TAYLOR PIVA: Wonderful. Thank you, Katie. And I am Taylor Piva. I am program director at Prepory. I have been here for the last five years, and I come with a decade of higher education experience, over half of which is with college admissions specifically. So very experienced in this field. My academic background is in writing and rhetoric and higher education. I have a master’s degree from Carnegie Mellon in rhetoric, so I’m really experienced in that writing field in particular. I have also worked at a number of universities, including Carnegie Mellon, University of Chicago, as well as the University of Rochester, and I’ve personally helped students gain acceptances into a wide range of schools, including Ivy League institutions, as well as schools like University of Michigan, NYU, UT Austin, and many more. So I’m really excited to talk to you all about personal statements and all the details that go into that.

KATIE WILLINGHAM: We’re so excited to have you here, Taylor. And as you heard, Taylor is a true professional in this space, and we’d love for you to dive in with your questions throughout. I’m going to jump in here with a little bit of introduction for you about Prepory. And so we are a college admissions counseling firm. We support students from 9th through 12th grade, so all the way through profile development and the application process.

And we really, really encourage you to book an initial consultation with us to learn a little bit more about our services, have a meeting with the enrollment team that’s tailored specifically to your needs and goals, and we will share that link to schedule an initial consultation in the chat with you, and we can talk through how our services actually support your goals. So this is background for you. We have been in this industry for over a decade. We’ve helped over 14,000 students through this process. Ninety-four percent of our students do get admitted to one of their top five choice schools. These are typically the reach schools or the most competitive schools on their list. And I will mention with this piece too, year over year, I have conversations in the springtime with students who have gone through this process without support. They’re already looking to transfer and, you know, they’re saying to me, hey, I had the grades. I had the activities. Right? You know, what made the difference? Why did my peers who had lower grades get in where I wanted to go? The answer is essays. You need essays. You are not reading your peers’ essays, and Taylor is. She knows what your peers’ essays look like. She knows where they start and where they end up when you work with Prepory. So we’re going to be sharing our tips and tricks with you all about that tonight. A little more context for you just about results. Right? So what does that mean? Those strong essays, they get you into top schools across the country. So last cycle, we had acceptances to all top 50 schools, very familiar with building top profiles and navigating how to tie your story to the particular goals and needs of the institutions that you’re excited about. So excited to answer your questions all about tailoring your writing and exploring this process for the schools that interest you. And with that, I will turn it over to Taylor.

TAYLOR PIVA: Wonderful. Thank you, Katie. So our agenda for this evening, obviously, is going to focus on the personal statement, but there are a couple of different components for that. So we’re going to start with the basics. Before we can really dive into what the personal statement is, what goes into it, how to make a compelling personal statement and stand out in your application, we need to understand where does that fit into all of the other components that are going into your college applications. Then we’re going to talk a little bit more about what admissions officers are actually looking for. What is the content they’re looking for? What are the stylistics that they’re looking for? And we’re going to talk a little bit about do’s and don’ts, so you know what those best practices actually are. And with that, we’re also going to talk about choosing a topic. This is arguably the most important part of the personal statement. We want to know what you’re going to be writing about. And so we’re going to talk about what that topic might be, how do you choose what is going to best represent you, and also fit again within those components of the application. We’re going to talk a little bit about storytelling versus resume dumping. There’s a common mindset that you’re going to want to list everything you can in terms of extracurriculars to really showcase all of those activities. And I’m going to tell you why that’s not the case. Katie is going to talk to us a little bit about the Prepory difference a little bit more, and then we’re going to save some time for questions at the end, although we’ll be checking throughout, so if there are questions that I can answer quickly as we’re on the relevant slide, I will try to do so, but please keep putting them in the Q&A so we can get to them at the end.

All right, and so with that, we’re going to start with the basics. As I said, college applications include a number of different components. If you are familiar at all with this process, these are going to feel very familiar. The standard ones that I’m sure most people think about are the high school transcript, the standardized test scores, the general application, which is going to include your activities list — those are your extracurriculars — your honors, your awards. There’s the letters of recommendation. These are coming from teachers at a high school. They may be coming from community members, guidance counselors. There’s the personal statement, which is our focus this evening. And then there are supplemental essays.

And I want to talk a little bit about the difference between the personal statement and supplemental essays. We’re really going to focus on the former here this evening, but it’s really helpful to situate ourselves in the differences. So as we go through what those topics might be for the personal statement, you might start to understand why we push in one direction versus another. So the personal statement is sent to every single school. If you’re applying through the Common App or through the Coalition, it is sent to all of them as long as they accept it, and it is generally the same personal statement for each school. This is really meant to be a reflective narrative about growth — that is the goal of the personal statement. It’s also a chance to reveal a little bit of personality. You can have some humor — I think I saw a question about that already in the Q&A — so yes, you absolutely can have some humor, you can show some wit, you want to be able to showcase that personality a little bit through the writing style and the topic of choice. And again, this topic is going to be found ideally nowhere else in the application.

On the contrary, supplemental essays are going to be specific to each school. So these are going to be ones that as you go through the application process, schools get to pick what their supplemental essays may be. You will start to see a pattern. There are common types of prompts that we see with supplemental essays. You’ll see a lot of “why this major” essays, you may see a “why this school” essay, a couple of others that are very common, but they are typically geared toward the specific school. You want to tailor them accordingly. These are also shorter than the personal statement — we’ll talk about the length in a moment. The supplemental essays are much shorter. They’re meant to be very quick and easy in that way, although they are still time-consuming to write. And then they’re geared toward these very specific questions, as I mentioned. So they’re going to be about those academic interests, those professional goals, why a student feels this particular school is the right fit for them, how have they engaged in their community. So they’re very specific, they’re meant to be a little bit more targeted and clearly focused than the personal statement.

