brainstorming, write to the prompt that produces the best idea.

The best idea will be interesting, meaningful, engaging, or thought-provoking. It should be a topic that’s unique to you, or at least something that will separate your essay from the hundreds or thousands of others the admissions team must read. 

You should also ensure that your chosen topic is a good representation of you and what you bring to a college campus. Perhaps most importantly, it should be something you’re genuinely excited to write about.

Now, we’ll dive deeper into each prompt and how to answer them!

What should you write about?

This is an open-ended essay topic with nearly limitless possibilities. If you choose this topic, write about something that you consider central to who you are as a person. It can be about a hobby, interest, skill, or experience. It can also be about an element of your family, heritage, or culture. Think of this topic as, “Is there anything you really want to tell us about?”

What should you not write about?

Don’t write about a topic that applies to hundreds of other students. For instance, it’s better to avoid writing about the death of a family member or pet, being the captain of your school sports team (unless you can put an interesting spin on it), or your significant other. 

It’s also best to remember that you are the main character of your essay, so don’t focus on another person who’s an inspiration in your life, like one of your parents or grandparents. 

How should you write it?

First, pick something that’s genuinely meaningful to you. Your passion for the topic and its importance in your life should shine through in your writing. 

Once you’ve decided on a topic, think about how to frame it as a story. (Remember that the prompt says to “share your story.”) Your personal story about the topic will give your essay a unique perspective and help you stand out from the crowd. 

Begin the essay with a brief anecdote that highlights your topic. It can showcase how you got into the talent or interest you’re writing about or a meaningful moment in your life that’s relevant to your selected topic. It can also focus on a challenge you’ve experienced and overcome that’s tied to your identity or background. Use concrete, specific details that bring your story to life.

After the anecdote, reflect on why the topic is so important to you. How has it impacted your life and your growth as a person? What have you learned from it? How has it shaped your identity? Why is it an essential part of who you are? You don’t have to answer all these questions, but make sure to demonstrate your ability to reflect about your experiences in a meaningful way. 

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Note that this essay has three parts: 1) A time when you faced a challenge, 2) How it affected you, and 3) What you learned from the experience. Although you will need to explain a challenge you faced, the majority of the essay should focus on what you learned from the experience. 

So, consider if you’ve experienced a failure or setback that has taught you a valuable lesson or made you a better person. Do you respond well to challenges and obstacles, and is there an experience you can share that highlights positive qualities like determination, perseverance, and a positive attitude?

Challenges could include growing up in poverty, having a learning disability or physical disability, or being bullied. It could also mean missing out on an opportunity you really wanted, or being told you wouldn’t achieve something, then going on to accomplish it anyway. 

Overused responses to this prompt may include moving around a lot as a child, losing a championship game, or the death of a family member or pet. That doesn’t mean you absolutely can’t write about these topics, but make sure you have something new or insightful to say.

You should also avoid topics that could seem silly to the admissions team, like a break-up, failing your math test, or missing out on the party of the year. Don’t write about anything that calls your morals or judgment into question, such as any type of illegal or inappropriate activity.

Start by briefly describing the challenge, setback, or failure. Avoid overly negative language or complaining. Instead, state the facts. As always, use concrete details to make the story more unique and engaging.

Spend the rest of your essay discussing what you learned and how you grew. How did you handle the challenge and ultimately overcome it? Show positive qualities like resilience, integrity, courage, and persistence. What lessons will you carry with you into college and the rest of your life? 

This is one of the more challenging Common App essay prompts. It requires a passionate essay about a belief or value that’s important to you, something you’re willing to stand up for, even when it’s difficult to do so. Think about something that truly matters to you. Why does it matter? Have you stood by an unpopular opinion or belief? Why? What happened next?

Successful responses to this prompt have included an essay about a student challenging her self-doubts and insecurities, as well as an essay about a student standing up to her parents’ old-fashioned ideas about feminism. You could also write about challenging beliefs that are racist, ableist, or otherwise discriminatory. 

It’s important to avoid topics that are overly controversial or polarizing. You don’t want to write about something that makes the admissions team uncomfortable or offended, or something that they strongly disagree with. Politics and religion are risky. 

It’s almost always a good idea to launch right into the meat of your story. Describe the time you questioned or challenged an idea or a belief, using vivid details and active verbs. 

Then, discuss the outcome. How did your actions impact the people around you, your community, or your life? Reflect on why you chose to take a stand and why the value or belief you shared is important to you. How will this experience change or affect your actions in the future?

This prompt is risky because you want to sound passionate, but not preachy. Remember that you’re telling a story about an experience you had, rather than writing a persuasive essay about one of your beliefs. You should also demonstrate that you’re able to consider (and sometimes disagree with) other viewpoints without insulting them. Don’t sound rude, angry, or close-minded. Instead, show that you’re principled and have integrity. 

This is another broad prompt that gives you the opportunity to write about a time you felt gratitude. Think about how the people in your life have helped you grow. You can write about a small or big gesture that you appreciated. Consider the role of gratitude in your life, and how acknowledging positive experiences can inspire and motivate you. 

You can write about anything from a random act of kindness to something that restored your faith in humanity. It can be a kind gesture from a stranger, an unexpected and meaningful gift from a loved one, or something a person in your life said or did that helped you overcome a challenge or difficult time. 

Once again, remember that the main character of your college application essay is always you. So, you must be able to write about how you expressed your appreciation or responded to the gesture. How did it affect you? How does it continue to motivate you now? Did it inspire you to “pay it forward” to others? In what way?

You want to write about an uncommon act of kindness that deeply affected you, something you’ll always remember and draw inspiration from. In most cases, it’s better to avoid writing about something materialistic, like your parents buying you the car you’ve always wanted or getting you an expensive prom dress. If it costs money, but the gesture was personal and meaningful to you, then it’s okay to address it. 

How should you write about it?

Start by sharing the experience or gesture that you appreciate. Use specific details to show (not tell) how the gesture made you feel seen, heard, or acknowledged. What happened that touched your heart and inspired you?

For most of your essay, focus on how you responded and drew inspiration from the experience. What did you realize as a result? How did you express gratitude and appreciation? How did you choose to pay it forward? Is the act of kindness linked to your passions or aspirations for the future? 

Words like “event” and “accomplishment” are open to interpretation. It could be a major life event or a small occurrence that meant a lot to you. Often, the smaller events make for more surprising and memorable Common App essays. Whatever you’d like to write about, make it creative and interesting by sharing your unique perspective. 

Think about the moments, even small ones, that changed you as a person or opened your eyes to new ideas. Have you ever had an “aha” moment that impacted your perspective or actions moving forward? What’s something you’ve learned that made you feel more capable or more adult?

Make sure that the accomplishment, event, or realization is something that helped you learn or grow. Maybe you simply discovered something new about yourself, like leadership skills you didn’t know you had. Perhaps you learned a simple but meaningful life lesson, like the value of being open to feedback or slowing down to appreciate the little things in life. 

One overdone topic is sharing a community service experience that made you appreciate your own circumstances more. If you really want to touch on this topic, make it unique by discussing a small moment within the experience that affected you in a specific way, instead of something general like “appreciating life” or “being grateful for what I have.” As usual, you should also steer clear of anything illegal, illicit, or potentially silly. 

Briefly tell the story of your transformative experience. What happened, what did you accomplish, or what did you realize? 

Then reflect on how this moment in your life led to growth or change. How did it help you understand the world through a new or more mature perspective? What did you think or do differently afterward? Did it influence your values or future goals? Did it spark a new interest? 

By now, you’ve probably noticed a pattern. It’s best to start Common App essays with a brief story or anecdote that includes vivid details and active verbs. You want to make it specific so it’s not a generalized essay that any applicant should write. Then, it’s time to get reflective about how the experience impacted or shaped you. If you can relate it to your passions, aspirations, or identity, even better!

This prompt is all about your passions. It’s also an opportunity to showcase your capacity for self-motivated learning. College admissions teams admire applicants who are curious and resourceful. If something captures your attention, how do you go about exploring it and learning more?

Whatever you write about, it should meet two main requirements:

• You genuinely love it.
• You’ve taken the initiative to pursue more knowledge and more experiences related to this interest.

What sparks your curiosity, inspiration, and appetite for knowledge? Why? When you’re deeply interested in a topic, how do you seek to enrich your knowledge? What is your learning process? 

You can write about your love for dystopian literature, abstract art, chess, coding, the stock market, baseball stats, the culinary arts, or even applying psychology concepts to your favorite TV shows. Are you intrigued by quantum physics, Henry VIII, how to make the perfect cheesecake, or the ripple effects of the Treaty of Versailles? Be specific. 

As long as you can explain how you pursued more knowledge on the topic and continued to challenge yourself, don’t be afraid to get creative. 

As long as your topic meets the two requirements described above (you love it and you’ve independently pursued more knowledge), it should work well for this prompt. Of course, it could be tricky to write about your obsession with video games or reality TV. Make sure you can explain why the topic fascinates you and how you’ve enriched your learning in this area.

Start by discussing how you initially became fascinated by your topic of interest. Alternatively, you can start by describing your typical morning routine of checking the stock market, or describing your favorite corner of the local library. Share why your topic piqued your curiosity or immediately absorbed you.

Then, explain what you do to further your knowledge in this area. Remember to be specific and use concrete details.

Is your topic related to your college major or future goals? If it’s something non-academic, like perfecting your cheesecake recipe, briefly make a connection to more academic pursuits. Is the way you approach cheesecake the same way you approach preparing for a big test or sharpening your writing skills? 

In this case, you can write about anything . This prompt is 100% open-ended. It can even be an essay you’ve already written! But for the same reasons this topic is great, it’s also challenging. Responding to a specific prompt is often much easier than responding to a prompt that says, “Write whatever you want.” 

That being said, this is the prompt for you if there’s something you’re dying to share with the admissions team that does not apply to any other Common App essay prompt. What do you have to offer a college campus that no one else can? Is there a story you love to tell that will provide insight into who you are and what matters to you?

Any essay will technically fit this prompt. Just be sure to avoid controversial, inappropriate, or overly silly topics. 

The way you write this essay depends on the topic you choose. However, you can follow the general rules of thumb outlined in our advice for the other essay topics. Start with an engaging anecdote that draws the reader into your topic. Then include some reflection about why it’s important, what you learned, or how it’s impacted your personal growth and future aspirations.

General Essay Tips

For any of the Common App essay prompts, as well as supplemental essays and short answer questions, follow these tips:

• Share new information. In your essay(s). Provide information that the admissions team won’t find anywhere else in your application. This is an opportunity to highlight aspects of your personality and life that don’t fit anywhere else.
• Write in your voice . Your essays should “sound” like you. If the schools you’re applying to don’t offer interviews, this is your best chance to let your personality shine. The admissions team wants to know who you are, beyond your GPA and test scores.
• Use specific details. We’ve said this a lot, but that’s because it’s important. Vivid details and memorable language set your essay apart from the pack, even if your topic is extremely unique or groundbreaking.
• Be creative. Don’t be afraid to get creative and highlight what makes you unique, within reason. Admissions officers that have read thousands of repetitive essays will appreciate something that’s a little zany. 
• Proofread carefully. Read over your essay multiple times for clarity, concision, grammar, and spelling. Delete unnecessary or repetitive words and phrases. Try to use active verbs (e.g., “Joe interviewed me” instead of “I was interviewed by Joe,” or “My mom picked me up from school” instead of “I was picked up by my mom”). Ask a trusted friend, family member, or teacher to review your essay too. 

You should also make sure your essay answers the question the prompt asks. Write about something that’s important to you, and always make sure to reflect. You aren’t just telling a story; you’re showing what you learned, how it changed you, and why it’s important enough to be the focus of your college application essay. 

Final Thoughts: Common App Essay Tips

Writing your Common App essay doesn’t have to be scary. Believe it or not, it can even be fun. The key is to choose a topic that you’re excited to write about. Dig into something that’s important to you. Get creative, use specific details, and reflect on your experiences. 

Don’t try too hard to impress or use vocabulary words you’ve never used before. Be yourself – just a more polished, professional version. Write in your voice and let your personality shine. That sounds at least a little fun, doesn’t it?

By following these tips, you’ll reduce your college essay stress and write a memorable essay that college admissions teams will love.

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How to Write a Winning Common App Essay

Including 3 stellar common app essay examples.

The Common App essay, also called a personal statement, is one of the trickiest components of a college application. Many students struggle with how to make their essays stand out from the crowd. After spending years building up an excellent high school resume , getting good grades, and dreaming of college, it could all come down to one 650 word college essay ! That’s a lot of pressure. Don’t worry – we’ve got you covered. In this blog, our college essay advisors tell you everything you need to know about the Common App essay, how to brainstorm ideas, how to write it, the biggest challenges, mistakes to avoid, and handy tips to keep in mind. We also provide a few samples to help you understand what types of essays actually impress college admissions committees.

>> Want us to help you get accepted? Schedule a free strategy call here . <<

Article Contents 48 min read

The Common App essay is the personal statement that students have to submit on the Common Application portal. College apps are getting tougher by the minute as students are judged on so many different criteria – academics, of course, but also extracurriculars, letters of recommendation, supplemental essays, and the personal statement. All the hard work you put in towards taking on tough IB and AP classes, servicing your community, committing to your extracurriculars, could all be wasted because of one essay, that most students write in a month!

Many students are intimidated by the concept of the essay, not just because of how important it is, but also because they simply don’t know what to write in it. How personal should they get? What’s the right tone? What are colleges even looking for? With these questions running through your mind, it can be hard to focus and actually start writing.

But the Common App essay is like any other aspect of your application, or in fact, like any other challenge you meet in life. With adequate preparation, strategic planning, and a commitment to excellence, you can produce a Common App essay that’s sure to impress college admissions committees. In fact, if you do it right, writing this essay could actually help you refine and perfect your writing skills and even teach you things about yourself that you didn’t know! Read on to learn failproof tips from our college admissions consulting experts!

