Breaking Down Essay Prompts

Breaking down essay prompts

Write sooner than later

We want to make sure you start thinking about which essays you want to write sooner rather than later.

Many “full-ride” competitive scholarships—that could cover the full cost of college—are due in September, and many colleges have an early deadline sometime in October or November. You want to start following the writing schedule you came up with now, even if you’re only using your weekly time to brainstorm and outline. You don’t want to rush this. Plus, the more intentional time you spend with your essays, the easier they get!

In this article we’ll get specific this time around and ask: what are essay prompts really asking you for?

what colleges and scholarships are you applying to?

Before we can talk about how to break down college or scholarship application essays, it’s important to know exactly which questions you’ll be answering in your writing. Look through the college and scholarship applications you’re interested in so you can start the essay brainstorming process. Many times, these won’t change too much from year to year, so you can look them up now, even if they aren’t on the site yet.

If you’re still figuring out what to apply for, check out the resources in our previous messages, like Cappex or College Greenlight. You can also ask a counselor or adviser if they recommend you for larger, full-ride competitive scholarships!

Even if you don’t think you’ll need a personal statement, it’s useful to have at least one draft ready. You never know when you might change your mind or need an essay for an easy scholarship. Check out the resources in our previous messages, like Cappex or College Greenlight, for prompts, or ask counselor or adviser for recommendations.

what exactly are essay prompts?

Essay prompts are the specific questions that college or scholarship applications ask you to understand more about who you are. Rather than asking you to talk about every part of your life, they’ll usually ask you to focus on one or two aspects of it. They will also usually tell you how long your essay should be.

Remember, your personal statement is about you. It’s your place to tell your story to the application reader, beyond your grades. You don’t have to be a perfect student, but a reflective one. Tell your readers what else they should know about you, and help them see why you deserve the opportunity you’re applying for.

The prompt’s job is to give you a rough outline of what exactly that reader wants to know and how you should say it.

Think about it like this: If you’re interviewing for a job, you’re not going to give the manager your whole life story. You’re probably going to answer the specific questions they ask to see if you’d be a good fit. With a personal statement, you’re doing the same thing, just in writing.

prompts on prompts on prompts

Common college essay prompts

While each college essay prompt will have things that make it unique, many of them ask one of the following questions:

Tell us about yourself.
How have you been a leader?
How have you been challenged?
How have you grown in the past few years?
What do you want to do in college?
What inspires you?
What will you add to our campus community?
Why are you applying to this school?

Common scholarship essay prompts

Many scholarships ask questions like:

Tell us about your background and any significant financial challenges you face with the cost of college.
Why do you in particular deserve this scholarship?
How will this scholarship help you?
What impact have you made on your community? Describe times where you have demonstrated leadership for helping others.
Describe qualities, leadership traits, and accomplishments related to the focus of this scholarship.

Some schools will also provide a space for you to write additional information. While not usually required, this is a great space to write down information about your life that might not show up elsewhere in the application, like why you had a bad sophomore year or what you’re doing to improve in class.

Common Application essay prompts

If the schools on your list require you to apply using the Common Application (you can check here), you might be required to answer one of the prompts below. You’ll only have to answer one, so think about which you’d like to answer:

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?
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.
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.

You can check out some tips from College Essay Advisers on how to answer these questions here.

time to break down... the essay prompt!

Now that you know what colleges and scholarships usually ask for in their essay prompts, let’s break one down into bite-sized pieces. Let’s look at one of the Common Application college essay prompts and work through it together.

Common Application 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?

Let’s break down this prompt into smaller mini-questions. This will help us see what they’re asking for a little more easily.

Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure

What single event are you going to focus on? Are you going to write about a time when you failed a test? A family issue? When you lost in one of your tournaments with your varsity team? It might be useful to do some visual “life-mapping” to brainstorm ideas about what event to focus on for these prompts.

How did it affect you?

What were your feelings and emotions? The consequences? The actions you had to take to make up for your failure? Make sure to not only talk about the failure, but to explain why it was such a big deal. Show your essay reader why this failure made such an impact on your life that you’re choosing to write hundreds of words about it.

What did you learn from the experience?

This is the golden area. You’ve described the issue or failure, you’ve described how it made you feel and what the consequences were. Now’s your chance to show what you did about it and what you learned. You didn’t just wallow in the failure. You chose to take action and you probably improved and grew because of it.

Show the reader what you had to do, but also what you took away from the challenge. You might have learned to be more empathetic, more disciplined with your studies, more outgoing with a sibling when they’re going through things, or something else. Whatever it is, the reader wants to see how you’re bringing this upward trend of growth and potential forward with you.

You’re going to have to continue to grow from challenges and failures as you go to college, so make sure they know you’ve had some experience with that already.

First Generation?

If you’re the first in your family to go to college, did you ever have a time where you had no clue what to do in your classes or college prep? Did you have an experience where you went to your parents for help with your educational stuff and didn’t get a good response because they also didn’t know what to do? Tell us about how you took steps towards growing from that experience as a first-generation college student!

don't let the prompts break you down

Personal statements are pretty unavoidable your senior year, no matter what your path is after high school. Even if you don’t need one for college applications, getting money from scholarships will definitely require an essay or two.

Starting to break down the prompts you’ll be writing about now gives you the entire summer to make sure you’re answering the questions completely. And lucky for you, once you’ve answered one prompt, editing the essay for another one is pretty easy!

If you’re still feeling stuck, no worries. Next time, we’ll be diving even deeper into how to tell your story.

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