Focusing more on that personal statement now, these are a few quick facts for us, and we’ll dive in a little bit more. The personal statement is 650 words. So as I mentioned, this is longer than supplemental essays, but I want to stress that this is not long. It may feel long as students are getting started. 650 words sometimes can feel like quite a length to fill, but it goes very fast. And so that is one thing I’d like to stress. It responds to one of seven prompts if you’re using the Common App or one of six for the Coalition for College. The prompts are very similar across these two platforms, so you generally can still use the same personal statement for either. And again, it plays a really significant role in the holistic review process of an application. What I mean by that is while test scores and transcript and extracurricular profiles are really important because they are going to help a student sort of stand out as academically driven, being able to perform well academically, really engaged in their community or through the major that they may want to pursue — the personal statement is where we get to showcase that personality that allows an admissions officer to know this student seems like they are a good fit for my institution. It makes a student memorable. If you think about the number of applications an admissions officer reads, not only in a cycle, but in a given day, it is hundreds in a given day. And so you really want your application to stand out, and the personal statement is the number one way to make sure that that’s happening.

And so again, the top universities are valuing these because of that personality component, but we’re really getting to see how is this student more than just these quantitative figures on an application or their extracurriculars — how are they representing themselves as human beings who are going to now be on our campus and represent us moving forward.

TAYLOR PIVA: So then in terms of what admissions officers are looking for besides this personality piece that I am continuing to emphasize, you’re really going to want to find a topic that cannot be found elsewhere in your application. We’re going to talk a little bit about this again with the resume dumping, but what I want to stress here is that this is a place to showcase what makes you special. And that does not have to be your academic interests or the major that you’re going to be pursuing. It doesn’t have to be an extracurricular that you’ve been involved in. It can be something that is much more minor. So we really encourage students to consider: what are your passions? What are your interests that have shaped you across your lifetime or in the last few years that really feel instrumental to who you are? And I think a great way to think about this is — I often tell students to ask their parents, to ask their friends: what are those things that feel most important to who I am as a person? If you had to describe me to somebody who doesn’t know me, what are the things that you’re emphasizing? And then you can sort of work backwards from there. You want to think about moments in your life that really reveal these things. You want those anecdotes, those personal experiences that we can really latch onto.

Admissions officers are also looking for the correct tone. This is really why we emphasize starting early. I think a common misperception is that this is just another essay that you’re writing, and it’s not. This is not an academic essay. It’s going to be unlike any other essay you will likely ever write, unless perhaps you go to graduate school and you do this all again. But it’s really meant to be a rather informal — without being too casual — representation of your voice. So you definitely do not want to approach this like it’s an English essay; there should not be citations, for example. It really should feel a little bit more like a conversation between you and the admissions officer. So again, still a professional tone, but much more casual than most people recognize.

And then the storytelling component is something that I really want to emphasize. This is a story. So you are wanting to show a past, present, and future of your experience. We’re often starting with an anecdote that has happened sometime in the past and using that to demonstrate an arc of growth. As I mentioned in the beginning, this should be a way of showing growth in some capacity. It could be growth in values that you’ve developed. It could be growth in relationship building. There are a lot of different ways to showcase this, but how have you changed as a person and what are you hoping to take moving forward? That doesn’t necessarily mean that it has to be specific to your college experience, but really how are you as a human being hoping to continue moving through life with this newfound takeaway?

KATIE WILLINGHAM: We have a question here I think that would be helpful to jump in with. Nat, this is your question — which I’m not going to read word for word, but hopefully summarize for you — about the amount of time admissions officers are really spending with these essays that students are laboring over and putting their heart and soul into. Is there anything that makes that “click”? I really liked this idea of what clicks. What does that click look like?

TAYLOR PIVA: Yeah, this is a great question. Thank you so much for asking. I would say, to answer the first part of how long admissions officers are taking — this may be disappointing news, but they are not taking very long. And so this is part of the reason why this personal statement is so important because they’re going to review those other components relatively quickly. Right? It’s very easy to scan a transcript and see, are the grades good? Great. Are the extracurriculars sort of looking like what I’m expecting for this major? Great. And then we get to the personal statement and it’s — here’s your chance to hook them.

And what that looks like, what that click might be, is really trying to make sure that the opening of your personal statement is as engaging as possible. We’ll look at this in a future slide, but it’s often called a hook in admissions essays — but also if you’re familiar with creative writing at all, you might have heard this as well — that you really want to start with a hook or an engaging opening. Those first few sentences, if not the first and second sentence, are your moment to really grab your reader. And that does not mean that it has to be outlandish. I think there’s a way to go overboard with this, but you really do want to set the scene very quickly. This is not a chance to be Charles Dickens and have a very lengthy start to your essay. We don’t have time. You want to sort of get in and really capture their attention in those first couple of sentences, and then you’ve got them hooked moving forward. Great question.

KATIE WILLINGHAM: Thanks, Taylor.

