Time to nail that college admissions essay!

Today is the first day of fall: the autumnal equinox, when the sun passes directly over the celestial equator, and every single spot on Earth – the North Pole and the South Pole; Charlottesville and Cairo – gets the same amount of day and night. Today, there are no winners and losers.

That paragraph is not the beginning of a college application essay, but it could be. What would come next? An erudite rumination on the nature of equality? A story about a summer job helping to even society’s playing field? An account of one’s awakening to the beauties of meteorology or astronomy? All are decent possibilities. In fact, nearly any topic can become a good college essay. The key is the passion of the writer, because passion makes for lively writing, and the point of a college essay is to convey the sense of a live and thinking human who cares about something – practically anything. With that in mind, here’s a list of “obsession” topics from Harry Bauld’s useful book On Writing the College Application Essay. Each of these seemingly trivial topics can yield a fantastic college essay. Scan the list and ask yourself:

- Is there something from this category that really charges me up?

- Why am I so charged up about [whatever it is]?

- What connects my strong feelings about this tightly-focused thing to something deeper, more significant, more substantial, more revelatory about what makes me tick as an individual?

Here’s the list:

1. a smell

2. a word

3. a day of the week

4. a daily ritual

5. a skill/talent you don’t possess

6. a sound

7. a recurring dream

8. a one-time dream

9. something about your name

10. a place that is secret and doesn’t have a “real name”

11. a small place that has a name

12. a non-obvious body part something you said but regretted

13. something a friend once said

14. something you didn’t say – and regretted

15. something you said – and regretted

16. an ongoing argument about something trivial

17. an ongoing argument about something important

18. your favorite or least favorite swear

19. something in the natural world

20. a building or part of a building

21. a human-made visual (ad, painting, graffiti)

22. an accident

23. something you read

24. a song/few words from a song

25. an image from the Internet

26. a piece of dialogue from a movie

27. an animal or something about an animal

28. a deficit or weakness in yourself

29. someone who scared you when you were young

30. a metaphor that sticks with you, even if cliched

31. a cliché

32. something about money (physical)

33. something about your hair or someone else’s

34. something you can’t wait for

35. a specific, very small moment when you knew what love was

36. something about elementary school

37. something about food

38. a small fear

39. a medium fear

40. a big fear

41. something fire-related

42. something specific and particular about water

43. something you misunderstood or mispronounced for a long time

44. a move or moment in a movie

45. a time you helped kill or save something