{"id":4880,"date":"2025-11-28T09:30:24","date_gmt":"2025-11-28T09:30:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.oreateai.com\/blog\/college-essay-topics\/"},"modified":"2025-11-28T09:30:24","modified_gmt":"2025-11-28T09:30:24","slug":"college-essay-topics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.oreateai.com\/blog\/college-essay-topics\/","title":{"rendered":"College Essay Topics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Let me tell you about the night I almost set my kitchen on fire trying to make microwave s\u2019mores during a college essay meltdown. Senior year, right? My Common App draft was filled with phrases like \u201cpassion for learning\u201d and \u201cwinning the regional debate championship\u201d (spoiler: we got 8th place). It felt as stale as last week\u2019s Dunkin\u2019 donut.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the thing nobody tells you:<\/strong> The best college essay topics aren\u2019t under some Spotlight Achievement\u2122\ufe0f marquee. They\u2019re hiding in your grandma\u2019s weird Christmas Jell-O recipe, the way your hands shook handing out fries at your Chick-fil-A shift, or that time you taught your dog to high-five during lockdown.<\/p>\n

My \u201caha\u201d moment came when my younger sister read my 10th draft and said, \u201cThis sounds like a LinkedIn post written by ChatGPT.\u201d Ouch. But she was right. I\u2019d been trying to sound<\/em> impressive instead of being<\/em> human. So I scrapped everything.<\/p>\n

What actually worked:<\/strong><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. \n

    The \u201cNo Trophy\u201d Rule<\/strong>
    \nI made a list of 23 moments that mattered but would never make a resume:<\/p>\n

      \n
    • Accidentally wearing two different Crocs to school junior year (long story)<\/li>\n
    • Crying in a Target parking lot after my first breakup<\/li>\n
    • Learning to fix my dad\u2019s \u201998 Ford pickup by watching YouTube Shorts
      \nThat last one became my essay \u2014 not because I\u2019m a mechanic prodigy, but because fixing that clunky truck taught me how to troubleshoot panic (mine) and carburetors (the truck\u2019s).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n
    • \n

      The Walmart Test<\/strong>
      \nIf your topic could also describe the kid behind you in the checkout line (\u201cI love science and helping people!\u201d), dig deeper. My friend wrote about reorganizing the shampoo aisle during her overnight Walmart stocker job. She connected it to solving \u201cinvisible problems\u201d \u2014 way more memorable than her 4.0 GPA.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n

    • \n

      Embrace the \u201cSo What?\u201d<\/strong>
      \nAdmissions officers read 500 essays about mission trips. They haven\u2019t read one about your family\u2019s 20-year feud over Monopoly rules. I helped my cousin rewrite his essay around losing spectacularly to his aunt every Thanksgiving (\u201cSometimes failure tastes better than turkey\u201d). He got into Brown.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      Watch out for:<\/strong><\/p>\n

        \n
      • The Trauma Trap<\/strong>: You don\u2019t owe strangers your hardest memories. Write about healing, not just hurt.<\/li>\n
      • The Thesaurus Plague<\/strong>: If \u201cameliorate\u201d isn\u2019t in your texts to friends, don\u2019t put it in your essay.<\/li>\n
      • Grandparent Eulogies<\/strong>: Unless Nana taught you something wildly specific (mine taught me to cheat at Bingo \u201cfor Jesus\u201d), tread carefully.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

        A year after submitting my truck essay, I mentioned it to an admissions counselor at a campus event. She grinned: \u201cOh! You\u2019re the carburetor kid. We debated your file over Insomnia Cookies.\u201d Turns out they remembered the Jell-O story too \u2014 another applicant wrote about using her Slovak grandma\u2019s recipe to cope with moving states.<\/p>\n

        Your move:<\/strong>
        \nGrab a notebook. Set a 10-minute timer. Write every small, weird, glowing memory that comes up \u2014 even if it\u2019s just that time you convinced your math club to prank the principal with pi-themed puns. The gold is in the gravel.<\/p>\n

        And if you get stuck? Try making s\u2019mores in a microwave. Just\u2026watch the timer. (RIP my mom\u2019s Tupperware.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

        Let me tell you about the night I almost set my kitchen on fire trying to make microwave s\u2019mores during a college essay meltdown. Senior year, right? My Common App draft was filled with phrases like \u201cpassion for learning\u201d and \u201cwinning the regional debate championship\u201d (spoiler: we got 8th place). It felt as stale as…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1751,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4880","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-content"],"modified_by":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oreateai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4880","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oreateai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oreateai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oreateai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oreateai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4880"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.oreateai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4880\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oreateai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1751"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oreateai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oreateai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oreateai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}