TAYLOR PIVA: Yeah. One of the other things that we really want to emphasize here is that the personal statement should fully answer the prompt. We’re going to talk a little bit about the prompts shortly, so I’ll go through those in more detail, but there are some prompts that have multiple questions embedded within them. And so you want to make sure that you are actually answering all of those questions, not just the first or the last, which is a common mistake. But it’s also really important that you don’t veer off topic. Again, this is not an incredibly long essay. 650 words is not a lot of time. And so if you start to veer off into a tangent, it can get very muddied very quickly. And so really trying to stay focused, stay on topic is going to be really important to have that captivating essay from start to finish. And then lastly, we want it to be well written. Of course, the content is important, but the stylistics are also equally important. You want it to be, of course, thoughtful and well written in terms of the story arc, but we also want to make sure that we’re not having careless errors in terms of grammar and spelling and things like that. It should be conversational and casual, but that does not mean that we don’t want to give attention to the stylistics as well.

KATIE WILLINGHAM: We have a question about kind of alternative styles. This is someone who’s curious about putting together maybe a montage and finding a thematic thread. So I know we’ve definitely had some students who have kind of flipped the script a little bit. Where are those parameters and how do you think about some of the effective alternative styles?

TAYLOR PIVA: I think this is a bit of a complicated question. So I think that this is one of the areas where I would say working with a college admissions coach can be really helpful, because there is a little bit of strategy here. In general, I would say it is possible to be creative, right? We do want these personalities to shine through; if that’s the way that we do it, great. I would say the biggest thing is to be mindful of the balance. So if we are choosing a format that maybe is a little bit more outside of the box, we want to make sure that the content and the rest of the stylistics don’t feel too zany. One of the risks that I sometimes see with students is that essays can feel quirky for the sake of being quirky rather than authentic. And so I think that’s a little bit of that balance here, but I have certainly seen students write montage essays that are quite successful. I think having that theme to ground them is really important because you also want to make sure that it doesn’t feel like you’re trying to bite off too much more than you can chew, and now where is the point of this essay? I’m not sure.

KATIE WILLINGHAM: So helpful.

TAYLOR PIVA: I think that this outline that we have here on the screen does follow a little bit more of that traditional structure, but I think the general principles here are probably very similar, right? As I mentioned at the beginning, and I will emphasize again here, this hook that you see in the introduction is incredibly important. This is going to be the moment where you’re grabbing that admissions officer’s attention and getting them to be hooked on your essay. This is where you’re getting them to say, okay, I advocate for this student to get into Harvard. You really want this moment to be well written and effective.

This could be starting in the middle of an experience — it’s a very common approach. It could simply be beautiful language that is just so well written that it really captures their attention. So again, it doesn’t have to be the most exciting. We don’t have to think of, you know, the fight scenes in an adventure book, for example. It can be those little things if they’re well written. So really there’s a variety here. But then we’re going to move into the body. And this is where, as I mentioned, we want that past, present, and future. So we’re going to think about: whatever that anecdote is or the context that we’re offering, what was that? What happened in the context of the prompt that you’ve chosen, and how has it affected you as a student? And what does that mean in terms of who you are now? And then how is it going to help you grow, not only now, but in the future? Right? So we’ve got our background, we’ve got our past and all the context that we need. The climax is really understanding what does that change? What turning point did you get to? What are the emotions that we need to feel as the reader? And then growth — making sure we understand how did we get from past to present, and how are we getting from present to future?

And then that leads us into our conclusion, understanding how this experience motivates you for college, your career, your future goals. As I mentioned, this is going to all of your schools. So you don’t want this to be attached to any specific institutions. If, let’s say, NYU is your top choice, you don’t want your conclusion to say, and this is why this experience has prepared me to be at NYU and a successful biology major. That’s not quite what we’re going for here. We want it to be a little bit more zoomed out than that. This is what prepares you to engage with your peers in a meaningful way. This is what is going to help you impact your community moving forward — things like that.

So a little more about these do’s and don’ts that I want to go over — in terms of things that we do want to see. As I’ve mentioned, you want to choose that topic that isn’t found elsewhere in your application. So again, your extracurriculars are going to cover a lot of those organizations that you’re a part of, the activities that you’re doing outside of the classroom. They may cover some things that you’re doing inside the classroom if you’re doing some research or things like that. Let’s focus on a topic that’s outside of that so you’re showing more things in your application. The point here is to maximize all of these components so that you’re using all of the space to showcase who you are and how you’re a great applicant. So rather than repeating some of that, we’re really trying to utilize the space here.

We want to tell a story. One of the things that you’ll often hear is “show, don’t tell.” So how can you show this growth? How can you describe it in a storytelling way rather than simply stating, I learned to be empathetic. Well, that’s great, but tell me how. How did that happen? Show me that experience and make sure that we’re connecting that past, present, and future. Again, that storytelling technique that I just mentioned is going to be really important. This is again about those stylistics. You’re going to see a little bit more of the creative here. A little bit of creative writing goes a long way in the personal statement. And again, emphasizing that hook is incredibly important. It could be your whole first paragraph, it could be your first sentence, but really making sure that you’re engaging the reader from the moment they begin the personal statement.

And then some of these don’ts: you should not try to fit your whole life story in your personal statement. 650 words is not enough time to cover from birth to now, no matter how you try to split it. It is also not possible to even fit the four years of high school in your personal statement. So really trying to be intentional about what you’re including and limiting that focus is going to help have a successful personal statement. You want to make sure that you’re not talking too much about somebody else in your personal statement. It’s called a personal statement for a reason. They want to get to know you as an applicant. They don’t want to get to know your best friend. They don’t need to get to know your sibling, your teachers. This is a point where the focus should be on you.