The Common Application, often called Common App, is the cornerstone of the college application process for most students in the US and Canada. It’s an online, centralized portal that gathers college application components from students and sends them to colleges. Students only have to submit their application once, and it’s sent to every college they want to apply to. With over 900 participating colleges all over the world, the Common App just makes life so much easier for high school students applying to college, not to mention their parents and teachers. Can you imagine if you had to send an individual application to each and every college you’re applying to? Well, you still might have to send out 2 or 3 different applications since not every college in the US and Canada uses Common App. For instance, UC schools have their own application system and if you’re targeting those, you will have to submit a separate application. But the overwhelming majority of colleges in the US do utilize Common App, which makes it a huge boon during application season. In one portal, you can submit your personal information, transcript, list of activities, letters of recommendation, and the personal statement, which will go out to all the colleges you want to apply to.

So, what is this dreaded Common App essay anyway? If you’re a high school student applying to college, you might know it as your main essay or personal statement. This is the component you submit in the “Writing” tab of the Common App, where you’ll find the 7 Common App prompts for the current application season along with a textbox where you write your essay in response to one of the prompts. It’s strongly recommended that you write your essay in a Google doc, MS Word, or some other reliable word processor with backups, and then copy paste the final draft into the Common App textbox. You should not be typing your first drafts and making revisions directly in Common App! You might end up losing the essay due to a technical glitch or worse, submitting a rough draft by accident.

The great thing about the Common App essay, and one that students frequently forget, is that the same essay goes out to all the colleges. So, you don’t need to write individual essays for each college or tailor your essays to talk about specific courses or universities. In fact, you should aim to keep your Common App essay as general as possible, without reference to any specific schools or degrees. For instance, if you make your Common App essay very focused on your passion for science subjects and talk about your desire to attend a top engineering college, while you’re applying to liberal arts schools as well, you’re tanking your chances of getting an acceptance from the latter. Don’t worry, you’ll get your chance to get college-specific when you’re writing your college supplemental essays.

Would you like more tips for how to write a stellar common app essay?

Difference between Common App essay and supplemental essays

As part of your college application, you’re expected to submit a number of different written components, from the descriptions of your extracurricular activities to your personal statement and the supplemental essays. It’s very important that you understand the different requirements and purpose of each of these written components and tailor them as needed. Specifically, make sure you don’t get confused between the Common App essay and the supplemental college essay. As we mentioned above, the Common App essay is your 250-650 word personal statement that you submit with your primary application on Common App. You only need to write one, and it goes out to all the colleges you apply to. The purpose of the Common App essay is to give the college admissions committees a better idea of who you are as a person and what makes you unique. It should be focused on your life and experiences, without any reference to a specific college or bias towards a specific stream (such as STEM, liberal arts, etc.).

Once your primary application is processed and if you make it through (though not all colleges screen primary apps), specific colleges will start reaching out to you with their supplemental application that will include prompts for essays. In these essays, you’re expected to get specific and address why you want to get into that college and reference your academic interests. Colleges can ask for more than one supplemental essay, and the required word count can vary. Some have a maximum word count of 250 words while others match the maximum length of the Common App essay at 650 words.

How do you differentiate between these two essays? How do you even find enough material for all these essays? Well, think of your Common App essay as your broad personal statement, an answer to the question “ Tell me about yourself ” (in relation to specific prompts), while your supplemental essay focuses in on the question of “Why do you want to attend this college?”. The two essays should complement each other, but there should be no overlap.

How can you ensure this? That’s what we’ll explain in this blog. If you do your Common App preparation right, and give yourself enough time to brainstorm, you’ll most likely come away with plenty of raw material, topic ideas, and inspiration for your supplemental essays too. There will be plenty of ideas you might reject as unsuitable for your Common App essay which could work for your secondary app essays.

Why is the Common App essay important?

So, if colleges will be asking for college-specific essays anyway, why is the Common App essay important? Well, in many cases, you won’t even get to the supplemental essays stage without an impressive Common App essay. This essay could count for 10% to 30% of how your primary application is evaluated, and the more elite the college, the more important it is. That’s because elite colleges such as Ivy League schools receive a huge volume of high-caliber applicants. They have plenty of applications from students with top grades, amazing extracurriculars, and references, so the Common App essay really becomes crucial in making an application stand out. Additionally, some schools, such as private liberal arts colleges, favor a more holistic admissions process. These colleges often don’t prioritize standardized test results as much as other schools and give more weight to the students’ extracurriculars and personal statement.

The Common App essay could be the deciding factor between you and another candidate with a similar profile. Many students with the best grades in their class and a roster of impressive extracurricular activities, not to mention top SAT scores, end up rejected from their dream schools because of a poorly-written essay. Having said that, it’s important to remember that no matter how great your personal statement is, it won’t make up for uneven grades and a less than robust resume, especially at elite schools with competitive admissions.

Remember that the Common App essay represents a final chance for you to take your application to the next level. By the time you’re writing and submitting your essay, there’s not much you could do about your transcript, your history of extracurriculars, etc. These components are long-term achievements which can’t be accomplished in a day. But you’re in complete control of your Common App essay and it’s your one chance to advocate for yourself in front of the admissions committee.

In fact, from the students’ perspective, this is what makes the Common App essay so important. Most of your primary application is quantitative, focused on grades, scores, contact information, and so on; your essay is one of the few “qualitative” components of your application. It allows you to speak directly to the admissions committee, and really humanize yourself, help them see you as person rather than just a collection of facts and figures. Your grades and standardizes test scores and all those other application components are certainly important – they indicate your academic prowess, your talents, your abilities – but they don’t represent you as a person. Everybody has a unique story and adding that personal context can really enhance your application.

Common App Essay Prompts

Common App releases the prompts for every admissions cycle around spring. The prompts have stayed more or less constant over the last few years, though a couple of prompts are occasionally changed, so it’s always a good idea to check them when they are released. You can select any 1 of the 7 prompts provided to write a 650 word essay.

These are the latest Common App essay prompts.

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Colleges have no preference for which prompt you pick. Some students prefer to look at the prompts and get inspired, and that could work, but ideally, you should brainstorm ideas about the best stories and narratives from your life that could work for your Common App essay before picking a prompt. You can then tailor the ideas as per the specific prompt ask. As there are so many open-ended prompts, you’ll have a lot of freedom to choose a topic that works best for you.

Many students believe that Common App essays have to be extremely serious, talk about a traumatic or deeply impactful event, or document amazing achievements. Of course, you can choose to write a serious essay focused on any of these topics (or others) – but they’re not the only kind of essays that get acceptances! Many students write about light-hearted or seemingly trivial topics but are able to make their essays meaningful and unique. You should never sacrifice authenticity and truth for “razzle-dazzle”. Focusing on what the admissions committee wants or prefers is a useless exercise. Not only will it make your essay seem forced and pretentious, but it also has no basis in fact, since admissions committees don’t actually have any “preference” for a specific topic.

Would you like more guidance on how to write stellar college essays?

Common App Essay: Unique Challenges

Essays are a crucial part of any admissions process. If you decide to pursue graduate studies, you’ll undoubtedly have to write a statement of purpose for graduate school , among other types of essays and written submissions. And naturally, grad school level essays are longer and more challenging. At the same time, in some ways it’s easier to write an essay about yourself when you’re older. High school students face unique challenges when writing their essay and that often causes the “blank page panic” when they sit down to actually write their essay.

For one thing, younger students talking about themselves are talking as much about their potential and their dreams, as they are about their actual experiences. You can’t expect that at this early stage in life, students have had some great epiphanies or breakthroughs. High school students are still forming their identity and exploring who they are. It’s difficult to know exactly what to write to make yourself stand out from the crowd when you’re not even sure who you are or what your unique experiences are. That’s why many students experience writer’s block and find it difficult to know where to even start. Moreover, communication skills develop with time, and younger students may find it more difficult to express themselves in a natural, eloquent way, through their writing.

That’s why it’s so, so important that you should give yourself plenty of time to write your essay and break down the process into several steps that will help you logically bridge every fear and uncertainty you might have.

Recommended Timeline

As we mentioned above, the best way to handle your Common App essay is to break down the writing process into several steps and give yourself plenty of time to complete each step. Before we get into the actual timeline, let’s figure out what would be the best time to start writing your essay.

When to start?

Common App applications open in August, but they release their essay prompts as early as March or April. This gives students plenty of time to work on their essay – and not many students make full use of this time!

Our recommendation is that you work backwards from when you want to target sending out your applications and start working on your Common App essay 3 months before that date. This might seem like a huge amount of time for a 650 word essay, but trust me, you’ll need it. We’ll break down the reasons why in a minute. Just know that without spending a few months on your essay, you won’t be able to give it your best shot and truly make it stand out.

If you’re targeting early acceptance deadlines, you’ll probably have to submit your primary application by October and secondaries by November. If you’re targeting regular application timelines, then you have a bit more time as primary deadline is in November and secondaries’ deadlines are in January. Different colleges have different timelines, so you’ll have to check the admission websites of the colleges you’re applying to so you can confirm the exact dates.

You should plan your Common App essay timeline according to these dates. For instance, if you’re targeting early decision admission, then the secondary applications would most likely be due in October or November. So, the ideal time for you start your Common App essay work would be around July. This timeline also works as you can then spend your summer before senior year of high school working on your essay. Even if you’re busy with a summer job or a summer program , you’ll still have more time to devote to writing and brainstorming than you would during your school year.

We suggest that you don’t wait till the last minute to work on your essay. While of course it’s possible to write your essay in a month or even sooner, that will not give you enough time for the “preparation” stage of writing your essay. It will definitely impact the quality of your essay and make it that much harder for you to find your “voice”.

Moreover, leaving your essay-writing till the last minute is just a recipe for chaos. Remember that once your senior year starts, and those application deadlines start approaching, you’ll get busy with all the other submissions that are due for your application, and you’ll have the secondary essays to worry about too. Once school starts, you’ll have to manage all that with keeping up your grades and devoting time to your extracurriculars. You won’t have much time or (more importantly) the mental energy left over to deal with your Common App essay. That’s why we highly recommend that you use the summer before your senior year of high school to do the major work on it.

Starting early will also give you time to seek out feedback on your essay. Specifically, it will give you sufficient time to approach your referees (who will be writing your letter of recommendation) and show them a draft of your Common App essay. This action serves a dual purpose. First, as mentors, they could provide valuable feedback. Second, looking through your essay can help them calibrate their perspective on you, see you in a different light, and influence what they include in your letter.

Remember that if you really want your college application to stand out, you need to tell a consistent story that is supported by all the different elements of your application: the essay, the supplemental essays, the letters, and the extracurriculars. Each component should communicate different aspects of yourself that complement each other and present a picture of a real person with depth and something unique to offer. The synergy between these different elements, and a consistent narrative, can make your application really impressive and prove your clarity of mind and focused ambitions. However, it’s not easy to achieve this effect while also keeping your essay as authentic as possible. So, how do you make the best use of the opportunity the essay presents you, while still presenting evidence-based points that are supported by your experiences and align with the rest of your application? Well, that’s why we recommend starting your essay writing process so early! It’s not a simple matter of picking a prompt and writing a couple of drafts of the first topic that comes to mind. You might get a good essay that way – but if you want a GREAT essay, one that will truly stand out, you’ll need to put in the hard work and advance preparation towards making that happen.

This is the timeline we recommend to help you write a stellar Common App essay.

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As you can see above, it will take you around 3 months, as per the timeline, to create the final draft of your Common App essay. If you start in mid-June or July, you’ll be finishing it up and asking for feedback around September, once school starts. That leaves you a couple of months to work on the rest of your application and secondary essays.

While this timeline represents the ideal amount of time you should be spending on your essay, you can condense it down as it suits you. Make sure you’re aware of the key application deadlines for the colleges you’re applying to, including early admissions deadlines (if applicable), and ensure that your essay and the rest of your Common App components are ready in time.

Next, let’s see how to complete each of the steps we’ve listed above. 

Are you looking for help with your college application? Check out this guide:

Preparing for Your Common App Essay

We recommend that before you actually start writing the first draft of your essay, you should spend some time brainstorming and freewriting, exploring different prompts, and reflecting on yourself and your life so far. This kind of pre-writing preparation is a crucial step to writing an effective, meaningful, and memorable essay. Not only will it help you identify topics for your essay, but it’s also a great way to broaden your perspective on yourself and think deeply about who you are and what you want. Moreover, this exercise isn’t just useful for your Common App essay – all your reflections from this period can also be used to help you write your supplementary essays!

Brainstorming Part 1: Self-reflection

We recommend spending a week or 10 days focusing on self-reflection and introspection. This is similar to “journaling”, something you may actually already be doing, but with a greater focus on writing about topics related to your Common App essay.

You should spend 10-15 minutes every day writing in your journal. At this stage, just indulge in some free-wheeling thought association about your life, your experiences, your goals, what makes you unique, what are the biggest obstacles you’ve faced, and so on. Note down any essay topics that come to you but don’t stress out if nothing suggests itself. The important part here is to start the process of self-reflection and to start narrating your experiences.

Life can seem like a random collection of events, but each of us is on our own journey of growth and learning. Don’t get bogged down by expectations and other people’s ideas – this is the time to just focus on yourself and what makes you unique. No idea, experience, or perspective is too silly or strange. Write down whatever comes to your mind as something significant that you’d like to discuss in your Common App essay. To get your self-reflection started, here are 4 questions you can ask yourself:

• Who are you?
• What makes you different?
• What are you passionate about?
• What do you hope to achieve?

While doing this exercise, you should be wary of getting too invested in the college application “checklist” and reducing your life to a series of achievements or key experiences. You’re not writing a resume; you’re just exploring who you are and getting into the habit of thinking and writing about yourself. In fact, the whole point of the personal statement is to provide a perspective of yourself beyond what’s already shared in the other application components.

