It’s the way you communicate with the admissions committee as a person and potential member of the campus community. It brings to life the student-you!-behind your statistics and demographics. Why? Your personal statement is the single loudest ‘qualitative’ element of your application. In order to get into your dream school, you’ll need not only great grades and test scores, but also a strong personal statement. Admissions officers are people-people who would be horribly bored if their job came down to just numbers, statistics, cutoffs, and counting up your AP, SAT, and ACT scores. Instead, they’re trying to get to know candidates as humans. You may have heard the phrase “holistic admissions” thrown around-many universities follow this model, which means they don’t necessarily have an ACT or SAT cutoff score, nor do they require a certain number of AP/IB/Honors courses. (Suggested reading: Which Schools Use the Common App? The Rank-Ordered List) Why does the Common App Essay-and any other college essay-matter?

Though not every school uses the Common App-many state or public schools often have their own systems-the work you do in writing your Common App Essay will serve you in every other component of the process, including applying to non-Common App schools and writing the secondary and supplemental essays that often accompany both types of applications. It’s also where you’ll encounter “The Common App Essay,” otherwise known as your personal statement (PS), which is what this guide will focus on. The Common App allows you to enter information like your name, demographics, extracurricular activities, and more just once for every school that uses it. You might be familiar with the Common Application, Common App for short, which serves as a single application shared by over 900 colleges, including every Ivy League school and similarly elite universities like Stanford, Caltech, and the University of Chicago. In fact, if tackled with intelligence, reflection, and organization, the college process can actually offer you a chance to make the admissions process about you as a person, rather than about a distant name on a screen. All those essays, all those forms, all those questions? They’re about getting you in touch with the most authentic and vibrant version of yourself. The college application process has a logic to it-and it’s one that you, the applicant, can both navigate and trust. You, the college applicant, have worked hard through high school, earning great grades, expanding your worldview through extracurricular activities, and contributing to your community… and now, it can seem pretty unjust to throw yourself at the mercy of an application system that seems arbitrary, blind to your personality, or even uncaring. One of the biggest fears of many students and parents is the sheer anonymity of the process. If you’re a parent, you might be afraid of how much the college admissions system has changed and grown more competitive since you were your kids’ age, or perhaps you never had to navigate this system at all. If you’re a student, you might be reviewing rumors and horror stories about that classmate of yours with perfect grades and a 1500 SAT score who somehow got rejected from every Ivy League school. Applying to college: the phrase alone can instill terror in the hearts of high school seniors, and even in those of us who have lived through the experience.Įvery year, the college application process seems to get more complex, and more intense.

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