You don’t want it to be school-specific, as I mentioned. You also want to make sure that you’re not having an overly negative tone. This happens sometimes when we’re thinking about — from that past, present, and going into my future — when we’re thinking about a challenge or an experience that maybe was not as positive that we’ve now grown from, it’s a little risky to lean into that negativity too much. We want to make sure that if we’re talking about something maybe not so positive, we’re doing so to the extent that we need to, and then we’re thinking of the positive and reframing it in that way.

And then lastly, we do not want to procrastinate writing the personal statement. This is going to be a really time-consuming part of the process because you want to get it right. It’s a really important part of the college application. It is, as I said, the part where you get to show that you’re a human being outside of those metrics that have been a part of the application process. You’re going to be able to tell your story and show your personality, and you really want to give it thought and attention. A lot of times you have to go through a couple of different topics before you find the right one, or you might try a couple of different prompts before you find the right one. And so starting early is going to give you the time to really think through it, let it breathe, think about how you want to revise, rather than trying to rush through it and maybe not having the best outcome.

KATIE WILLINGHAM: Yeah, I’m going to give Taylor one second here to take a sip of water and take a peek in our Q&A as well. Our team behind the scenes — me included — have been in there answering your questions. So we’re very on top of our Q&A. Keep them coming, you guys. These have been really fascinating, but she’ll dig in there a little bit.

And just a little bit more context for you about Prepory. A lot of these students in our reviews talk about the writing process. They talk about having that support of somebody who’s in your corner, who’s able to help you actually describe your experiences authentically and really be you in this process. So I know someone asked about kind of being too polished — we’re doing our job wrong if that is how your work is coming out. And really making sure our students feel seen and heard and that they’re putting their authentic selves forward. But there is a lot of nuance to that, and that is why it’s really so important to have support. I also — I was just on a call earlier this week with a family who was, you know, like, okay, so we start the process when the Common App opens, is that right? You know, getting going on these essays in August — like, that’s what makes sense. I’m doing a summer program. I’m busy. Students who have a lot going on sometimes delay specifically the writing process way too long. So this is something that we can help you think about just in terms of your timeline of breaking this down into manageable pieces. And with that, I’ll encourage you again to schedule an initial consultation with our team so we can talk you through that structure and that breakdown, what it would look like to have outside support and how we’re going to keep this manageable for you around all of your different activities.

TAYLOR PIVA: Yeah. There were two questions that I saw in the chat, and I think one of our colleagues just answered one, but I’ll answer it aloud as well for others who may have similar questions, and that is: can you write about an experience that happened early in high school as opposed to maybe later on in that process? And yes, the answer is yes. Generally, I advise that students don’t choose experiences that happened prior to high school, unless it’s something really, really important and we can talk about it and then move very quickly to the present. But certainly within high school — 9th grade through the beginning of 12th grade as they’re applying — is certainly fair game.

And I will say, actually, the flip side of that is you don’t want to choose necessarily an experience that has happened too recently either. What I have found is that some students will choose something that has happened — if they’re writing this, let’s say, in June between junior and senior year, and it’s an experience that maybe happened in April — they haven’t had enough time to reflect on what that experience has actually meant to them, how it’s changed them. And so that reflection piece that we’ve been talking about in the growth arc is really hard to have come through without having more time to reflect on it. So both ends of that are true.

And then we have one more question that I’ll answer before we move on, and that’s about whether or not a successful personal statement can be written as a movie script or a voice-over script. I think that this is a really cool idea in terms of creativity. My concern definitely is, as you name in your question, about how much you can actually flesh that out in 650 words. I have seen versions of this that are not quite a script, but they are trying to take that creative approach, especially for those who might be going into creative fields. So I think there’s opportunity there, but I think the script idea, as it is formally in that format, is probably a little trickier to do. But I think, again, there are people at Prepory — we have some film people on our team who have done film as a background academically or professionally — so that is something that we could certainly explore, with a lot of creative minds to poke around there as well.

TAYLOR PIVA: All right. So then thinking about how we’ve talked now about the importance of this topic, and we don’t want it to be something that’s shown in your application in other places — it’s really important, but then how do we actually choose what that is? Well, first we need to think about the prompts. So these are the Common App personal statement prompts. As I mentioned, if you’re using Coalition for College for any of your applications, the prompts are very similar. So they also have a topic of your choice prompt, which we’ll talk about, but there’s a lot of overlap here. So ideally, you should be able to pick a prompt that works if you have applications on both platforms.

But very quickly, I want to go through these. The first is about your background, your identity, your interests — these are things like, I would not be who I am if I didn’t talk about this specific part of my identity or my interests. This is a passion that I have, that I can’t not tell you about. The next one is about a lesson. So something — you’ve encountered a challenge and how did that challenge affect you? What did you learn from it? This is a very great way to see that storytelling arc that we’ve been talking about. The next one is reflecting on a time when you challenged a question or challenged a belief or idea. So how did that happen? What was the result of that?