Brainstorming Part 2: Prompts

Once you’ve done some general self-reflection and identified some important narratives and qualities about yourself that you’d like to highlight, go back to your list of prompts, and see which one jumps out at you. At this stage, for some students, one or the other prompt may seem like an obvious choice. For example, if you’ve found yourself journaling a lot about a significant traumatic event such as the loss of a loved one, prompt no 2, which asks you to talk about a setback or obstacle, might seem like the answer. But don’t be so hasty to fix on a topic. Remember, at this stage, you haven’t even begun to define your topic! Getting too attached to an idea too early is as bad as not knowing what to write about, as it can prejudice you against exploring different ideas and maybe finding a more appropriate one.

Ideally, at this stage, you should be looking at 3 or 4 different prompts and brainstorming specifically in response to them. That way, you’ll have a variety of different experiences and narratives to choose from when you’re ready to write your first draft.

Below, we’ve listed a few key considerations and reflections for each of the prompts, that can serve as a starting point for your brainstorming. Spend some time every day – it could be 10 minutes, or it could be half an hour – just writing down your instinctual responses to the prompts, using our questions and reflections as a guide.

Prompt 1 : Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.

This prompt is an excellent opportunity for you to talk about any hobbies, talents, extracurriculars, and any other interests that are important to you and that you haven’t got a chance to talk about elsewhere in your application. This includes “useless” hobbies that may not be achievement oriented, but that you’re nevertheless passionate about, such as needlework, playing video games, volunteering at an animal shelter, and so on.

It’s also an opportunity to reflect on your identity, your family, your hometown, and any other aspect of your personal life that’s both unique and important to you. Many students use this prompt to talk about their racial or ethnic identity, their sexuality, their gender, and so on. You can weave a story of personal growth through your interests or identify important influences on yourself and how they interact with each other. Here are some questions you can ask yourself:

• What was your upbringing like? What social environments surround you? How do they impact you?
• Where do you live? What are some key images that would strike a stranger about the area where you live?
• Where are your parents from? Have you ever visited their home town? What impression did it leave on you?
• What do people around you know you for? Do you have a long-term commitment to any specific skills or talents?
• What was your childhood like? Would you describe it as happy? What’s your happiest memory of childhood?

Prompt 2 : The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?

This is the “overcoming obstacles” prompt. If you’ve faced any major adversity in your life, that you think is significant to your story, this is your chance to write about it. Many students also use this prompt to talk about more minor obstacles, and describe a narrative of personal growth, self-reflection, and learning. Whatever the incident or topic you chose to talk about, the key here is to focus on how you dealt with and overcame the failure, challenge, or adversity.

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Prompt 3 : Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea. What prompted your thinking? What was the outcome?

Many students avoid this prompt as they believe it’s referring to big-scale, political activism and social service, and they don’t think they’ve ever made any kind of significant impact in this area. In fact, this prompt can be a great opportunity to talk about any time you experienced change in your value system, even if the impact was quite small. It could be as simple as noticing a need for change that prompted a change in your belief systems, for instance, a poor interaction with a doctor that made you think about how the healthcare system can improve. Here, you should focus on your thought process and map out the genesis of the change, and what impact it had on you.

• Think back to your childhood. Do you hold the same values you do today as you did then? If no, what made you change?
• Do you agree with the values and beliefs of your family, friends, and others close to you? If not, why do you hold different beliefs? Have you ever tried to change their mind/have they ever tried to change your mind?
• Think of a time when you questioned yourself or changed your beliefs. How did you change? Why did you start questioning yourself?
• Have you ever gone against the social norms of the people around you? What made you do that?

Prompt 4 : Reflect on something that someone has done for you that has made you happy or thankful in a surprising way. How has this gratitude affected or motivated you?

You can use this prompt to write a more philosophical essay that focuses on the impact another person made on you, and why it stayed with you. Most people would find it difficult to actually think of a material gift that left a philosophical impact on you and significantly changed your life. That’s why many students use this prompt to write about non-material “gifts” in the form of memorable advice, a challenge, an obstacle, or a task, that taught the student a valuable lesson and motivated them to do better.

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Prompt 5 : Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others.

This is one of the more open-ended prompts that students love to use as it allows them to amplify their achievements and talk more about “impressive” experiences in their life. Actually, it’s a mistake to use this prompt to just talk about the same extracurriculars and academics you’ve already covered in the rest of your application. Even if you do mention an extracurricular activity here that you’ve already covered elsewhere, the important thing is to bring a different perspective and reveal a new side of yourself. It’s not just about saying “I did this amazing thing”. You’ve got to think about how the event or accomplishment impacted you, what led up to it, and what you took away from the experience.

• Have you ever been deeply impacted by someone’s words, advice, or guidance? Describe the experience and how you changed after it.
• Have you ever had a “eureka” moment that changed your life? Did you ever experience a moment of clarity about something you want that helped you define your long-term goals?
• Apart from all the achievements listed in your resume, what’s your biggest accomplishment? Is there a seemingly insignificant moment of your life that you’re truly proud of? 

Prompt 6 : Describe a topic, idea, or concept you find so engaging that it makes you lose all track of time. Why does it captivate you? What or who do you turn to when you want to learn more?

This prompt is an ideal opening to help you talk about your more “useless” extracurriculars. The activities or interests that you’re passionate about, but which aren’t achievement oriented and hence don’t make it to your resume. It could be anything as simple as baking or bird-watching, or as abstract as an interest in how language works. If you can tell a story about how you found this interest, how it motivates you, why you love it, how it influences other aspects of your life, and how it helped you grow as a person, then this is the prompt for you. This is a great chance to paint a vivid picture of your inner life and communicate your unique way of thinking to the admissions committee.

• Is there something you’re so good at, people come and ask for your help? This could be really anything, from a musical talent to being good at fixing things around the house.
• If given unlimited leisure time, how would you spend it? What would you do if you didn’t have any obligations to go to school or earn a living? What sparks your passion for life?

Alright, so you’ve done some journaling and brainstormed a few essay ideas in response to the prompts. Don’t jump straight into selecting the idea and writing the essay – spend at least a couple of weeks, ideally 3 weeks, indulging in free writing. Try your hand at writing in response to a few different prompts, or all of them, if you have the necessary inspiration. Don’t think about restrictions such as word count, flow, structure, or any of that just yet. Just let your inspiration run free and write about anything you like.

The goal here is loosen your writing up, shake free the cobwebs from your brains, and get into the habit of writing about yourself. This is when you can work out the little awkward details in your writing and develop a more natural writing style. Some of this raw material, after some editing, could even make it to your essays, but don’t be too concerned at this stage with the “outcome” or this exercise will be wasted. Write without pressurizing yourself to produce brilliance, using the prompts as a kind of starting off point for a free associating exercise. This step is crucial to making sure your final essay sounds authentic, natural, and personal, rather than a formal summary of events or a forced statement of facts.

Give yourself a daily goal – 10 mins, or a few pages, whatever works for you. You should ideally do this activity in the morning, when you’re fresh and have a clear, relaxed head space. Select a cool, quiet corner of your house or a library where no one will interrupt you and sit down with your writing instrument of choice – notebook, laptop, or whichever medium feels most natural and comfortable for you!

If you find yourself facing writer’s block, shake yourself out of the rut by asking yourself “why”. Whatever you’re writing about – an idea, experience, event, or person, ask yourself why is this important to me? Why do I care? Why does it bother me? And keep going.

Another important tip at this stage is not to ask for feedback or show your writing to anyone. This is the time for ideation, not perfection. In fact, step away from your own writing for some time and don’t come to re-read it till after a few days. This is a great way to reap great essay ideas and get around your own anxiety and self-doubt.

What all of this pre-work does is help you avoid time wastage and inefficiency at a later stage. If you simply start off writing an essay based on a prompt without any brainstorming or preparatory work, you might spend a lot of time struggling to write, work late nights trying to get the tone or the style right, and then still feel that it doesn’t quite work without any idea of why. Self-reflection helps you get to the core of the matter, identify the “juiciest” stories and experiences from your life, while brainstorming helps you work through the “bad” writing in a low-pressure environment. When you select a topic after all this work, you’re likely to feel much more confident about your essay and that will reflect in the smoothness and eloquence of your writing.

Selecting a topic

After your more than a month of daily brainstorming and freewriting, take a break for a couple of days and don’t think or write anything related to your Common App essay. Then, come back and go over the results of your journaling, brainstorming, and freewriting with a fresh eye, and select a topic that stands out to you. 

Here are some tips to help you select a good topic:

• Anchor your essay to a story, which will be the “hook” that opens the essay and draws the reader in. Focus on this story and which experience you’ll use to build the story, and that will help you select a topic. A personal, meaningful anecdote, such as the first time your mother taught you to make a specific dish, or the time you interacted with a new student who changed your beliefs, is an excellent opening for an essay. Try to think of significant experiences that could be great essay-openers and define your topic around that.
• Pick a “focus” for your essay. Is it a person? An event? An experience? A quality about yourself you want to highlight? Remember, it’s important to give your essay a single focus and do justice to that topic rather than try to crowd in too many elements.
• Connect your experiences to your ambitions and pick a topic that actually helps you show your potential, your ambitions, and your dreams. Sometimes significant experiences in your past don’t really have any connection to your future, though they might give you plenty to write about. Your topic should connect your past, future, and present effectively, and show a consistent narrative.
• Try and balance your application out strategically. Select a topic that shows a different side to yourself than what you’ve already communicated in the rest of your application, for instance, if your extracurriculars are focused on your competitive athletic career, talk about a completely unexpected non-athletic passion such as environmentalism or expand upon how your personal insecurities, and a time you failed, and how you learned to cope with it. Humanize yourself and bring a nuanced perspective to your achievements. On the other hand, if you have inconsistent grades or your extracurriculars aren’t that impressive, amplify your accomplishments and talk about the passions that you devote your time to, even if they aren’t resume-worthy.

You should start by selecting 4 to 5 topics that are most meaningful and personal to you and then narrow it down to the one that’s most suitable for the Common App essay. Don’t throw away the rest! You can use the rest of the topics to get inspired when writing your secondary essays. Moreover, shortlisting multiple topics ensures you always have a back-up if, for whatever reason, your initial essay idea doesn’t work out.

Remember: don’t let self-doubt be your biggest enemy. There is no wrong or cliché or boring or lame topic. When it comes to the Common App essay, the how and why is key, much more so than the what. Do YOU believe in your story? Are you speaking honestly and from your heart? Is there a logical narrative and flow to your essay? Is there a meaningful conclusion that you’ve drawn? These are the questions you should be asking yourself, rather than wondering what the admissions committees will think of your topic!

At the end of the day, admissions committees are not judging your experiences, but rather your way of thinking – they want to get to know you as a person. When you’re writing your essay, you can always monitor your language to make sure it’s not overtly sentimental or emotional, but your topic and the key narrative should be all yours and completely sincere. Even if it’s a so-called “cliché” topic – such as, for example, an immigrant’s story or the obstacles you faced as an athlete and how you overcame them – the important thing is, your essay should have nuance and depth and a well-thought out perspective.

Let’s get into how you can actually write an impressive Common App essay.

Writing the Common App Essay

Writing the first draft.

At this stage, you simply take the plunge and get into the actual writing of your essay. First of all, thanks to all your brainstorming and journaling, you’ll probably find the writing part quite easy! Most students are more challenged by the structure of their essay and figuring out how to create a logical flow with a meaningful conclusion. To help you out, we’ve listed a few common essay types that you can use to structure your essay. We’ll also go over how to outline your essay and create a logical structure.

Essay types

Selecting a “type” of essay can be helpful as a kind of guide for you during your writing process. The following are the most common essay types students use to write their Common App essay:

Specific Story : This is the classic and most popular type of personal statement. It opens with a personal, meaningful story, which is complete in itself, and sets up the “lesson” or “focus” for the rest of the essay. The essay may go on to discuss other related experiences or how that specific story impacted other areas of the student’s life, or it could expand various facets of the single story, connecting to the student’s present and future. This a is reliable essay style, but you should be careful not to make it to moralistic or fable like. For example, you could open the essay with the story of how you met a patient at an old age home you volunteered at, and how their words or actions had a meaningful impact on you and galvanized you to take action about how people at the old age home were treated. It’s a complete story in itself, and then you could move on to talk about how you are committed to always speaking up for those who can’t speak for themselves, and how you did that in other arenas of your life, and how you plan to pursue this goal in your future.

Iterative Pattern : This is a great essay type for those who want to talk about a journey of growth, learning, and self-reflection. Here, you open with an event or incident that may not have a definite conclusion or lesson, and then return throughout the essay to various related incidents that show a progression of a single theme through time. For instance, if there’s a specific issue you’ve struggled with, such as stuttering or public-speaking, you could start with incidents describing past attempts at public speaking and how you failed there, and then go on to describe how you worked towards improving yourself and overcoming your fears, and end with an incident where you actually achieved success in public speaking.

Circular : In this essay, you start with a story or incident, but don’t share the entire story or the final takeaway at the beginning. Instead, you use the rest of the essay to discuss how you felt about the incident, your thought process, the impact it had on you and others, and then you come back to the story and end the essay with a meaningful conclusion. For example, if you’re writing an essay for prompt no 3 (about a time you changed your mind), you could begin the essay describing an incident where you have to make a crucial decision – say, about whether or not you’ll expand the membership of your “boys-only” chess club to invite anyone who wants to join – then provide context about your family background, previous beliefs, and how you’ve changed them, and then come back to the provide the happy ending to the story, explaining how you not only changed the membership rules but took additional steps to make the new members feel welcome and comfortable.

Building Challenges : In this type of essay, you provide a series of different events or experiences in your life that all build on one another to present a kind of obstacle course that you have to overcome. This essay type is most often used to write adversity focused essays. For example, a student from a socio-economically disadvantaged background could start their essay talking about their earliest childhood struggles, how they overcame them, and then go on to expand on other struggles they’ve faced, which could be related to their background or their education or interests. They key with this type of essay is to focus on the “overcoming” adversity aspect, and to emphasize what you’re proud of and what you did well in these different circumstances. 

