College Admission Essays: Exploring the Subject of the Essay - Yourself

Mining Your Life

Miners move tons of earth looking for a few precious bits of ore. Their task is dirty, dangerous, and tiring. Fortunately for you, “mining your life” for essay topics carries none of the risks of chopping real minerals out of the earth. You won’t get dirty, though you may tire (mentally, at least) after a long trek down memory lane. Plus, mining your life is actually a lot of fun; you get to poke around inside your own head, dredging up all the best moments from your past. True, you may pull up something sad, but if it’s inside you, on some level you’re dealing with it anyway

Writing an essay is a valuable experience even apart from the admissions context. If you’re applying to a new school, you’re at a transition point — a good time to take stock of where you’ve been and where you want to go in life. See the present moment as a pivot between your past and future and give both time periods close attention.

When you “mine your life” for material, you’re in search of stories. You’re not seeking a bunch of general statements like “I am a very strong person. When I face a challenge, I don’t give up.” General statements are boring. They also give the committee very little information. But stories — everyone loves stories! Tell a story and you’ll capture your readers, making them experience your reality for a few moments.

Of course, when you write an admission essay, you present more than the story itself. You must add a few sentences that interpret the story for the reader, explaining why the story matters. The interpretation also presents the theme of the story. In the next section of this chapter, “Collecting the Stories of Your Life,” I explain how to uncover the stories you need. In a later section of this chapter, “Identifying Themes in Your Autobiography,” I show you how to define the themes of your stories.

Many applications for law, business, or medical schools ask you why you’ve chosen that particular career. “Mining your life” to answer this question involves thinking about people in the profession you’ve met, images of the profession on television or in films, or experiences (an illness or a court case, perhaps) that made you appreciate these jobs. See the appendix for additional questions that prod your memory and help you define why you chose your career path.

Collecting the Stories of Your Life

The big moments — the winning touchdown, the award, the opening night of the play — provide good material for an essay. They’re also fairly easy to remember. Here’s how to collect memories of important events:

• Flip through your family’s photo albums or mentally review the milestones you’ve passed — birthdays, graduations, “firsts,” and so on.
• Talk with your parents or other relatives, urging them to tell you stories about your childhood. Establish a nostalgic mood in which each comment begins with “remember when.”
• Chat with your best and oldest friends (who are sometimes the same person) about “the good old days.” Take note of the stories they seem to remember best.
• Got amnesia? The appendix at the end of this book contains a complete set of questions to spur your recollections.

Take a notebook or open a computer file and name it “Mining” or “Memories.” Fill it with a list of all the memories you’ve gathered. Put a star next to turning points — the times when something changed. Also put a star next to any lunch-table item — the important stuff you tell your classmates the minute you sit down in the cafeteria.

Then turn your attention to the small stuff. Life’s little events are important too. The quiet walks with your grandfather around the pond in his backyard. The time you and your friend baked cookies for an elderly neighbor. The first time you sat at the “grown-up table” for a holiday dinner. As you review your past, collect a long list of stories — memories, really — of those times. Work your way through a typical day from the present and then one from a series of intervals: two years ago, five years ago, ten years ago, and so on until you run out of time. The moments you choose to remember from a typical day at each of those ages may provide fine essay material. (The appendix contains a series of questions that will help you remember the “small stuff” of your life.)

After you’ve got a slew of stories, think about them carefully. Which ones reveal something important about your character? Which ones would you like the admissions office to hear? Do any of your memories relate to the questions on the application? Does any story have a theme that you’d like to communicate to your reader? 

Remember that mining your life is not writing the essay. At this stage you’re just collecting material, not trying to punch it into shape for that large blank spot on the application form. Don’t worry about the rest of the process; just dredge up as many memories as you can and list them in a computer file or in a notebook.

Getting Personal with Impersonal Questions

The vast majority of admission essay questions relate directly to your experiences (“Tell us something about yourself,” “Describe an experience that changed your perspective,” and so on). But even questions that seem abstract (“Discuss the role of the printed word in the age of technology,” for example) are personal when they’re answered in the context of an admission essay. If the admissions officers wanted to read a purely academic, abstract discussion, they’d ask you to submit a report written for one of your classes. Many universities do just that, asking for a graded English or history paper. But an admission essay is supposed to reveal something about your beliefs and values.

Before you answer an abstract question, you should spend some time exploring your reactions to the topic. Memories are still relevant, because your beliefs flow from your experiences. For the question in the previous paragraph, for example, you might reflect on your relationship with books, magazines, newspapers, and other printed material. When do you read? Do you recall the first time you sat down with a book? Think about one experience reading a book and compare it to a session of reading from a computer screen. How do these events differ?

When you write an essay in response to an abstract question, you may use only a tiny portion of a story you uncovered. Nevertheless, the memories will influence your answer and provide the personal slant that the admissions committee needs.

Here is a good example essay of a personal response to an impersonal question: “Write about a local, national, or international issue that is important to you.” Notice that the writer — a real student, by the way — starts out with an actual incident from her life and connects it to the issue of dating violence.