The next one, number four, is what I call the gratitude prompt. So this is one where you’re thinking about something someone has done for you and how that gratitude affected or motivated you. I will say for this one — as I mentioned, you don’t want a personal statement that veers toward being about somebody besides yourself — this is the most common prompt where that happens. And so it’s a really helpful one to have a lot of guidance on to make sure we’re striking that balance. You have to acknowledge who that person is, but then you have to make sure that you’re centering this about yourself. How has the gratitude actually affected you and your story?

Number five is about a specific accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth. So again, that storytelling arc — this is maybe less so a challenge compared to number two, but just a light bulb moment, if you will, and how have you come to understand either yourself or other people differently from that. And then number six is something that you find so engaging that you can lose track of time. So this can be similar to number one as well in terms of interest, but this is really meant to be those passions that you can just do for as long as somebody will let you. You know, I’ve had a student who has written essays about gardening in this way — it’s very cathartic, they just garden for hours. This is often a lot of the creative ones; I’ve had students write about crocheting or other creative outlets, but just something where you can really shine through with that passion.

And the last one is a topic of your choice, and it’s in red because I strongly, strongly discourage you from choosing this. And the reason why is because it is the hardest one to write, and that may seem untrue if you’re looking at this and you’re like, well, but there’s no prompt. I can write about anything. So it should be easy. What I have seen in all my years of working in college admissions is that what happens is that all of those don’ts that we talked about earlier — don’t bite off more than you can chew in terms of topics and make sure that you have a clear arc — those don’t happen because there is no parameter for the prompt to guide you. And so this one is really risky, and I really think most students who choose this, their essay actually fits one of the other six. And so if you go back and look after you’ve written an essay, most of the time you can pick one of the others and use them to guide you.

That being said, this is from last year’s data from the Common App. These are the prompts that were used most in order. So you can see, despite what I just said, topic of your choice is used the most. And so if you want further reason for why you shouldn’t use it, you also don’t stand out in this way. Right? If you are just one of many applicants writing a topic that could be anything, it has no structure — that can get really exhausting as an admissions officer to read when there’s not a lot of that structure being offered. If you can write a really compelling essay, that’s great, but again, wanting to make sure that it’s really structured and clear in terms of what you are sharing helps to move us forward.

Facing adversity, which is the second prompt — the lessons that you’ve overcome — is the next most common, and the personal growth is then our third, rounding out our top three. I would say in general, this maps onto my experience, although I do not recommend that students use prompt seven. What I also want to point out here is that if you are thinking, well, I want to pick a prompt that maybe is less represented and that will help me stand out, you might want to think about the “challenging an idea” prompt and the gratitude prompt, because these are much less represented across the board for applications.

KATIE WILLINGHAM: We have a lot of great questions about this one. I know that you and I also were just kind of fascinated by this.

TAYLOR PIVA: Yes.

KATIE WILLINGHAM: Yes. By seeing that. And we did actually also have topics to avoid, so we’ll get into that shortly here. But Penny wants to point out that a topic of your choice doesn’t allow you to be the most creative. So can you be the most original with this prompt? I’m curious what you think.

TAYLOR PIVA: It does. And you know, Penny, I think my perspective was similar to yours when I first started in college admissions. Interesting. What I have seen time and time again — and I will admit, when I’m given the choice to do something like, here you can do this set thing or you can create your own project, your own design — what I have seen though time and time again is that especially because this is a very different style of writing than what students are used to and it is not that much space — again, 650 words is really not that many words when it comes down to it — what ends up happening is that students bite off more than they can chew. They pick a topic that is sometimes a little bit more stylistic over content, because they’re trying to show that creativity, and then we lose that actual content about who they are. Again, we don’t want to be quirky for the sake of being quirky. We want to be intentional. And so it’s not that it can’t be done and done well. But a lot of this is also: you need to know the rules before you can break them. And so what I’ve also found is answering one of the other six prompts first, and then thinking about, is there a way I want to sort of turn this on its head — that can also be the way to get to prompt seven if that’s really where a student wants to go.

KATIE WILLINGHAM: Interesting. A plot twist. So definitely try one of the other ones out first. Someone else, Swati, is asking here if we have metrics on which essay prompts are more successful — so turning this on its head a little bit. I don’t think number for number we have tracked this exactly. This is really going to depend on the student and what works for their story. So it wouldn’t really be the best way to go about this. But definitely some of these ones that students are not taking on — that’s all of a sudden going to start to feel fresh. That’s my answer, but I’m interested in your context too, Taylor.

TAYLOR PIVA: Absolutely. Agree with you, Katie. I think keeping things fresh is really important. And I think a lot of this is — I tend to find the personal growth and the background, identity, and interest prompts, despite tending to be more common, have a lot of ways to answer that question that still feel new. And so, you know, I can read — and I have many times in application cycles — I can read probably 20 background, identity, or interest questions in a row, and they could all be different because there are so many ways to take that question. And so there are ways to make that really unique. Metric-wise, yeah, it’s hard to say. We have metrics at Prepory of, in general, what makes a great personal statement, not necessarily by prompt, but by topic and stylistics. So that is certainly helpful for us. But I would say just in general, those two tend to be the most open-ended, so you can really span a lot of topics there.