Creative Essay : These are essays that don’t confirm to any conventional formats. Some students chose to go completely off-beat and create a radically different essay structure. For example, you could write the essay in the style of a chapter from your favorite classic novel, but with you as the protagonist. Or, you could create a dialogue between two imaginary people, say, two important historical figures, talking about you. This is a very difficult kind of essay to pull off, but it can be high-risk, high-reward, when done right. Many students use it as a way to showcase their expert knowledge of any specific area or prove their creativity to the admissions committees.

Check out this infographic:

Essay structure

Once you’ve figured out, broadly-speaking, what type of essay you want to write and what you’ll include in it, the next step is to create an outline. Now, some students prefer to start with free writing and create a reverse outline later, but that’s not an ideal way to work. Reverse outlining usually takes up more time and isn’t very efficient.

Your essay should, generally speaking, include 3 to 5 paragraphs. More than 5 paragraphs could make your essay look very cluttered – remember you can’t go beyond 650 words! On the other hand, you’ll need a minimum of 3 paragraphs to cover the beginning, middle, and end, three crucial components in any essay.

Having said that, your essay topic and personal inspiration should always your structure, so if you think more than 5 paragraphs makes sense and is logical within the flow if your essay, go for it. However, we still wouldn’t recommend less than 3 paragraphs. Having a wall of text in front of you is just difficult to read and could get you marked down.

Create the following outline for your essay:

Depending on the type of essay you\u2019re writing, this could include another personal anecdote, or it could be a meaningful takeaway. It\u2019s very important to have a defining, impactful conclusion that sums up your thesis from earlier in the essay and ties up any loose ends. "}]">

Here are some tips to keep in mind for when you’re writing your essay:

Build the suspense : When you’re telling your anchor story, the one that opens your essay, make sure you keep building the suspense. There should be some mystery about what happens and conflict in the middle to keep it interesting. For instance, if you’re talking about that time that you overcame your fear of water after a swimming injury to finally return to the pool, don’t begin by saying “I got back into the pool after my injury for the first time on 6th September.” That gives away all the drama! Instead, build the story by describing your fears, the previous incident, and encouragement you received from your coach, and then end with the fact that you finally made it back into the pool.

Don’t deal in plain statements : To make your essay engaging, it’s very important not to rely solely on statements of facts and to back up every fact with evidence. This could be in the form of experiences or activities, personal incidents, descriptions of a specific setting, descriptions of your state of mind, and so on. For example, instead of simply saying “I was angry that I had to leave my hometown.”, describe an incident where you confronted your mother about her decision to move you away and talk about how that anger impacted your relationship with your mother. When talking about a meaningful outdoors trip, instead of saying “The forest was very beautiful.”, try giving specific, sensory-based descriptions and talk about how the setting impacted you, for example – “With the trees swaying above me and the leaves rustling in the wind, I found an inner peace and calmness I’d never experienced before.” Make your essay as engaging as possible, with thoughtful analysis, vivid descriptions, and beautifully set scenes.

Answer the prompt : Make sure, as you’re writing, that you’re addressing the prompt you’ve been given. Try and understand the prompt at a deeper level and don’t just create a surface level connection because it suits your topic. Remember, prompt no 7 is essentially a “free topic” so if you really want to create your own topic, that’s the one you should go for.

Be deliberate, authentic, and humble : Every sentence should have a clear reason for being included in your essay. At the same time, your voice should be as natural and authentic as possible. Don’t drop in pretentious references or brag about your achievements if they don’t belong in the essay. Keep your central topic in mind and only include details and events and relevant to it.

Beginning/middle/end : Your story should have a clear beginning, middle, and end. This is a fundamental rule of essay writing and is crucial to making sure your essay has a logical, coherent flow.

End with a key takeaway : Your essay should always have a learning, an epiphany, a moral, or talk about a new perspective you gained. You could introduce it earlier in your essay, but it should be reiterated in the concluding paragraph. 

Revising your essay: 2/3/4 drafts

We really cannot emphasize enough the importance of revisions and editing when it comes to writing your Common App essay. This is when you get your critical monocle out, place it over your eye, and give your essay a really thorough analysis. Most students satisfy themselves with just 2 drafts – the initial one, and the second one that they create after seeking feedback from their teachers or mentors – but you should ideally work on 3 or 4 drafts by yourself, before even showing the essay to anyone else. When you’re revising your essay, make sure you keep the following things in mind:

Is it too much? This is where you check yourself – remember that you simply cannot communicate every single thing about yourself in one essay. The key is to find one theme you want to expand on and focus on that. If there’s too many incidents, events, experiences, with no clearly defined conclusion or connection between them, it might be time to re-write your essay. As writers say, sometimes you have to “kill your darlings”, which means, you shouldn’t get too attached to specific ideas or sentences if they don’t fit in with the rest of your essay.

Is it too little? At the same time, it’s also possible to get too specific and be bogged down with unimportant details that don’t really add to your story. Ask yourself if your essay has a broader perspective or lesson to offer and if not, you need to add that in.

Show don’t tell : As we mentioned before, you should not be making unsupported statements and piling facts on facts. Check your essay to make sure your statements are all supported by accompanying examples, descriptions, or stories.

Use your outline : Keep coming back to your outline to improve you’re the structure and flow of your essay. It’s easy to get carried away with writing the introduction and making it too long, and the outline should help you stay on top of how much time you’re spending on each sub-section of your essay. Additionally, sometimes, a great description or line can be incorrectly placed in the essay, and your outline will help you identify that. For instance, your essay should never begin with your “key takeaway”, no matter how important it is. You need to build to it. So don’t be afraid to move things around. As you’re working, define the purpose of each paragraph and keep checking if your writing is aligning with that purpose.

Check for clarity : All essays should have a few key elements. That includes your anchor story, your central thesis or declarative statement, and your key takeaway. Is your essay communicating everything you want it to? Or is the message getting lost in a sea of words?

Trim the excess : Students are often tempted to include braggy details in their personal statement that are not relevant to the rest of the essay. This is a bad idea – it certainly won’t impress anyone and could make you seem pretentious and insincere. Similarly, students sometimes add personal details in their personal anecdotes that don’t add to the story and only editing will help you catch these little details. For instance, you really don’t need to add details of your appearance in any of your anecdotes, unless it’s directly relevant to the story.

Check grammar and spelling : Don’t just rely on auto-correct! Make sure you go over your essay with a fine-toothed comb, catching every spelling or grammatical error. Leaving these in is the best way to get yourself marked down by admissions committees.

Use varied sentence lengths and structure : Sometimes, when you’re writing in your natural style, you may end up repeating certain sentence structures that come most easily to you. Make sure you include a variety of sentence lengths. This makes your essay more readable and engaging.

Use active voice : Always use active voice wherever you can, rather than passive voice. For instance, instead of saying “The dance class was run by me from Monday to Saturday.”, try “I ran the dance class from Monday to Saturday.”.

Once you’ve thoroughly revised your essay and got it as perfect as you can from your perspective, it’s time to invite other people to take a look at it. Who should you seek feedback from? There are many options: friends, peers, parents, teachers, and older mentors. There’s always a risk with certain types of feedback, for example, parents may sometimes over-edit your work, making you lose your natural voice, whereas teachers could view your essay from an academic perspective and ask you to make it more formal. Ideal reviewers are older mentors, friends who have recently and successfully been through the admissions process, guidance counsellors, or admissions experts.

The most important thing is that you trust your reviewers and that they know you well enough to give you genuine, well-meaning feedback. Keep an open mind to all the feedback you receive, but remember, don’t sacrifice your voice. In case of a serious disagreement with someone over a critical point in your essay, always back yourself, because no one knows you better than you!

Also, try and get feedback from varied sources. Friends and family can comment on the personal experiences you talk about in the essay while teachers and counselors can help you perfect the tone, format, and language of the essay.

Once you’ve gathered all the feedback, go back to your essay, and complete a final revision keeping in mind the feedback you’re received. After this, do a final check of your outline, flow, grammar, spelling, and so on.

But wait! Don’t submit it yet. Before your final submission, you should always have someone else – a trusted advisor or friend – take a look at your essay. After going over the same piece of writing so many times, re-read fatigue can make you miss out on obvious errors. So, make someone else proofreads your draft before you submit it on Common App. Remember, Common App does not allow you to make any updates to the submitted essay. You really need to be sure that you’re happy with the final draft before submitting.

Next, let’s put some of these tips, tricks, and strategies into action and see some examples of great Common App essays.

Sample #1: Rina

The fragrance of cloves mingles with the potent smell of green chilis to fill the kitchen with a delicious and familiar scent. After hours of chopping, peeling, and stirring, some overnight marinating and a couple of disastrous attempts at frying onions, I’d finally managed to re-create my grandmother’s biryani recipe from scratch. But the final test was still to come. Would my mother approve of my efforts? After all, I’d done all of this as a surprise for her birthday. As I stood there, watching my mother gingerly lift the spoon to her mouth, I couldn’t believe that I’d actually spent an entire day and night working so hard to recreate one of my family’s traditional Indian recipes. I’d come a long way from the scared girl who couldn’t run away fast enough from my bi-cultural background.

Growing up, what I wanted more than anything else was to blend in with my peers. I remember every year during the annual school fundraiser, all students were asked to contribute something for the baked goods sale. A typical American event – and one that I dreaded. My mother always insisted on preparing elaborate Indian sweets, syrupy gulab jamuns and golden jalebis, and I always felt so out of place standing next to that stand in school. It took me a long time to realize that my greatest source of discomfort was my own insecurity.

The distance I felt from my mother only increased with time, as I grew up to be a regular American teenager who preferred my friends’ company to my mother’s and who listened to all the wrong kinds of music. That all changed two summers ago, when we got the news that my grandmother in India had passed away. I noticed a great change in my mother after she came back from the funeral. She was quiet, sad, and withdrawn, and most importantly, she’d stopped cooking altogether. One day, I asked her why. She told me that her mother was the one who had taught her how to cook, and now that she was gone, she felt some crucial emotional connect was gone from her cooking and she couldn’t find any joy in it. This revelation made me think deeply about my own disconnect from my Indian roots and how hurt my mother must be my continuous rejection. What for me was just a natural desire to “fit in”, for her represented a rejection of so much that was important to her. Eventually, to my mother’s delight and surprise, I asked her if she would teach me how to cook Indian food like her mother had taught her. Though I’d started the exercise as a way to help my mother with her grief, I was happy to discover that I enjoyed cooking thoroughly and soon developed a taste for Indian food I’d never had before. I took on more and more complicated recipes and felt a great sense of accomplishment at every one that I mastered.

This experience made me realize how important it was to embrace every part of yourself and to keep an open mind to new experiences, and new perspectives. This is a lesson I’ll carry with me as I enter the next stage of my life, and I’m glad I learned it before it was too late for me to mend my relationship with my mother.

So that’s how I ended up in my kitchen that day, covered in flour and oil splatters, awaiting my mother’s judgment with trepidation. And as my mother’s face lit up with a smile of delight, giving her stamp of approval to my difficult culinary feat, I felt I’d finally found that sense of belonging I’d been searching for all my life. (621 words)

Why it works : This essay is a great example of the “circular” style of essay. It opens with a story that hooks the reader in, builds suspense about what the conclusion could be, and ends with a meaningful takeaway that brings the story full circle. Though the setting is simple, the stakes are high, and that is clearly communicated in the way the story unfolds and the subsequent experiences shared. Additionally, the writer narrates experiences and events that add context to the central thesis – that of finding belonging and accepting your self – and does not include any unnecessary details that could clutter the narrative. She also includes evocative descriptions that make the essay an engaging read. 

Sample #2: Robert

9 pm on a school night, the radio blasting The Weeknd, I was cruising down the N-75, feeling that I could keep going forever. No, I wasn’t out for a wild night with friends – right beside me was my father, looking at me with pride. After spending months terrified of getting behind the wheel, I’d finally gotten over my fear. That day, I was actually driving on the highway at night, a combination of circumstances that would have given me nightmares just a few weeks ago.

Most teenagers dream of the day they can finally get behind the wheel and be the masters of their own destiny, and I was the same. Unlike most teenagers, my parents felt no trepidation handing me the keys to their car when the time came for me to start practicing. I was the responsible, mature, and capable oldest child and had quickly mastered the basics of driving in my theoretical lessons. So, what could go wrong? I found that out within a month of starting actual driving lessons with my father. It was one disaster after another. I’d turn to the wrong side. I’d take too long to brake. And sometimes I’d just freeze, too anxious to move or do anything. As my father tried to tell me, it was a very dangerous maneuver to undertake in the middle of a busy intersection! It all culminated in a small accident that resulted in some minor damage to my father’s car and some major damage to Mrs. Waterford’s pea beds.

To everyone’s astonishment, including my own, this small accident completely traumatized me, to the point that I gave up my driving lessons and stopped practicing. All of my friends had also experienced some kind of bumps in their driving journey, but none of them had been deterred. Moreover, I’d always prided myself on being the kind of person who could accomplish anything I set my mind to. I’d taken on a full roster of STEM-oriented AP classes and maintained a 4.0 GPA all through junior year, and I’d played on an injured ankle to get my football team to victory in freshman year. But when it came to driving, all my gumption seemed to desert me.

I remember the day my friend got her license, and we went for a drive together. She asked me why I was so scared of driving and joked that it’s the first time I’d ever failed a class. Her lightly spoken words struck a chord in me as I realized that she’d actually pinpointed the source of my fear. I’d always had a natural aptitude and affinity for the two main interests of my life: science and football. I’d found it easy to do well in school and on the field, and never really explored interests beyond these safe arenas. That’s why I didn’t really know what to do when faced with something that didn’t come naturally to me. Driving was the first time I’d had to face up to my failure, and it had spooked me completely.

