Lily Holmes, Contributing Writer
Application essays, especially those written for scholarships, academic programs and internships at any education stage tend to follow a similar formula. Even when it seems as if a new trend in essay writing may break the mold, it melds right in.
Online guides may say that an essay is meant to reflect “who you are” and provide an outline describing exactly which words to use, which not to use and the precise narrative an admissions officer wants to see. Look hard enough at a list of essay topics to avoid, and almost every topic is supposedly off limits. There is no getting around it: Writing application essays can be annoying, stressful and restrictive.
The online advice is often initially accurate. Certain essay topics, including the “trauma dump” and “resume repeater,” tend to grate readers or even send the message that the applicant in question finds their traumatic lore to be the most interesting facet of themselves.
The “resume repeater,” an essay about the hypothesis of your important high school research project or your internship at a major tech company, is both redundant and difficult to write without sounding like a humble brag. The cliché “out-of-state competition” or “mission trip” essay is similarly difficult to write in a flattering manner, even when writing about a failure or challenge rather than a success story.
The emotions and revelations described during a competition, volunteer experience or similar venture often fall into the same box no matter who describes them, meaning the essay’s reader learns little to nothing about the writer.
The “trauma dump” essay is often regarded as the most disliked essay topic, often involving the applicant’s personal medical history, a family member’s severe illness and injury, bullying or other forms of discrimination.
While these experiences often shape a person and teach them valuable lessons, they rarely have a place as the focal point of a personal statement. When explicitly asked to describe a hardship or time of problem-solving, the essay must include a problem or challenge, but most sources suggest that these essays should focus heavily on the problem-solving aspect or recovery from the incident, rather than ruminating on the problem itself.
However, no essay topic is truly “off-limits” or “doomed to fail,” since it matters more how an essay is composed or framed if the writer is to avoid being cliché.
Following any application essay advice too closely, even advice that claims to steer away from clichés and grasp a reader’s attention, typically drags an essay away from the writer’s voice.
In medical school applications, most advice guides the writer away from trauma dumping about their grandma’s cancer or their personal health issues and their consequent love of science and helping people. However, this only drives them straight into writing about the suffering they witness while shadowing, volunteering or working clinical shifts.
Even beyond mainstream advice, there are traps: attempting to be “clever” by disparaging the prompt, slap-dashing together an essay at the last second or attempting to become a poet laureate in one 500-word personal statement.
However, there is one piece of somewhat corny advice often provided that holds true across nearly all essay formats and intentions: The application essay, as long as it answers the prompt, should showcase the writer themselves — as both an applicant, a writer and most of all, a person.