Great questions, guys. This is one of my favorite things to talk about because I think, you know, it’s really easy to say, well, there’s all these things that you can show your personality with — pick a great topic, go forth and be merry. But there is some secret sauce, and it’s what topics to avoid. And I will say before we go through this list, this is not because these are not good topics. I have seen essays that are very well written on many of these. The problem with these is that many of them are very repetitive. So for example, for our first few here — sports and sports injury essays — these are really hard to read because I see them a lot, and they end up feeling very similar. And while it is something that I recognize as a big part of an athlete’s experience in particular, they don’t tend to show me something new about a student, especially if the extracurriculars already have a lot of sports represented. They end up just reading a lot of the same things — a lot of leadership, a lot of teamwork — and I’m not learning a lot of new things about those applicants, especially to set them apart from other people, which again is one of the big goals here.

TAYLOR PIVA: Cultural foods, moving schools or homes — these are also very similar. They can be very compelling, but because they tend to be written in a very similar way and we see them very often, they tend to not make applicants stand out as much. Divorce and breakups are hard to write about and I often recommend avoiding them because they tend to shift the focus away from the student themselves. You know, if you’re writing about your parents’ divorce, that tends to put the focus on the parents and that experience and less so about the student. Breakups just tend to not be something that admissions officers necessarily need to read about.

The mission trips and volunteering abroad — I know that there are students who have had very meaningful experiences internationally or through mission trips, etc. But a lot of times these, again, don’t necessarily help the student stand out, especially depending on the type of institution they’re applying to, but they also can be hard to strike the right tone. So again, when we’re thinking about how you’re presenting yourself, you want to make sure that you are presenting yourself as somebody who understands a little bit more about the world and yourself. You don’t want to present your experiences as “I was there to save the day,” which is sometimes what these essays can sound like without being intentionally written that way. That’s something to be mindful of there.

Failing a test or a class — as I mentioned earlier, you want to make sure that we’re not having an overly negative tone, right? And part of this is you want to represent yourself well. We don’t want to give admissions officers reasons to not want to accept you. Talking about a failed test or a class can sometimes give that pause. And sometimes it’s telling on ourselves in a way that we don’t need to tell on ourselves. And so we want to make sure that we’re representing our stories well and presenting ourselves as the best applicant for college moving forward.

COVID — we generally want to avoid. We all went through it, and those essays tend to not be specific enough for that experience. They were very common to be written about early on, as you can imagine. And then the Common App shifted to having a separate question for impacts from COVID in particular, which has now shifted now that we’re a little further out from that, but the point still remains that talking about that as a main point of focus generally does not read as a compelling essay.

And then these last two — we want to be really careful because these are obviously sensitive topics and they tend to be very important to student experiences, especially the death or illness of a loved one. Unfortunately, we do not know who is going to read your students’ applications. And so it is hard to know what stigmas there may or may not be in terms of mental health. And again, we want to present ourselves as positively as possible. And so thinking about mental health crises — we don’t want to give an admissions officer pause that a student may not be ready for college or the right fit for their college. And we also want to make sure that these are things that are not actively happening, that we’ve had enough time to reflect on, as I mentioned earlier. And the death or illness of a loved one, similar to what I mentioned with divorce essays and some of these others, can shift that focus to too much of another person and not enough reflection on the student themselves. And again, we really want to make sure that there’s enough reflection to be had here that it feels like we’re telling a story completely, and not making it only about this one topic that can feel a little too heavy for these types of applications.

So then again, how do we choose the right story? We’ve talked about what you don’t talk about. We’ve talked about what those prompts are and sort of these frameworks, but then how do we choose the right story? We’re going to ask ourselves a few questions. One, does this topic tell a story with a beginning, a conflict, and a resolution? Do you have your past, present, future? Is there a clear story arc? Is there a challenge or conflict in the story? And again, this doesn’t have to be external. It doesn’t have to be a hot debate between the student and a friend or anybody else in their life. It could be internal conflict — you know, them trying to resolve something within themselves — but there has to be some sort of inciting moment here. And then does the student experience growth or change because of this experience? Again, the whole point of personal statements is that growth arc. We want to show how a student has changed over time, been able to reflect on that experience, show introspection through high school.

Is this story that we’re trying to tell mainly about the student, their thoughts, their choices, and their feelings? Again, this is a personal statement. It’s not the student and their friend’s statement. It’s not the student and their parent’s statement. We really want the focus to be on the student, the applicant themselves. So is it mainly about them? And then lastly, does this story reveal something new about you beyond your activities and grades? We want to think about the application as a whole. So how can we maximize these different components so that the activities list is telling us something, the grades are telling us something, and the personal statement is there to show: here’s who I am as a human being, this is my personality, and that way we can tie all those pieces together.

And so with that, as I’ve mentioned a little bit through this process, it is important to start early because you’re going to write a lot of essays. And you’re not only going to write a lot of essays in terms of the personal statement being one component of that, but as I talked about at the beginning, there are a lot of supplemental essays that are going to come into play as well. The personal statement — you may write multiple versions before you get to the point where you are actually revising and you’ve landed on that final topic. And then supplemental essays — you may have four per school, you may have a few less, you may have more. So if we assume that you are applying to 10 schools, which students often apply to a few more, and you’ve got four supplemental essays per school, we’re looking at 40 essays plus the personal statement. And if you think of a minimum of three rounds of review and editing, that’s 123 rounds of essay editing, and I would say the majority of our students are doing much, much more than that. This is why starting early — and I know we have a lot of juniors and junior parents here — this is still early, you’re still okay, but it is time to get started if you are an underclassman. I start with students even before junior year just to start practicing the writing so that you are comfortable with this genre and really prepared for this writing process.