Once I had that realization, I spent some time reflecting on how I could move past this fear. I soon got back behind the wheel, and I took extra classes with a trained instructor so I could get really confident in my driving. With my license finally in hand, the first thing I did was call my friend to tell her I’d passed!

I’m now committed to challenging myself and getting out of my comfort zone, whether it’s expanding my roster of subjects to include more humanities courses or auditioning for our school play. Not every new experience has been a “success”, but as I know now, that’s not the point! My fear of failure has now transformed into a fear of stagnation, and this has helped me see life in a whole new perspective. (645 words)

Why it works : Robert’s essay is a great example of an “overcoming obstacles” essay that focuses on a personal obstacle and provides the necessary context to make it a compelling narrative for a personal statement. The key in any essay about overcoming a challenge is to document your journey from obstacle to learning to growth, and Robert’s does that very clearly. In any personal statement that has a “growth narrative” there also needs to be a focus on the writer’s inner thoughts and evolving thinking. In this essay, Robert walks his audience through how we felt at each stage of dealing with this obstacle. Finally, he ends with a memorable takeaway that reiterates the lesson he learned and explains how he plans to implement this lesson in his life.

Sample #3: Sarah

“Sarah. Sarah! Wake up!” My mother’s voice woke me with a start, and I raised a bleary head from my drool-covered book. Once again, I’d lost track of time and fallen asleep reading a Thomas Hardy novel. My mother watched me bewildered and asked me, “I guess you really love your new English Literature class, huh?”. My mother’s bewilderment stemmed from the fact not very long ago, I had a clear trifecta of interests – my friends, cheerleading, and fashion designing – and reading stories about things that happened to people very far away, 200 years ago, did not figure in my list of priorities. And now here I was, obsessively working my way through Hardy’s entire body of work, not long after I’d finished all the completed Austen novels. And I was already planning which Bronte sisters’ works I’d be reading next!

I have Mr. Smithers to thank for starting me on my astonishing journey of discovering, and falling in love with, 19th century British literature. While we were studying Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice for our Lit class, he assigned each of us a specific assignment about different aspects of Regency era life. In my case, knowing my predilection for fashion, he asked me to work on a project about the trending women’s fashions when Jane Austen was alive. What started as a routine assignment for class soon transformed into one of the most fascinating explorations of my life. I found myself completely absorbed in the tiniest little details of Regency fashion: the imported textiles, the use of chemises, what types of slippers they wore. From exploring the “what”, I soon found myself asking how and why. I borrowed books from our school library about the politics and economy of Regency era England. I began to see the deeper connections between the socio-economic climate, and prevalent cultural trends, and how that all manifested in the form of major fashion trends. Before, I’d only ever thought of Napoleon as a short, angry French man from some distant era in history! Now, I found out how close he had come to actually conquering England, and how his rejection of extravagant court fashions in favor of ancient Greek philosophies actually popularized the empire waisted gowns that dominated Regency era England ballrooms.

With Mr. Smither’s encouragement and guidance, I found more and more novels to help me continue exploring this new interest. Under the sunlight streaming through the windows of our dusty little school library, I absorbed myself in these stories of people from a long gone era. Yet every story I read only revealed to me how humans, across time and space, have a treasury of common experiences. Reading Hardy’s Tess of d’Urbervilles, I found myself sympathizing with the double standards that Tess was dealt just because she was a woman. It also made me think deeply about how I had also internalized and sometimes acted upon sexist ideas. Like any high school, our school too was a rumor factory that most often targeted girls. I decided, from that moment, to stop participating in forwarding any gossip or rumors. I also spoke to some of my friends who had thoughtlessly spread unkind gossip about a new girl. It was a tiny act of kindness and change, but it helped me grow as a person and re-define my perspective on what matters.

The most wonderful thing about literature is the power it has to take us beyond ourselves and show us a different way of thinking than we ever imagined. Today, I not only have a new interest, but also a new perspective on life, and a new avenue to growth and learning. I can’t wait to see what new perspectives, ideas, and theories are waiting for me between the pages of a book. (629 words) 

Why it works : Sarah’s essay focuses on her interest in a specific subject and takes the reader on a journey of discovery along with her. Essays responding to prompt no 6 can sometimes be tricky to write, since it’s more difficult to set up a conflict or expand upon lessons learnt when talking about a technical topic or a specific subject. Sarah manages to create conflict by showing us a contrast between who she used to be and who she is now and leading us through the steps that led to her transformation. She also has a clear takeaway – the power of literature and its personal impact on her – and that ties back in with her initial set up of how much she had changed thanks to her new-found interest. It gives a clear idea of who she is and how she thinks, and presents a unique perspective on a regular hobby.

The Common App essay should be between 250 to 650 words. Ideally, you should write an essay of at least 500 words to ensure your narrative is substantial and meaningful.

No – once you’ve submitted your Common App essay, it is locked for editing. Make sure you’ve triple-checked your final draft, and get someone else to proofread it, before you submit it.

Yes, the Common App essay is a very important admissions component. It can count for up to 30% of your application review. The more elite and competitive the college, the more importance they’ll give to the Common App essay. As the only qualitative component of your primary application, your essay is a great opportunity to make yourself stand out from the crowd and humanize your “checklist” of achievements for the admissions committee. A great essay could help you edge out other applicants with similar profiles in terms of academic record and extracurriculars.

Ideally, you should spend 3 months writing your Common App essay, giving yourself plenty of time for brainstorming, free writing, selecting a topic, writing multiple drafts (at least 3), seeking out feedback, and finalizing your essay. You can compress these activities down into a shorter timeline, but this could make the process that much more difficult and could impact the final quality of your essay. Starting and finishing your Common App essay early also leaves you free to deal with all the other application components closer to the actual college app deadlines. Remember, you’ll also have to write secondary essays for multiple colleges in a short period of time – a month or less – and your Common App essay prep could be very useful in writing secondary essays as well. So, it’s best to give yourself plenty of time to prepare for and write your Common App essay.

If you’re struggling to find a topic for your Common App essay, start with journaling and brainstorming before you get into actually writing the essay. Just write down your free-association responses to  3 or 4 of the prompts. Ask yourself a few key questions to guide your brainstorming such as: who am I? What do I hope to achieve? What is my passion? What makes me unique? Find the experiences, events, ideas, and people in your life that are the most meaningful to you, personally, and then select a topic that corresponds to those events.

A great Common App essay is one that demonstrates your excellent writing skills, shows depth and breadth of thought, a clear journey of self-reflection, and truly expresses who you are as a person. Your essay should not be a repetition of the items already seen in your resume. Instead, it should provide a new and refreshing perspective on you, and should clearly communicate what makes you special.

Ideally, you should ask at least two people to review your Common App essay. Select someone close to you, such as a parent or a friend, who can give you genuine, well-meaning feedback about the personal aspects of your essay. You should also ask an experienced mentor to review your essay, such as an English teacher or guidance counsellor. If you’re really struggling with it, you can get the help of admissions consultants who can give you expert feedback.

The Common App essay is your personal statement, and you only need to write one essay that goes out to all colleges along with your primary application. You can select from 1 of 7 prompts and write an essay about any meaningful, personal achievements or experiences that you’d like admissions committees to know. The Common App essay should be general and should not reference any specific colleges. On the other hand, supplemental essays are written in response to college-specific prompts and should directly address why you want to go to a particular college. These essays are a part of your secondary application and colleges can share 1 or more prompts to help them get to know you better.

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• Faculty & Staff

Students admitted to the UW now have until June 1 to commit, a result of FAFSA delays. We anticipate that financial aid offers will be sent in late April or early May.

Applying with the Common App

Only apply once! The UW does not have a preference of application platform. The deadline for both is November 15, and decisions will be released March 1–15. Should you submit both applications, one will be withdrawn and will not be reviewed. You will not receive a refund of the application fee.

General instructions

Grading scale changes/covid-19 impacts.

Running Start / College in the High School / other dual enrollment

Pre-9th grade courses

International curriculum

All applicants

You must complete your Common App Profile and add the UW to your list of colleges before you can start the UW questions.

Use the College Search to find and add the UW.

Then select the UW to begin the UW questions.

As you move through the application, you will be able to complete only one section at a time. Completion of the sections will be indicated with green check marks. Once you have completed all sections within the Common App profile as well as the UW questions, submit your application, pay the application fee and you’re done! We will contact you if we have any questions or are missing any information.

International applicants

Once you have completed the General , Academics and Contacts section, you will answer the Residency questions. This will determine your application type.

If you have attended a school outside of the U.S. that follows a national compulsory curriculum, you are required to upload a scanned, unofficial copy of your transcript(s) for grade levels 9 and higher in the Educational background section of the UW application.

Your admissibility will not be impacted if your school changes its grading scale to Pass/No Pass, Credit/No Credit, A/Incomplete, A-C/Incomplete. The holistic review will accommodate all of the various grading policies that school districts implement in a way that neither advantages or disadvantages any applicant. Use the following steps to notify the Office of Admission of a grading scale change when you self report your courses.

Step 1: Add high school information

Before you begin entering your coursework, you will need to add your high school information to the Common App Education section by selecting Find School .

If you took any classes that allowed you to earn college credit, you will also need to add your college information by selecting Colleges & Universities and Find college .

Step 2: High school coursework

Once you have completed the Current or Most recent Secondary/High School and or Colleges & Universities section of the Common App Profile, you will be able to start entering high school coursework in the Courses & Grades section.

If a school changes the grading scale to Pass/No Pass, Credit/No Credit, A/Incomplete, A-C/Incomplete, select A-F in the Grading Scale drop-down menu. Select the grade that fits your school’s grading scale changes by scrolling through the drop-down list for each schedule type indicated.

If you have courses you are currently taking and need to report, add them in the Education section under Current or Most Recent Year Courses .

Select the Course subject from the closest matching option or choose ‘Other/Elective’ if your subject is not on the list. Then enter the Course name for any class that was part of College in the High School or other dual enrollment program.

Running Start, College in the High School, or other dual enrollment classes

Even if you earned college credits while in high school, as long as you have not taken any college-level courses after graduating from high school, you should apply to the UW with the freshman application. Running Start, UW in the High School, College in the High School or other dual enrollment classes should be entered in the Education section. Be sure you have completed the Current or Most Recent Year Courses and the Courses & Grade sections, and indicate all dual enrollment courses.

• Changes to your senior year schedule If you anticipate your senior year schedule might change or you haven’t met with an adviser to make your plans, please let us know in the “Additional information about yourself or your circumstances” writing section.
• Transcripts. Transcripts are not required for admission consideration, and we ask that you do not send them unless requested. However, having an unofficial copy in hand may help you complete the application.

Step 1: Add high school & college information

Make sure you have completed the Courses & Grade section and reported all subjects taken at a College or University, as well as grades received as they appear on your academic transcript.

Step 2: Self-reporting high school courses

Once you have completed the Current or Most recent Secondary/High School section of the Common App Profile, you will be able to start entering high school coursework in the Courses & Grades section.

Select the subject from the closest matching option or choose ‘Other/Elective’ if your subject is not on the list, then enter the Course name for any class that was part of College in the High School or other dual enrollment program.

Select “Dual Enrollment” in the Course Level drop-down menu.

Include courses taken in grades 7 and 8 only if they are high school courses that are also included on your high school transcript. Most applicants have not completed high school courses in grades 7 and 8.

Before you begin entering your courses, you will need to add your high school information to the Common App Education section by selecting Find School . You do not need to list the name of the school at which you took pre-9th grade courses. Instead, use the name of the high school where you received the credit.

Start entering high school courses in the Courses & Grades section. Select the Other Courses selection, then indicate you have other courses on your transcript by selecting Yes .

Select the School Name where you received credit then the School Year where you took this course. For example, students applying for autumn 2023 who took coursework in 8th grade would select the School Year of 2018-19. Finally, enter the rest of the course information.

International Curriculum

Applicants studying foreign/national compulsory curriculum will self-report their yearly coursework for grades 9 -12.

Step 1: Reporting current courses

If you have not yet graduated high school, you will need to report your courses for the current academic year. Complete the Current or Most recent Secondary/High School section of the Common App Profile then you will be able to start entering high school coursework in the Courses & Grades section.

Once you have completed the Education section of the Common App Profile, you will be able to start entering high school coursework in the Courses & Grades section.

Report your coursework and grades listed on your high school transcript by selecting the appropriate grade level.

IMPORTANT: DO NOT report courses for grade 12 if you are currently enrolled for grade 12. Instead, report your coursework in the Current or Most recent Secondary/High School section of the Common App Profile under the Education tab.

Select the School Name, School Year, appropriate Grading Scale, appropriate Schedule for each course .

•        Choose Semesters if your school has two terms per academic year.
•        Choose Trimester if your school has three terms per academic year.
•        Choose Quarter if your school has four terms per academic year.
•       If your grading scale is not listed in the drop-down menu, please select Other.

Select the appropriate Subject , Course Name , and Course Level

•       If your Subject is not listed in the drop-down menu select subject title with other as an option, for example Math (Other) .
•       Report the Course Name exactly as it is listed on your transcript.
•       Select the appropriate Course Level.

Report your final Grades exactly how they are listed on your high school transcript. Do not convert your original grades. If you did not receive a final grade, select N/A.

Enter Credits exactly how they are listed on your high school transcript. Do not convert your credits. If you school does not provide credits, please enter 1 for an entire academic year of study or enter .5 for a half-year of study.

Review the self-reported information that you have provided.

(I)GCSE sample below

China sample below

IB samples below

Step 3: Upload

You are required to upload unofficial copies of transcripts or exam certificates for grades 9-12 if you attended a school outside the U.S. that follows a local or national compulsory curriculum, even if the year was repeated in the U.S.

You do not need to upload or submit unofficial transcripts if you attended a U.S. high school or an international school that follows a U.S.-style curriculum unless requested by the Office of Admissions.

