Students targeting American universities are likely to submit one or more applications through the Common App platform. In this series, we will discuss strategies to write strong, memorable essays based on each of the six prompts offered by the Common App. Let’s create a strategy for answering prompt #5:
5. Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth
and a new understanding of yourself or others.
Personal growth comes in many forms, and Prompt #5 opens the door to tell your own life-changing story. While the question encourages you to identify “an accomplishment, event, or realization” that acted as a catalyst in your life, the central point of your essay should be about the growth or understanding you experienced as a result and how that shapes who you are today and going forward. Students considering this prompt should think broadly about what kinds of personal growth they have experienced. For this essay, personal growth might include reaching a new level of maturity, taking on new or more responsibility, finding an academic focus or career calling, realizing a desire to contribute to social impact, making stronger commitments to friends or family, increasing self-awareness, improving your self-care, or other topics. Similarly, achieving a new understanding of others could mean expanding your worldview by achieving a new level of cultural awareness, sensitivity, or acceptance. When sketching your outline for this essay, remember that writing about personal growth and gaining a deeper understanding of others highlights your open-mindedness and a discussion of one or more of your values. Identify those values and build that into your narrative.
Your Life-Changing Experience
In the Common App Prompt #2 blog post, we gave a recommendation about how to open an essay with a story. We recommend that you review that strategy as it also applies here.
This question is particularly broad, as any accomplishment or event that happened in one’s life is an acceptable starting point. From there, the writer has the space to go in countless directions regarding their personal growth or understanding of others. All kinds of human interactions, relationships, chance encounters, current events, and personal experiences have the potential to change our lives and the ways in which we see the world. This essay will be about your own growth or understanding, so the story you share should be very personal, whether that is an individual accomplishment, participation in or awareness of an event like an election or natural disaster, or something bigger than yourself that causes you to have a realization. Give a brief account of what happened and tell the reader your initial reaction – the spark mentioned in the question.
Talk About Growth
Like Common App Prompt #2, the focus of this question is on personal growth. Your initial reaction and realization is the starting point of new growth or understanding. What happens after that is what the question is really asking you to discuss. Talk through your emotional experience and your thought process as you dealt with new information, feelings, and ideas. Here are some example thought questions that you might expand on.
If you accomplished something and it inspired you to do more, what did you realize and what feelings did you have?
If you accomplished something but the experience left you feeling unsatisfied or incomplete, what happened next?
If a news story made you reconsider your own actions or something about society, how did you respond to that?
If you realized that someone you care about was being mistreated because of their race or gender, how did it make you examine your own ideas?
How Has It Changed You? What Now?
At this point in the essay, show that you are sustaining your personal growth and that it continues to have a positive effect on you today. Articulate how you are changed as a person and what that inspires you to do. If this experience is directly related to what you would like to study in university and do in your career, show a clear connection between this personal growth or understanding and your intended major. If your growth or understanding is more related to your values, give clear examples of how you will act differently in the future, whether to better yourself or to change your interaction with others.
Conclusion
Growing as a person will always be perceived positively, which is why you might have heard people talk about the value of lifelong learning, mindfulness, and gratitude. By showing that you know yourself and you understand the progress you have made as a person, student, citizen, and – eventually – a professional, you will give admissions officers, professors, and future employers confidence in your ability to continue to grow as a person and increase your potential. Be bold and choose Prompt #5 if you want to communicate your ability to grow and be successful.