TAYLOR PIVA: All right, now how do we draft these essays? Your personal statement is going to tell this story. We’re going to limit the personal statement to a maximum of two experiences. As I said, we don’t want to bite off more than we can chew. So if you do more than this, this is where things start to get muddied. If you write about more activities than just two, it starts to feel like that expanded version of your resume. If you recall at the very beginning when we set our agenda, I mentioned we want storytelling versus resume dumping. So if we limit ourselves to two experiences, we’re able to really focus the story and make sure that there’s a clear central topic. And then you can incorporate your achievements into the story. We don’t want it to read like I’m telling my story about competing at a DECA conference, and then I just have a couple of sentences where I list out the awards and honors that I’ve gotten and they’re sort of tacked on to the end of my paragraph, because that’s going to read pretty obviously as what I’m doing. You really want to make sure that this is a holistic representation. You can mention some of these key components in terms of achievements and experiences, but we want to focus on the storytelling because the rest of this is going to be represented elsewhere in the application.

So what do strong personal statements have in common? They’re going to show your values and personality through a cohesive story based on your selected prompt. Right? So you’re making sure that your story — you’re limiting that focus, you’re choosing a prompt, you’re answering all parts of a prompt, and you’re not going off on tangents. You’re going to reflect on your past, present, and future. You’re thinking of that story arc. You’re going to highlight who you are beyond your extracurriculars and academics. What else can you tell an admissions officer so that they know that you should be accepted into your top school? And lastly, you’re going to demonstrate your writing skills. We’re going to make sure that it’s well written. You’re going to make sure that you have really thought through all of these different components so that you’re representing yourself in the best way possible.

On the contrary, a weak personal statement consistently is going to discuss school-specific facts or details. Remember that this is being sent to every school on your list, so we don’t want those school-specific details — you’re going to save those for the supplemental essays. I promise you there’s going to be a place for those; you’ll get to talk about why you want to go to University of Michigan so badly — that will go in the supplemental essay. Your personal statement, leave it out. You want to make sure that you don’t choose the wrong topic. We’ve spent a lot of time on that this evening, and it’s for a good reason. It’s really important. You don’t want to tell someone else’s story. This is the personal statement. And you don’t want to cram too much into those 650 words. You really want to make sure that it’s focused, it’s clear, and it’s cohesive.

KATIE WILLINGHAM: Thank you so much, Taylor. I’m going to give you all a little bit more context around Prepory and how we help with this process and what that might look like. I hope some of you have already gotten on our calendar to book an initial consultation with me and my team. We’d love to talk more about this topic, and we will dive in for a little bit of Q&A here. I know we are coming up on 8:00. We’ll stay a few minutes later and answer some questions for you. And there are quite a few still in the chat. It’s gotten really juicy as we have been thinking about these do’s and don’ts, I think, which can really start getting those questions flowing.

So, what does the structure of our program look like? The core of Prepory’s work is hour-long one-on-one advising sessions — so really putting you in front of an expert. And in the essay process, I’d be thinking about — we have a whole wealth of reflective questions that we help students go through to come up with these topics. Right? So we’re doing work on that brainstorming piece, on that exploratory piece, and then we also have layered support. So unlimited essay and resume feedback. You have access to a writing team at Prepory, and you’re going to go through a mock admissions committee review process where outside members of the team who haven’t been talking with you week over week and have all of the context of your story are able to say, yes, this is really clicking, this is coming across on paper, and actually, it’s working for me as someone who’s read thousands of these essays.

So what I always emphasize specifically around writing at any stage: this is its own genre. I have a background in writing. Taylor has a background in writing. But it’s expertise in this specific genre that you need to be successful in the college application process and tying your entire story together to be successful at these top schools that you guys are curious about. So I hope you’ll book a consultation with us, and we’ll dive a little bit further here into the Q&A. Thank you guys so much. You can scan the QR code as well if you haven’t booked your consultation yet, and please go ahead and do that. Was there a question that you wanted to start with, Taylor, or shall I dive in?

TAYLOR PIVA: I really love one of these questions that asks: what if a kid just has a very boring life so far and may not have anything unique that’s going to help them stand out? I get this question a lot from students who say to me, Taylor, nothing has ever happened in my life. I’ve lived a very just standard life. There’s nothing here. And I do not believe them. There is something that will help them stand out. One of the things I want to emphasize on this topic is what helps a student stand out can be quite mundane. As I said, I’ve had students write really beautiful essays on gardening, and it’s simply just talking about how they have taken a joy in gardening and they have found peace in that, what they’ve learned about themselves with that process. We’ve had students who have written a gratitude essay about their bus driver and what they’ve taken away from just the daily relationship that they built with that person. And so they can be these really small moments — as long as there’s growth to be had and we can tell the story in a captivating way, that is going to help them stand out.

KATIE WILLINGHAM: I love that one too. I think there’s always something and it’s just kind of figuring out what that is for you. I love Shirley’s question here about time that students should commit. I know that this varies, but how many hours should a student set aside for each statement or essay?

TAYLOR PIVA: Yeah. I think that this definitely does vary. Part of this will depend on, you know, if a student is arguably a good writer. Are they comfortable with writing? Is this a harder process for them? But I would say for the personal statement, again, because you are likely going to have to go through at least a couple of topics before you land on that final one and then go through the drafting and revising process, it is definitely not an insignificant number of hours. If I had to put a number on it, I would say the average for my students is for the personal statement alone, we’re probably spending ten-plus hours, if not more. Supplemental essays will vary a lot because different schools, depending on where you’re applying, will have different numbers of supplemental essays. I know we had in the poll some people who are interested in potential Ivies — they tend to have a lot of essays. If you’re interested in applying to business schools as a high school student for undergrad, if you’re interested in BS/MD programs, engineering schools — those tend to have additional supplemental essays. So all of those are going to compound, of course. So it’s definitely a time-consuming process.