Do not mail transcripts or exam certificates to the Office of Admissions.

British-Style Curriculum

• If you studied a British-style curriculum, such as, (I)GCSE, SPM, Singapore-Cambridge (O-level) submit your exam certificate in addition to your high school transcripts.

India Curriculum

• Applicants will need to upload their scanned unofficial copies of their 10 th year exam certificate and grade 11 transcripts.
• If you have graduated, we will require scanned unofficial copies of your 10 th year and 12 th year exam certificates to complete your application.

China Curriculum

• Submit your transcripts for grades 9 and higher.

Other International Curriculums

• If you have completed any leaving exams, upload scanned copies of your exam certificates.

Common App for transfer Program Materials

• Last updated
• Save as PDF

The Program Materials section includes additional information and requirements for the programs you selected in the Add Program tab. Each program's requirements may vary, so it's important you review this section in detail.

Your selected programs appear on the left side of this page; click each program's name to begin your review. Note that depending on your program's requirements, you'll see one or more of the tabs outlined below.

The Home tab contains the Program Details provided by each program at the start of the application cycle. It includes deadlines, required offline forms, and other information specific to the program. Be sure to review this page carefully for any additional instructions, information, and/or requirements.

The Questions tab contains the questions specific to each program. Questions may be multiple-choice or open-ended text boxes. Some programs require additional essays. Contact each program directly if you have questions.

Select your answers for each question and then click Save . If copying a response into a text box, check for possible formatting changes. We suggest using simple formatting, as tabs, italics, multiple spaces, etc., will not be saved. To delineate paragraphs, type a double return between each paragraph.

The Documents tab is only available for certain programs. Uploaded documents will only be visible to that specific program. Documents that do not have a red asterisk are optional and do not need to be uploaded for you to submit your application.

Contact the program directly if you have any questions about their specific requirements.

If your program provides a PDF form to fill out and upload in this section, you must save and upload it as an image. Depending on your computer's operating system, there may be multiple ways to do this; a Google search can point you in the right direction.

Once your application is submitted, you cannot re-upload, update, or edit the documents in any way; however, you can upload new documents.

Offline Documents

Some colleges may need you to send additional forms outside of the Common App for transfer application. To determine if your college requires "offline forms," select a program in the Program Materials section and review their Program Details section. 

Colleges commonly ask for the following forms offline:

• College Report : This report shares more information on your standing at your current college. A college official must complete this form. 
• Mid-Term Report : This report includes information on your current courses. You can complete this reporting using details from your transcript or student information portal. 

Carefully review each program's instructions for how to complete and send these offline documents. Some programs may want you to send the completed forms by mail or by specific dates.

Common App Personal Essay

Students can select one of seven Common App prompts to guide their writing for the personal essay.

Some programs may ask for a personal essay in the Documents or Questions sections. If a program asks for a personal essay in the Documents section as a document upload, you do not need to specify the prompt you have selected. If a program asks for a personal essay within the Questions section, you will select a prompt and enter your response as text.

The 2023-2024 Common App Personal Essay prompts are:

The personal essay helps you distinguish yourself in your own voice. What do you want admissions readers to know about you that is not reflected elsewhere in your application? Choose the option that best helps you answer that question and write an essay using the prompt to inspire and structure your response (1,250 - 3,250 characters, approx. 250 - 650 words).

Please select a prompt below to help you write your personal essay:

• Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, please share your story.
• The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?
• Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea. What prompted your thinking? What was the outcome?
• Reflect on something that someone has done for you that has made you happy or thankful in a surprising way. How has this gratitude affected or motivated you?
• Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others.
• Describe a topic, idea, or concept you find so engaging it makes you lose all track of time. Why does it captivate you? What or who do you turn to when you want to learn more?
• Share an essay on any topic of your choice. It can be one you’ve already written, one that responds to a different prompt, or one of your own design.

Some things to consider as you write your personal essay:

• What are your academic and career aspirations?
• Are there personal experiences, obstacles you have overcome, or other aspects of your background that you want to share?
• How have your life experiences since high school affected your educational goals? What have you learned about yourself?
• What are your reasons for transferring or returning to college? Are you continuing your education after military service or time away from school, transitioning from a two-year college, or moving from one four-year college to another?
• What problems do you want to research or solve with your intended major and degree?
• What new opportunities are you hoping to explore, academic or otherwise?

Keep in mind that some programs may require additional essays. These can be in addition to, or in place of, the personal essay. Before you begin writing, review all of the writing requirements for each program you are applying to.

Recommendations

The Recommendations tab is only available for certain programs that require you to submit letters of recommendation.

Before You Begin

Recommendations (sometimes called Letters of Evaluation, Letters of Reference, or Letters of Recommendation) are submitted by the recommenders themselves; they cannot be completed or submitted by the applicant or another party on behalf of the recommender. We are not responsible for verifying recommenders' identities. If a discrepancy is found, we reserve the right to contact the appropriate individuals to investigate and to share the discrepancy with all programs.

Before getting started, consider the following:

• All recommendations are submitted electronically by recommenders using Liaison Letters , our Recommender Portal. Common App for transfer will use your legal name for recommendations.
• Research each program's requirements. You should determine whether your programs have specific requirements before listing recommenders on your application. Many programs have strict guidelines and submitted recommendations cannot be removed or replaced.
• Prepare your recommenders. Once you choose your recommenders, let them know they will be completing the recommendation electronically. We recommend getting their preferred email address and asking that they monitor that inbox for your recommendation request (which will come from [email protected] ), including any junk or spam folders.

The Recommendation Process

When you request recommendations, your recommender receives an email request with a link to Liaison Letters. Recommenders review your requests, and then accept, complete, or deny them. Recommenders may complete assessments such as writing essays, completing Likert scales, and/or uploading letters.

Once your recommender completes your recommendation, you'll be notified via email. You can check the status of your recommendation requests in the Check Status tab of your application at any time.

Common App for transfer also saves your recommender information. After you add recommender information once, you can select those recommenders from your list and add them for other programs.

Submit a Request

• Navigate to the Program Materials section. On the Recommendations tab, click Add Recommendation .
• If you have requested recommenders before, choose a previous recommender from the list or select Request New Recommendation .
• Enter the recommender's full name and email address, if necessary.
• Select the date when you would like this recommendation completed. This date should be before your program(s) deadline.
• Enter a brief message or note for the recommender.
• Select whether you want to waive your right of access to the recommendation. See Waiver below.
• Click the checkboxes to indicate your permission for programs (and us) to contact your recommenders.
• Click Save This Recommendation Request to submit it. Once you do so, an email is immediately sent to the recommender.
• Confirm with your recommenders that they received the email notification.
• Use the Check Status tab to monitor the status of your recommendations. Completed recommendations are marked as "Complete" and have a Complete Date listed. Follow up with your recommenders if their recommendations are still marked as "Requested" or "Accepted." It is your responsibility to ensure that recommendation requests are received and completed on time. We will not notify applicants about missing recommendations.

Resend the Recommendation Request

If you need to resend a request:

• On the Recommendations tab, locate the request you wish to resend.
• Click the pencil icon to edit the request.
• Scroll to the bottom of the page and click Resend This Recommendation Request .

Change the Recommender's Email Address

If you entered an incorrect email address for any recommenders (or if any recommender asks that you send the request to a different email address), you must delete these requests and then re-add them with the correct email.

The Family Education Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA) gives you the right to access recommendations unless you choose to waive your right of inspection and review. Prior to requesting any recommendations, you are required to indicate whether you wish to waive your rights. Common App for transfer will release your decision to waive or not waive access to your recommenders and designated programs. Your waiver decision serves the same purpose as a legal signature and is binding.

Selecting Yes indicates to programs that your recommender completed their recommendation with the understanding that you would not be able to view it. This means you will not be able to see the content of the recommendation. Programs may view this type of recommendation as a more accurate representation of an applicant's qualifications.

Selecting No indicates to programs that your recommender completed their recommendation with the understanding that you may choose to view it in the future. Selecting this option does not allow you to view your recommendation via the application. If you do not waive your right to view the recommendation, you may ask your recommender for a copy of the recommendation. Programs may view this type of recommendation as a less accurate representation of an applicant's qualifications.

Once you make a selection, you can't change it, so consider the choices carefully.

Prerequisites

The Prerequisites tab is only available for certain programs. In it, you can assign courses you took (or plan to take) to fulfill the program's required prerequisites. You must complete Transcript Entry and Transcript Review in order to complete this section. You should only add additional courses if necessary to reach the minimum credit requirement. Do not exceed the listed requirements by matching extra courses.

Note that assigning these courses does not necessarily mean you meet the program's prerequisite requirements ; the program wants you to self-identify these courses for their review. Contact each program directly if you have questions about these prerequisites.

Assign a Prerequisite

• Click Assign Course .
• Click the plus sign next to the course(s) that you believe fulfills the prerequisite. You can match multiple courses to one prerequisite, if applicable. If you do not have a prerequisite course to add, click I Am Not Matching Any Courses to this Prerequisite .
• Click Save and Exit .

Some programs may request or require that you complete a SlideRoom application, which is separate from your Common App for transfer application. In SlideRoom, you can create and submit a custom portfolio for each program. The SlideRoom tab is only available for certain programs. Contact each program directly if you have questions.

To submit a SlideRoom application:

• Click Click here to start your SlideRoom portfolio .
• You will then be redirected to SlideRoom, where you can log in with an existing account or create a new account.

Once you complete the SlideRoom application, return to your Common App for transfer application to verify that the section is marked complete. If it's not, click Update .

Note: if your program's SlideRoom application is optional, you can choose not to submit one by clicking Opt out of SlideRoom portfolio .

Application guide for transfer students

Get tips and best practices for putting together your best application.

What is Common App for transfer?

Common App for transfer is an online application that makes applying to college faster and easier. Through a single platform, you'll be able to search for and apply to any one of the more than 600 colleges that accept Common App for transfer. Whether you're applying to transfer from another 4-year institution or community college or looking to continue your path towards a degree by re-enrolling, Common App for transfer can help you get to where you want to be.

Gather materials

The info you’ll need to start your application

Filling out your application takes time.

And if you have to keep interrupting your progress to find information, like a certificate for a continuing education course or the address of your last internship, it can take even longer. Get a head start by collecting this information before you begin.

Below are some materials you’ll need to gather in order to fill out Common App for transfer.

• Some programs you apply to might ask you to provide this information. You can see what each program on your list requires in the College Coursework area of the Academic History section.
• You also have the option to add any continuing education courses you have taken.

Some programs will ask you to report these test scores. You can check the testing policy of the programs on your list in the Program Materials section.

On Common App for transfer, you have the option to share your experiences, things like research, internships, volunteer work, and more. This is the place to show colleges what makes you unique.

Create an account

Take the first step in the application process

Creating an account is simple.

• Provide your name and contact information.
• Make sure you use an email address you check often, as this is how Common App and colleges will get in touch with you.
• Choose a username and password.
• Review the Terms and Conditions.

Then click "Create my account" to finish the process.

Before you’re taken into the application, you’ll be asked to complete your Extended Profile. This includes information designed to tailor the application experience to you.

• College credits you will have earned when you enroll at the college you’re applying to
• The degree status you will have earned
• Your degree goal for the program you’re applying to

After answering these questions, you’ll be taken into the application. Congratulations! You’re ready to get started.

Counselor tip

Use an email address that you check regularly.

Colleges may need to get in touch with you regarding your application.  

Add programs

Add the programs to which you will apply

Now that you’ve created your account and explored schools that accept Common App, it’s time to start adding some programs to your application.

The Add Program tab is where you’ll find and add these programs. If you already have a college or program in mind, you can search by college name at the top of the page. You can also use the filters to search for programs based on different criteria.

• Program availability
• Application fee

You can select as many or as few criteria as make sense to you. As you select each filter, the program list will update automatically.

To see more information about a particular program, click on that program’s name. An overlay will open with information like the program’s contact information, website links, testing policies, and more.

Adding programs is simple. All you need to do is click the plus icon next to the program’s name.

To see which programs you have already added, click "Selected Programs” at the top of the page. Here you can also remove programs from your list, if you choose.

Engage supporters

Get letters of recommendation and school forms

In addition to your application, many colleges ask for additional documents to be submitted by recommenders on your behalf.

There are four types of recommenders you can invite: Personal, Professional, Academic, and High School Official.

Each program has different recommendation requirements. In order to see a program’s recommendation requirements, go to the program’s section in the Program Materials and proceed to the Recommendation tab of that program. (If a program does not require recommendations, you won’t see the Recommendations tab.)

On the Recommendations tab you’ll find helpful information including:

An "Add Recommendation" button to begin inviting recommenders

The types of recommenders the program requires

The number of each recommendation type they require and how many they allow — for example, a program might require 2 academic recommendations, but will allow up to 4

To invite recommenders:

Select the type of recommendation you'll be requesting

Enter the recommenders name, email address, and a desired due date for the recommendation

Provide a personal message or notes for your recommender (This can be anything you want; you could use it to thank your recommender in advance, provide context for the request, share instructions, etc.)

Choose whether to waive your right to access this recommendation in the future and check the affirmation statements

When you’re ready, click “Save this Recommendation Request” to complete the process. Your recommender will receive an email invitation with instructions on how to proceed.

Transcript collection

Submit your college coursework, if required

Some programs may ask for official or unofficial transcripts. Others may not ask for any at all.

You can see programs’ transcript requirements in the Academic History section under Colleges Attended or College Coursework.

If you’re applying to a program that requires official transcripts, you’ll need to download the Transcript Request Form. You can access this form in the Colleges Attended section. You’ll notice that your information will already be entered on the form. All you need to do is print and deliver it to the registrar of the college(s) you have attended.

The college you attend may send transcripts differently than outlined in the Transcript Request Form. Common App for transfer also accepts electronic transcripts from Parchment and National Student Clearinghouse. 

