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Where to Begin? 6 Personal Essay Brainstorming Exercises

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The Common App publishes a list of 7 prompts each year. They ultimately ask for similar types of responses, regardless of slight alterations year-to-year. The Common App prompts provide you with a forum to write about yourself, using whatever anecdote or vehicle you wish in order to communicate something profound and genuine about yourself to adcoms.

If this feat seems daunting or spellbindingly vague to you, you are not alone. For virtually every student applying to college, the moment when you sit down to draft your personal statement is likely the first—and may end up being the only—time in your life when you are pushed to describe your entire identity succinctly and eloquently. So, where to begin?

As with any writing assignment, the best way to approach the personal essay is to brainstorm what it is you want the entire essay to communicate about you to the adcom that will be considering you for admission. Read on for 4 surprising brainstorming exercises that will lead you to an effective personal statement strategy.

1. Consider the four core questions.

When writing your personal statement, there are four questions that your essay should answer:

• “Who am I?”
• “Why am I here?”
• “What is unique about me?”
• “What matters to me?”

These questions are important because they help bring awareness to the kind of person you are and touch on things such as your personality traits, your journey throughout high school, the interests and skills that make you unique, and what’s important to you. Colleges want to understand how you became who you are, and where you’re going (successful alumni reflect well on their school, after all!).

2. Try freeform writing.

To help answer these questions and start brainstorming, freeform writing is a good place to start. Begin by writing down 3-5 aspects of your personality or experiences and spend some time constructing narratives out of these different combinations.

This process of getting some ideas on paper and seeing how they can relate to each other can help you better identify a prompt that works for you. For example, you might note that you enjoy tutoring students in STEM, and are now working with a local school to create a Women in STEM initiative in your school district. You may also have tried previous initiatives that failed. These experiences could be constructed and applied to a number of Common App prompts. You could address a specific identity or interest you have associated with STEM, discuss what you learned from your failed initiatives, explore how you challenged the lack of women in STEM programs in your school district, envision solving for the lack of women involved in the science and mathematics fields, etc.

3. Make a list of opinions you firmly hold and explain them.

This exercise requires you to think about aspects of your identity that you have actively chosen. While exercise #4 asks you to consider what parts of your identity you have struggled to overcome, this exercise asks you to consider what aspects of your identity you are most proud of—those opinions that you hold because you chose to believe in something specific of your own accord.

This is an important brainstorming exercise because it should get you thinking about things you are passionate about. Ultimately, you will want to write your personal statement about something that defines you, gets you excited, and can exhibit your ability to think and speak for yourself. So now, before you start writing, make a list of the things that you care about most, and explain why you feel that way about them.

This list can include everything from your political affiliation to your stance on McDonald’s decision in the past year to serve breakfast for longer. The point of this exercise is that there is no right or wrong way of going about it, no topic that is more worthwhile than any other so long as you are passionate about it.

4. Make a list of your character flaws.

While the ultimate goal of the personal essay is to present yourself in as positive a light as possible to adcoms, the challenge is to do so in a way that is realistic and genuine. To do this, you’ll need to do some serious thinking about what types of character flaws accompany your best traits.

There are two main reasons why we suggest that students not shy away from talking about their own shortcomings as well as their achievements. The first reason is quite simple: a personal statement that paints a picture of its writer as perfect and without flaws will come across as dishonest and unrealistic. Obviously, you want to avoid this at all costs. Second, and even more important, if you are able to write a personal statement that acknowledges your flaws and recognizes that you are imperfect, it will reflect positively on you and vouch for your maturity.

If it feels counterintuitive or scary to dwell on anything other than successes, do not fret: that is the expected reaction to this advice. But if done correctly, acknowledging that you are not perfect can add genuineness to any personal essay. So, how to discuss character flaws? There are several ways to go about this.

One way is to discuss a character flaw that you have always struggled with and worked to improve upon throughout your life. In this scenario, discussing flaws can help introduce a discussion about growth or maturation and give your personal statement a nice narrative arc. Yet another way to discuss your character flaws is to acknowledge how certain struggles or personal shortcomings have shaped your identity, allowing you to go into more detail about the ways in which you were able to better yourself by identifying a flaw in yourself and being willing to fix it.

The thinking here is that students have no difficulty remembering all of the accomplishments, productive experiences, and glowing achievements that they want to include in their personal statements. After all, it is easy to write about these things. It is much harder to force yourself to think about aspects of your identity that rankle, and to think about how these things have shaped you.

5. Reflect on your choices and why you made them.

Another brainstorming exercise that can help you think of a topic is to reflect on what choices you’ve made and why. Once you come up with a list, it will be easier to see what you value and the direction in which you can take your essay.

Think about some of these questions to get the juices flowing:

• Why are they my best friend?
• Under what circumstances did we become friends?
• When did we last fight?
• If I had to spend 10 days doing the same exercise or physical activity, what would I choose? Why?
• Say I had to pick one food, and my three closest friends or family members could only eat that food for one week. What would that food be and why?
• Say I had to start a business selling something, and I would achieve the average level of success (financially, socially, etc) within that business, what would I choose to do?
• What movie would I want to take the place of a character in and which character would I want to play? Why?
• What class or teacher did I like most, and why? What class or teacher did I dislike most, and why?
• If I had to choose between singing, doing standup comedy, or dancing in front of 18,000 people, what would I choose? Why?