KATIE WILLINGHAM: Yes, and I really think that is part of why we talk so much about getting started early, because when you are in the thick of, you know, your difficult coursework and all of your clubs and all these leadership roles in, you know, doing it a few hours at a time and really spacing it out is also going to give you that space to kind of let things settle — like you were saying — and kind of get that space to reflect. So I love that.

I think this is a really fun, slightly combative question that I enjoy. How can you possibly write about a talent, interest, or passion “that’s my emphasis, not theirs” that’s not elsewhere in your application? Wouldn’t it be an activity or an award? How is it not going to show up if it’s your passion?

TAYLOR PIVA: Yes. Yeah, I love this question too, because I think it’s very real, it’s very honest. So one of the ways in which this often happens is students actually very commonly come to the end of their junior year and beginning of their senior year with more than 10 activities. The Common App allows for 10 activities in the activities list, and those activities are, you know, formal clubs and organizations, their sports, volunteering, their research, their summer programs, part-time jobs — there’s a wide variety. And so a lot of times students will come with a lot of activities and we have to whittle it down to 10. And so that’s one of the ways that I think it becomes easier, because sometimes those passions that you do just for the joy of doing them — we call this “dynamism” at Prepory — it’s the things that just make your heart happy and you are doing it just for that reason. For a lot of students, this might be music, it might be dance, it might be a club sport that maybe they’re just doing for fun. Sometimes those activities get left off the activities list because all the space is needed for things that are more aligned with their academic interests or leadership and things like that.

Otherwise, I would say it could be a slightly different presentation of a passion. So I have certainly seen students who, for example, might be interested in environmental science and they’ve got a lot of community service in that area, they’ve got maybe some summer programs related to that, but they still could talk about gardening — it feels similar to that outdoorsiness, but they’re talking about it from a very different perspective, talking about that growth. So there are ways to navigate a little bit of that overlap, but I think most people would be surprised at what gets left off of the activities list simply for the space.

KATIE WILLINGHAM: Yeah, so true. Another question here I thought it would be really helpful to answer live for everyone. You guys have been so amazing, by the way. These questions were a lot of fun. I expected questions to be light tonight — I don’t know why. You guys are really bringing them all to the forefront and it’s a really interesting time for us. So thank you guys so much for being here and sticking through the Q&A. From Teresa here: any suggestions if you find your essay is living in two different prompts?

TAYLOR PIVA: Yeah. Great question. I would say one of the things that I would question is: what is the actual story that we want to tell? Sometimes when it feels like we’re sort of torn between prompts, there’s a clear one that we’re sort of leaning toward, and so let’s just commit to that one. And sometimes it is truly just picking one and sticking to it — that’s the other solution here.

Strategy-wise, I think it can help to think about some of the supplemental essays that may be coming through the pipeline. So for example, if you are choosing between the “challenge and idea” question and the intellectual curiosity question, I might lean more towards intellectual curiosity — that’s the one where you describe an idea or topic that makes you lose track of time — because a lot of schools will have supplemental essays that ask about a time you had an idea challenged and how that impacted you. So sometimes just thinking strategically there can be helpful in choosing one versus the other. But if you’re writing an essay for one prompt and then you start seeing yourself veer to another, that also might be an indication that you need to go back to the drawing board — where is this topic actually going? — and make sure that you’re keeping that focus in line.

KATIE WILLINGHAM: With that focus one — we have a question here about the curiosity question: could it be curiosity around multiple interests? And I think this connects back to our montage question that kind of came back around — a theme, but three examples of that theme. So if you could talk a little bit about how that works.

TAYLOR PIVA: Yeah. I would say there’s no clear answer here. So I don’t want to say yes or no to whether or not that curiosity question can have more than one interest. I will say that the way that I generally recommend reading these prompts is pretty literally, and so because it asks about a topic, idea, or concept, my inclination is really to lean into the singularity of that. If they are relatively similar — let’s say there’s an interest in something related to, you know, if you’re interested in aerospace engineering and you’re thinking of space and engineering — well, okay, maybe we can put these two things together. But I would really try to limit yourself to that singular interest as much as possible, again, because we don’t have a lot of space. And so my worry would be if we are able to talk about more than one interest, that might indicate that we haven’t done enough to talk about either. And if we are talking about one as thoroughly as we should be, we shouldn’t have space for two. So that might be a helpful litmus test, if you will.

KATIE WILLINGHAM: Yeah, it also definitely relates to the idea of one theme and multiple examples of that theme. Are you trying to tell three stories? Or are we telling one story with multiple examples? Exactly. So sometimes that is a tricky thing to feel out and that’s why you want an expert on your side. So we’ll wrap it here. Thank you guys so much for your questions tonight, for sticking with us a little bit longer in our Q&A. It was really lively. We had so much fun with you and hope to see you on our calendar and be able to have more conversations about how we can support you through the writing process and through every single component and nuance of college admissions. Thank you so much again. Have a good rest of your night.

TAYLOR PIVA: Thank you all.