If your school uses a different service, transcripts should be mailed, instead of sent electronically. Be sure to include your full Common App ID # when entering the Common App mailing address.

If a program asks for unofficial transcripts, you can upload your transcript in the Colleges Attended section.

Some programs may not request unofficial transcripts within the Academic History section. Instead, they may allow you to upload an unofficial transcript in their Program Materials section. Be sure to check to see if there is a College Transcript upload option in each programs’ Documents tab .

Get ready to begin your journey

Walk through the transfer application with us before you apply.

Find additional support at the help center

Add Project Key Words

Guide to Writing a Stellar Common App Transfer Essay

Padya Paramita

December 1, 2020

If you’re having a hard time adjusting to your college, or you’ve realized that the school you attend isn’t the right institution for you, it may be wise to search for transferring options. As you work on preparing a strong transfer application , it’s important to note that the schools you’re applying to will want to know your reason for transferring and what you would bring to your new campus. This is where a well-written Common App transfer essay comes in handy.

In the 2020-2021 application cycle, the Common App for transfer students is allowing candidates to answer the Common App personal statement prompts. Most schools also have taken the option of including the Common App transfer essay with their applications in order to understand students’ interests and motivations better. To help you put together an application that will impress admissions officers, I’ve outlined the personal essay prompts, detailed how to write a strong response to the Common App transfer essay prompt, and added final tips that can help you stand out as a compelling candidate.

The Common App Personal Statement Prompts

2020-2021 is the first application cycle during which the Common App has allowed transfer students to answer the personal statement prompts. This year, it is up to colleges whether they wish to include the Common App transfer essay among their questions as well. If you’re applying to transfer, it’s important to be aware of the personal statement prompts. These are:

• Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, please share your story. (650 words)
• The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience? (650 words)
• Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea. What prompted your thinking? What was the outcome? (650 words)
• Describe a problem you’ve solved or a problem you’d like to solve. It can be an intellectual challenge, a research query, an ethical dilemma — anything of personal importance, no matter the scale. Explain its significance to you and what steps you took or could be taken to identify a solution. (650 words)
• Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others. (650 words)
• Describe a topic, idea, or concept you find so engaging it makes you lose all track of time. Why does it captivate you? What or who do you turn to when you want to learn more? (650 words)
• Share an essay on any topic of your choice. It can be one you’ve already written, one that responds to a different prompt, or one of your own design. (650 words)

Whichever prompt you choose, what’s important is that you tell a story that is unique to you. Writing about yourself can seem like an easy task at first glance, but when you sit down to actually brainstorm, you might reach a dead end. Where do you even begin? What experience is captivating enough to share with admissions officers? How do you narrow down your entire life story into 650 words? There’s a lot of pressure to find the right topic that will help you stand out. You can read more in detail about how to answer these in our Common App personal statement prompts 2020-2021 blog .

The Common App Transfer Essay Prompt

Now we come to the question for the actual Common App transfer essay . The prompt states:

Please provide a statement that addresses your reasons for transferring and the objectives you hope to achieve. (250-600 words)

If you choose to write this essay, remember that admissions officers don’t want a three-page complaint outlining why you are dissatisfied with your current college. Your application should be geared towards what your unique interests are, why you’ve chosen to transfer, and how the college of your choice can help you achieve your goals. Since you have up to 600 words in your arsenal, you can divide your essay into two or three segments so that all of your content is organized and easy to understand. Remember that you’re no longer a high school student. Since you’ve already experienced at least one semester of college by the time you’re applying, you can elaborate on how you’ve grown in the past year as well.

Regardless of whether your reason for transfer is in search of a stronger program in your chosen field or because you wish to attend college in a warmer location, it’s important to highlight how you can uniquely contribute to the campus want to attend. The prompt clearly asks “what you hope to achieve.” This indicates that admissions officers are looking to understand what their resources can provide you with that your current school can’t. So, make sure you spend time browsing the school website, understanding the different courses and major offerings, taking note of any relevant clubs and turning this knowledge into specific examples and anecdotes as you write your essay.

Further Tips for Writing the Common App Transfer Essay

• Dedicate Significant Time to Brainstorming: Since there’s only one prompt for the Common App transfer essay , a lot of students might take it lightly. However, you must stand out and write a unique response. Don’t just come up with an anecdote on a whim. Choose examples in your writing that allow you to be as specific as possible. Ensuring that your essay topic has a cohesive connection to the rest of your application can go a long way toward convincing admissions officers that you’re a strong candidate who can succeed in their institution
• Let Your Personality Shine: The purpose of the Common App transfer essay is to get to know you . You can’t be a memorable candidate if admissions officers are unable to gauge who you are, sense what you’re passionate about, and identify your goals. Don’t just repeat your personal statement. Instead, exemplify each point as concretely as possible. Whether reading about your favorite subject or how you’ve led a particular organization, the reader must be able to get a clear picture and learn new information from every essay. 

You spend some of your most significant years in college. It’s important to ensure that you attend a school that allows you to thrive and work towards your goals. If you aren’t happy at your present college and are working on your transfer application, a stellar Common App transfer essay can go a long way in helping admissions officers get a sense of who you are and what you can bring to the college. Happy writing!

Tags : transfer appilcation , Common App for Transfer Students , how to transfer , common app transfer essay , transfering colleges

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Common App vs. Coalition App: Which One Is Best for Your College Journey?

The Value of a Common Application

Key Similarities

Key Differences

Deciding Which One to Use

Expert Insights

This post will answer whatever questions you have about the Common App and Coalition App and guide you on deciding which to use. From key similarities to pivotal differences, along with a run down of what to consider when choosing between the two, this blog will home in on important features of these two high-profile application platforms and sum up their respective pros and cons so you can decide which one is best for your college journey.

Navigating the college application process can be daunting, but choosing the right platform can make all the difference. In this blog post, we'll compare the Common App and the Coalition App. These application platforms are the two dominant players in the college admissions landscape. But when you're faced with two platforms with so much in common (no pun intended), it can leave you wondering which one to choose, or why it even matters…

A bit like red apples and green apples, the Common App and Coalition app could be said to fall from similar trees, but they also have prominent differences — differences you can align with your own goals and circumstances in order to decide which application platform is best for you.

Whether you're looking to maximize your reach with the widely accepted Common App or benefit from the supportive features of the Coalition App, this guide is designed to help you make an informed decision.

Did you know that the average college-bound high school student will apply to six colleges, on average ? And, depending on personal circumstances and college interests, many students will apply to more than six , with some students sending out upwards of 10, 15, or more applications!

National statistics also show that the number of young people applying to college in the US is on the rise, along with the number of colleges they’re applying to. That said, don't be fooled by current trends or the notion that more is better... When deciding how many colleges to apply to , it's important to consider your target schools, college goals, and your personal circumstances.

That said, most students want to improve their chances by applying to a number of schools — such as reach , target , and safety schools. But, considering the time it takes to fill out just one college application, I probably don’t need to explain why having a common application is going to save you tons of time and energy!

By allowing you to fill out just one application and use it again and again, for all the schools you’re applying to, both the Common App and Coalition App exist, in large measure, to simplify and streamline your college application efforts.

But while the Common App was clearly designed for efficiency and uniformity, the Coalition App was created to provide greater opportunities for first-generation students and students from lower-income households.

Keeping this distinction in mind, you'll quickly make sense of many of the key similarities and differences between both platforms.

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Common vs. Coalition: Key Similarities

A streamlined application process.

Both the Common App and the Coalition App work the same way, serving as a common application form that allows you to fill out one application and then submit it to multiple schools, streamlining the admissions process.

But before you make plans to apply to dozens of schools, keep in mind the Common App caps your applications at twenty maximum. The Coalition App has no limit, but is also less widely accepted.

Widely, but not universally, accepted

While the idea of doing one application to use for all of the schools you’re applying to sounds great, the problem is that some schools only want to use their own application form, not a common one. Therefore, neither the Common App nor the Coalition app is accepted by all colleges and universities .

About 900+ institutions accept the Common App, and 150+ accept the Coalition app. This means that students first have to verify which of their prospective schools do indeed accept the Common App, the Coalition App, both, or neither.

Free to use, but application fees still apply

Both the Common App and Coalition App are free to use, but that doesn’t mean you can apply for free when you use them, because you’ll still have to pay any application fees required by the prospective school.

In short, using either the Common App or Coalition App won’t cost you more and can save you time, but neither will save you money. That said, both platforms do allow you to take advantage of application fee waivers if you qualify.

Among the 889 ranked colleges who participated in U.S. News' annual survey, the average application fee was nearly $45. The 64 schools with the highest application fees – all at least $75 – charged an average of about $78

- u.s. news and world report, a streamlined essay submission process.

Both the Common App and the Coalition App give you a chance to share a single application essay with multiple schools. The Common App offers seven essay prompts to choose from, but you'll only choose one and write one essay, with specific prompts periodically updated for subsequent admissions cycles. Whichever prompt you choose, you’ll have a word limit of 650 words.

The Coalition Application essay prompts are very similar, but may specify different length limits or requirements, depending on what the college set as its preference.

Efficient but not all inclusive

While both the Common App and Coalition App can significantly streamline your application process, individual schools may still ask you to submit numerous documents in addition to the uniform application document .

For example, many schools require applicants using the Common App or Coalition App to tackle one or more 'supplemental essays' guided by school-specific essay prompts.

Likewise, guidelines for letters of recommendation can differ from one university to another, and you’ll need to provide academic transcripts too in most cases.

The good news is that both platforms have features that enable you and your high school counselors and administrators to upload letters, transcripts, and other supporting documents.

Made for flexibility and convenience

Schools can choose to accept only their own application form, but many give students the option to use either a school-specific application, and/ or the Common App, and/or the Coalition App.

Some schools accept either the Common or Coalition App; others accept both. Whatever the case, consider all of the schools you'll be applying to when deciding which platform to use or not use, since the job of applying will be more streamlined the more times you can use the same application .

All that said, flexibility is a great benefit. For example, it's fine to use one platform for some applications and the other platform for other applications, if wish to or need to for some reason.

Likewise, as long as you're using an application form approved by your prospective school, selecting one option over another should not have any favorable or unfavorable impact on how admissions officers evaluate you or your application!

Important Differences

A pivotal difference between the Common App and the Coalition App is that the Common App is designed for the widest possible use, while the core purpose of the Coalition App is to connect underrepresented students with a coalition of schools offering financial and academic support to underrepresented students.

These distinct purposes will help you make sense of other key differences between the Common App and Coalition App.

KEY DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE COMMON APP & COALTION APP

Deciding which app to use.

You now know a lot about the essential similarities and differences offered by these two prominent college application platforms. Next, let’s zero in on a few pivotal pros and cons to consider as you choose which App best suits your own circumstances.

Advantages:

• Broad Reach: The Common App is accepted by over 900 institutions worldwide, including a diverse range of schools, from highly selective universities to smaller liberal arts colleges.
• User-Friendly Interface: An intuitive design simplifies the application process, making it easier for students to navigate their application components.
• Extensive Resources: With a wealth of application guides, a virtual counselor, and even a mobile app, the Common App provides a comprehensive toolkit to assist students throughout their application journey.

Disadvantages:

• Generic Approach: Given its wide usage, the Common App can sometimes feel less personalized, which might be a drawback for students seeking to highlight unique aspects of their background or experiences.
• Overwhelming Options: The sheer volume of member colleges combined with the limited college search resources can daunt students. This means students without access to other college search resources and admissions advising may want to keep in mind that the Common App has only very broad and generic search tools and resources.

Coalition App

• Focus on Accessibility: Founded with a commitment to access, affordability, and success, the Coalition App is particularly friendly to students requiring financial aid, emphasizing support for lower-income households.
• Planning Tools: Beyond the application, the platform offers a set of free planning tools encouraging students to begin the college preparation process as early as their freshman year in high school.
• Portfolio Feature: Students can use the digital Locker to build a portfolio over time, a unique aspect that allows for a more comprehensive presentation of a student's achievements and experiences.
• More Detailed Activity Descriptions: For students with less traditional activities, or whose activity roster emphasizes depth of involvement over quantity, having a bit more space to describe activities could be a noteworthy advantage.
• Limited Scope: It’s accepted by over 150 colleges, significantly fewer than the Common App, which could limit options for students looking at a broader range of schools.
• Newer Platform: Being newer, the platform's features and interface are less familiar to many counselors, potentially steepening the learning curve.

Making Your Decision

When determining which platform to use, consider not only the technical differences but also how each aligns with your individual application strategy:

• Individual College Preferences: Research to see if your schools of interest accept both applications or have a preference. Some colleges might be exclusive to one platform.
• Ease of Use: While both platforms aim to ease the application process, your individual level of comfort with their interfaces can influence your experience. Exploring each platform directly could give you a better sense of which one you prefer.
• Support and Resources: Evaluate what kind of support and resources you foresee needing. We've seen that the Common App and Coalition App have some fundamentally different design purposes and orientations, so it makes sense to consider each option in light of your own preferences and needs.
• Application Philosophy: Reflect on your values and educational philosophy. If access and affordability are priorities, the Coalition App’s emphasis on these values is something you'll want to consider specifically when making your decision.

We wouldn’t want to end without providing some more nuanced insights from Jeremy Parks, the US Admissions Strategist assisting with this blog post.

Don’t assume using the Common App or Coalition App will be enough

While both the Common App and Coalition App have significant reach and popularity, some very selective and popular institutions don’t accept either. Here are some high-profile universities in this category:

• All ten University of California Campuses

For these schools, says Jeremy, in addition to having to use a completely different application portal, you may find significant components in your common application form don’t fit either, in terms of content or format — so it’s good to plan ahead, leaving time to fill out additional applications for schools like these, if needed.

