It’s July, the Common App prompts are posted, and a lot of rising seniors are staring at a blank document trying to summarize seventeen years in 650 words. That’s the wrong assignment.
What the essay is for
Everything else in the application is a list: grades, courses, activities, scores. The personal statement is the only place a reader hears the student think. It’s not a résumé in prose and it’s not a hardship competition. The reader wants one thing: to finish the essay feeling they know a specific person a little.
Finding the moment
Try this exercise before any drafting. Have your student write down ten small moments from the last two years — not achievements, moments. The time the sourdough collapsed. The argument with a teammate on the bus. Teaching a grandparent to video call. Realizing halfway through a shift that the regular customer had been coming in because he was lonely.
Then ask of each: did I think differently afterward? The one where the answer is clearly yes is the essay. It doesn’t need to be dramatic. It needs to have changed something inside the student’s head.
The first draft
Write the moment first, in detail — what was said, what it looked like, what the student was doing with their hands. Then write what they understood afterward. Then stop. That’s a draft. It will be too long, slightly out of order, and the ending will state a lesson too plainly. All of that gets fixed later. What can’t be fixed later is an essay that was never about anything specific.
What parents can do
Protect the draft from editing. The single most common way an essay goes wrong is a well-meaning adult smoothing it until it sounds like a well-meaning adult. Readers can tell when a seventeen-year-old wrote it, and they want that. Ask questions — “what were you thinking right then?” — and don’t touch the sentences.
What to avoid
The injury-and-comeback arc. The service-trip epiphany. The grandparent’s death as a plot device. These aren’t bad experiences; they’re bad essays, because thousands of students write them the same way and the reader has seen the shape before. If the student’s real story is one of these, the way through is more specific detail, not a different topic.
The schedule
- July: find the moment, write the rough draft.
- August: one honest round of feedback (questions, not rewrites), second draft.
- September: supplements. The personal statement should be nearly done by then.
A July draft isn’t ambitious. It’s the difference between an October spent polishing and an October spent panicking.
By Jeff Thompson, Phortex Campus · July 15, 2025 · ← All posts