Understand the role academic components play in your application

While the Common App and Coalition App both support holistic evaluation, academic components often matter more than others. Jeremy told us that even in a holistic admissions framework, grades and course rigor typically reign supreme in the evaluation process, especially at the more selective schools:

Academics are the first and foremost factor for being competitive at any top college here in the United States, so if you don't have the grades you'll be fighting more of an uphill battle. When thinking about what ‘academics’ comprises, it's both rigor and the actual course grade.

If you’re logging into either the Common App or Coalition App platform to get a head start a year or more in advance of sending out applications, consider enrolling in courses with a level of challenge that’s right for you and that will demonstrate a sequence of increasing rigor from one school year to the next.

Be smart about what you include or omit from your list of extracurriculars

The Common App offers you a chance to include 10 extracurriculars on your activities list, but only about 150 characters for describing the activity and your role. You can only list 8 extracurriculars on the Coalition App, but get a bit more room for your descriptions. In addition to keeping these factors in mind, Jeremy recommends (whichever App you use) curating your final activities selections for optimal breadth and coherence .

Aligning activities for breadth

One crucial strategy is to think about breadth not just in terms of varied activities — like sports vs. clubs — but in terms of how specific activities spotlight different skills, traits, and aptitudes. As you select which high school extracurriculars to include, try to select ones from your high school career that spotlight traits like these:

• An innovation mindset , with descriptions that foreground independent thinking and initiative-taking
• Leadership , with descriptions that enumerate specific leadership skills and quantitative outcomes resulting from your actions or decisions
• Public service , with descriptions highlighting compassion or altruism
• Creativity , with descriptions that spotlight introspection, imagination, or originality
• Employment experiences , with descriptions highlighting maturity, dependability, soft skills, and/or a positive work ethic
• Determination and commitment , with descriptions that foreground perseverance or an ability to overcome obstacles or challenges

Aligning activities for coherence

Selecting and spotlighting extracurriculars that deepen key strengths that figure elsewhere in your application makes for a more coherent profile, says Jeremy:

When I read your [activities] list it's one of my first insights into whether or not you kind of match what your major says on paper. So if you say you want to be a mechanical engineer and I go into your extracurricular list and see it's just sports teams and a Quiz Bowl Tournament that’s not going to have a whole lot of insight on an engineer. If I see that you've gone to an engineering camp or you’re on a robotics team… that's a tinkerer, that's an engineer!

Jeremy also advises students not to limit their activities to traditional extracurriculars such as football, band, or debate teams. Anything constructive you did outside of your classes that’s part of your story and your personal growth are worth mentioning (unless you run out of room of course).

When it comes to deciding which activities to consider, do not spare yourself anything. If you think it's an extracurricular, it probably is, and we admissions officers want to know about it so that we can tell the best that we can about who you are... If you don't tell us we can't read between the lines… We can only advocate for your admissions based on what you choose to share.

- jeremy parks, us admissions strategist, crimson education.

These expert tips are a reminder that picking which App to use is important, but it’s just a first step. Whichever platform you end up choosing, be it the Common App or Coalition App, insights like these will help you complete your application like a pro.

Final Thoughts

Both the Common App and the Coalition App have a principal benefit for college-bound students — helping to streamline the application process.

That said, the Common App is clearly designed to be as universal a platform as possible, making it popular and widely used and understood.

The Coalition App, by contrast, is accepted at far fewer schools, making it a second choice for the majority of college applicants. But students seeking a more supportive pathway to college or connections to schools with more academic and financial support may find the Coalition App a more compelling option.

Remember, an application platform is merely a tool. Your own unique interests, qualifications, and goals are the most important touchpoints guiding your college journey, including your selection process and how you craft your individual application, regardless of the application platform you choose.

If you want leading insights that will sharpen your college journey, Crimson Education offers unparalleled expertise and a superior track record.

Whether you have questions about us, or about your own college planning, a friendly and skilled advisor is just a call away. Book a free consultation today and discover why students and families around the world partner with Crimson counselors and mentors for outstanding results!

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Key Resources & Further Reading

• Join our free webinars on US university applications
• Free eBooks and guides to help with the college application process

More Articles

A comprehensive guide to the common app: strategies and tips from an admissions expert.

How to Ace the Common App Activities List: A Step-by-Step Guide

How to Answer the 2023/24 Common App Essay Prompts

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How to Answer the 2024-25 Common App Essay Questions

An outstanding college essay can be the x-factor that gets you accepted to the school of your choice – particularly if you’re hoping to attend a prestigious university . As the emphasis on test scores declines , recent data shows that over 56% of colleges place considerable or moderate importance on students’ supplemental essays. So the Common Application, with its variety of essay prompts , can help you showcase your personality, achievements, and aspirations. 

While writing essays about yourself may be an art form, how you approach your answer can be more scientific. Here are our best strategies to select and answer the Common App essay questions for the 2023-2024 admissions year. 

How do you know which prompt to pick? 

Before you start brainstorming, consider the following criteria to choose an essay topic.

• Instinct – When writing a college essay made its way onto your to-do list , was there a personal story that jumped to mind? If so, test out how it feels to trust that instinct. Is there a prompt that this idea aligns with? 
• Passion – Can you write about this topic with excitement? If you’re leaning toward a topic because it feels like the one you “should” choose rather than one you’re amped about, don’t fall for that common mistake . Admissions officers read a ton of essays. If you’re not passionate about your subject matter, it’ll be clear. 
• Understanding – While the Common App essay questions seem fairly straightforward, ensure you understand your prompt and can answer all parts of it. Another mistake students make is forcing something they want to talk about into an existing essay topic. If you have an idea that doesn’t address one of their specific questions, consider prompt 7, which allows you free rein to explore the topic of your choice.
• Dimension – Does your essay give insight into who you are, outside of your GPA, extracurriculars, and letters of recommendation? For example, if you were the captain of your school’s varsity soccer team, an essay about soccer may not be your best choice.

The Common App Essay Topics 

According to a study from Yale , the most important thing to college admissions officers isn’t which prompt you choose, but that you write a great essay. Here are a few pointers to keep in mind:

• Craft a compelling, cohesive narrative that relates back to who you are as a person and a student. 
• Be honest , and don’t embellish details nor use AI .
• Avoid clichés that college counselors have seen before .
• Start early , and give yourself plenty of time to perfect your essay.
• Proofread your essay , and ask a friend, teacher, or family member to read it too. 

Common App Prompt #1: Identity essay 

“Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.”

Students who have a unique aspect of their identity that isn’t otherwise represented in their application might enjoy this prompt. And remember: identity doesn’t just mean your ethnic background. 

• Choose an aspect of your identity that makes you who you are. Are you the first in your family to go to college? Were you educated outside of a traditional school system? Are you a member of a religious group that has shaped your worldview? Each of these examples represents an aspect of identity that might be interesting to explore.
• Be specific about your background, identity, or interest that you’ve chosen. Explain how your personal experience deviates from the norm. 
• Describe the impact of this facet of your identity on who you are. Reflect on how this has related to your growth and perspective on yourself, your community, and your future. For example, if English wasn’t your first language, how did learning the language influence your interests? Did you turn to movies and television and discover a love of cinema that influenced you to pursue a career in entertainment? 

Get your creative juices flowing by reading other Common App essay prompt 1 examples that worked.

Common App Prompt #2: Overcoming obstacles essay 

“The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?”

Don’t think you can only write on this topic if you’ve experienced some type of significant hardship. No matter who you are or where you’re from, you’ve had to overcome obstacles to get to where you are today. Adversity breeds resilience, which is a great quality to highlight to a college admissions committee. 

• Identify an obstacle that has impacted you. Think back on experiences that required you to persevere. This could be something big, like the loss of a parent or a natural disaster, or something less severe, like a failing grade on an important assignment or losing an election for class president. 
• Detail the experience and your role in it. How did you feel when you first encountered this challenge? If you were overwhelmed or scared, be honest. Specificity around details, emotions, and your mindset will create empathy and paint a full picture. Then, complete the story. How did this event unfold? How did your mindset shift? 
• Highlight what you learned and your eventual success. As you brainstorm, make a list of your takeaways. If you experienced a major illness, did you find a renewed sense of gratitude for your physical health? Then, connect your learnings to some success. If you got fired from a part-time job, did the experience help you identify the career path you actually want to pursue and put you in a position to pursue it? 

Study up on how other determined students have aced Common App essay prompt 2 . 

Common App Prompt #3: Individuality essay 

“Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea. What prompted your thinking? What was the outcome?”

College campuses are full of students who are eager to expand their horizons and reassess previously held worldviews. If this sounds like you, prompt three might be perfect. 

• Choose a belief or idea that you questioned at some point. This could be anything from your approach to mental health, to your perspective on gender roles or religious beliefs. Explain why you held this belief and the importance of this idea in your life. 
• Explain what prompted you to explore . Was it a book? An article? A conversation with a teacher? Describe the scene – what happened, where you were, and how you felt.
• Detail the experience of your reflection . Did you turn to books to better understand the other side of this issue? Did you engage in conversation with people who thought differently from you? Get into the weeds of your exploration.
• Present your conclusion . If you changed your perspective, what was the evidence that caused this shift? And if you discovered an even greater sense of certainty around your original opinion, how does that feel? Or, if you’re still not sure but continuing to explore, that’s a great answer, too.

Read how other curious high school students explored beliefs in Common App Prompt #3 essay examples . 

Common App Prompt #4: The gratitude essay 

“Reflect on something that someone has done for you that has made you happy or thankful in a surprising way. How has this gratitude affected or motivated you?”

Gratitude can be a powerful source of motivation, particularly when we’re feeling defeated or down. If you’ve experienced an act of kindness that impacted your life in some significant way, reflect on it in prompt #4.

• Pinpoint an act of kindness that someone has done on your behalf. This could be something monumental, like a family member donating an organ, or a small, everyday gesture, like a stranger paying for your coffee. 
• Set the stage for your story. What happened? Why did you need this act of kindness? If you ran out of gas in the middle of the highway, what did that feel like? Then, present the act of kindness in as much detail as you can while staying within the word limit. What prompted the kind stranger to pull over with their gas can? What conversation ensued? 
• Explore your gratitude and reflect upon how the experience affected you. Did this random act of kindness change your perspective? Did you pay it forward through community service? Show how this experience caused you to change in some way, big or small. Don’t stop at gratitude; push yourself to action. 

Read about times other high school students felt inspired by the empathy shown to them.

Common App Prompt #5: The personal growth essay 

“Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others.”

High school is a period of deep personal growth. Use this prompt to highlight ways you’ve grown that might not be captured by your GPA or extracurricular activities. 

• Reflect on periods of personal growth and pinpoint the events that might have triggered them. Make a list of these types of occurrences. For example, traveling abroad to a new country, being selected to write for the school newspaper, or overcoming a fear of public speaking to compete in a debate. 
• Narrate your experience . You might think of this as your “before” and “during” snapshot. If you weren’t the best student in your science class, but had an exciting hypothesis to tackle in a science fair project, describe how you approached this project. Then, tell the reader about what happened. Did you succeed? Did you fail? Did you uncover a new skill?  
• Expand on your shift in perspective and how this experience caused you to look at yourself and those around you differently. Think of this as your “after.” If your project went on to win your local science fair, how did this shift your view of your scientific abilities? Underline how you grew from this experience and how it shaped your perspective. 

For inspiration, here are examples of Essay #5 responses from high school students just like you. 

Common App Prompt #6: The passion essay 

“Describe a topic, idea, or concept you find so engaging that it makes you lose all track of time. Why does it captivate you? What or who do you turn to when you want to learn more?”

Every student, no matter their GPA or collegiate aspirations, has a hobby or pastime they enjoy. Are you particularly passionate about yours? Take this opportunity to write about it, particularly if your passion is unique.

• List the things you love . Ideally, your greatest passion came to mind as soon as you read this prompt. But if you have an affinity for more than one thing, make a list. This could be anything from making pottery to playing chess or trying out new recipes in the kitchen.
• Explain why you have such an affinity for this hobby or pastime. Delve into the history behind this passion. How did you first get interested in rescuing animals? Did a parent or mentor expose you to this work? Did the experience of finding a lonely cat on the street spark your passion? 
• Expand upon your learning process and how you developed your knowledge of this topic. If you love astronomy, what steps did you take to learn about the night sky and types of stars? Did you immerse yourself in YouTube videos about space? Or visit local observatories? Demonstrate your thirst for knowledge and ability to self-motivate. 

Read other passionate essays here that have captivated admissions officers. 

Common App Prompt #7: Topic of your choice 

“Share an essay on any topic of your choice . It can be one you’ve already written, one that responds to a different prompt , or one of your own design.”

Prompt 7 can be divisive. For some, this open-ended prompt is a great opportunity to write a unique, personal essay. Since there are no rules (other than the word limit), there are several ways to approach Prompt 7.

You could choose a topic that is unique to you, write a personal statement, or tell a compelling story that has some broader appeal. Or, you could think totally outside the box and turn your essay into a screenplay, newspaper article, or other artistic form. 

If you’re considering this prompt, try not to recycle an essay you’ve previously written for a high school class. The admissions officer will recognize your junior year English essay on Othello and, most likely, will find this choice lazy. Moreover, the Common App essays are meant to offer insight into who you are – not how you perform academically. 

That said, this prompt does offer you the opportunity to reuse a prior essay as a base and then tweak it. Just be careful. The college admissions process is high-stakes. Don’t ruin your chances because you’re trying to save time on your essay. 

To find inspiration, check out other students’ essays on Prompt 7 . 

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The Common App essays give students an opportunity to inject some personality into their college applications. No matter which prompt you choose, write with passion and honesty. And then recycle some of those essays in your scholarship applications on Going Merry , to win some cash for college.  Going Merry is a comprehensive college prep platform that helps students get into college and afford it without student loans. We provide tips to make your college applications shine; we curate thousands of high-quality scholarships and help you win them; and we make it easier to compare colleges through our (free!) college cost insights tool. Take the next step to realizing your collegiate aspirations when you sign up for Going Merry today .

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