6. Make a list of anecdotes, childhood memories, or stories about yourself. Then choose one and make it your “vehicle.”

Finally, you should conclude your brainstorming session by searching for a vehicle: an anecdote that you can use to frame your personal statement.

You can use anecdotes in your personal statement in a number of ways. Some students choose to open with one, others close with one, and still others will use two or three anecdotes in order to add color and rhetorical flair to the points they are trying to make about themselves. The best types of anecdotes are the ones that tell the most about you or give insight into your character.

When we help students write their personal statements, we usually begin by brainstorming a few potential anecdotes to use in your essay. But if you are wondering what the point is of using an anecdote— Why use one at all when I could save words and just talk about myself ?—it’s useful to first understand why telling a story or two makes your personal statement stronger.

Ultimately, you will want your personal statement to communicate something about your character and personality that is unique and appealing to schools. When an adcom reads your personal statement, they are looking to hear about you in general, they are looking to learn something unique or special about you (so they can differentiate you from other applicants), and they are also looking for evidence that you would be a valuable addition to their community. But the fact of the matter is that these are fairly broad and vague directives to write about if you don’t have something specific to focus on.

This is where the anecdotes come in to save the day! They help instigate a conversation about yourself, your personality, your identity, and your character while also giving you something concrete to talk about. This is why we call it a “vehicle”—it can exist in its own right, but it carries with it important information about you as well.

Now that you know what the purpose of this vehicle is, it should be a little easier to brainstorm the anecdote(s) that you choose to frame your personal statement with. If you are not yet sure what to write about in your personal statement, you can start brainstorming anecdotes from your childhood, from favorite family stories to fond memories, from hilarious vacation mishaps to particularly tender moments. Do your parents have favorite stories to tell about you? Write those into your list as well.

Once you have a collection of stories to work with, you may begin to see certain patterns forming. Perhaps all of your favorite stories take place in the same setting—a vacation home that meant a lot to you or in the classroom of your favorite teacher. Maybe, you will realize that all of your fondest memories involve a certain activity or hobby of yours. Or, alternatively, you may notice that one story from your childhood mirrors or foreshadows a like, dislike, or accomplishment that would come to fruition later in your life.

If you already know what you want to say about yourself, you can come at the same exercise from another angle: try to think of several anecdotes that could be potential vehicles for the message about yourself that you want to transmit. If you want to illustrate that you love to learn, try to think pointedly about where that love comes from or what you have done that proves this. In this case, remember that any given anecdote can reveal more than one thing about you.

It is hard to imagine all of the possible personal statements that could come out of this brainstorming session, but it is almost certain that this exercise will help you come up with several concrete points to make about yourself and provide you with a tangible way to say those things.

Final Thoughts

If after doing these six brainstorming exercises, you still don’t feel ready to write your personal statement, fear not! Writing a personal essay is daunting and won’t be done in three steps, or even three days! 

For more guidance, check out these blog posts:

How to Write a Personal Statement That Wows Colleges

How to Come Up With an Idea for a Personal Statement

How to Write the Common App Essays

Mastering the Personal Statement

5 Tips for Editing Your College Essays

Want help with your college essays to improve your admissions chances? Sign up for your free CollegeVine account and get access to our essay guides and courses. You can also get your essay peer-reviewed and improve your own writing skills by reviewing other students’ essays.

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How to Brainstorm for Your Personal Statement

• Sasha Chada
• October 25, 2021

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Many students struggle to find the perfect topic for their personal statements. This can lead to stress and worry, after all the personal statement is the most important essay for college admissions. This desire for perfection can be a good thing, but sometimes leaves students paralyzed when trying to find a topic.

This is an understandable struggle. The prompts provided by Common App for the personal statement are incredibly open-ended, with the seventh quite literally allowing you to write anything you want. This breadth of choice can be freeing, but it can also be overwhelming. In this article, we’ll go over what makes for a good topic to write your personal statement about, how to brainstorm for your personal statement, and we’ll present some personal statement brainstorming questions. While we won’t be able to cover every possibility, we hope this will help you when you write your own essays.

What Personal Statements Should Be About

You. A personal statement, whatever else it covers, should in the end be about you. Who you are, what your hopes and dreams may be, what your values are, and what qualities you possess. Each person is unique, and the personal statement is the place for you to describe what makes you you . 

Colleges are looking to admit more than collections of numbers and statistics, they want to admit people, bold and curious, with passions and interests and points of view they can contribute to campus. They use your essay for this, to see how you think, and what your values are.

Thus whatever your essay is about, you should be the central subject. The essay may cover a transformative experience, one of your hobbies, an academic passion, or how someone else impacted your life, but the center of focus should be you. 

This can feel awkward for some students. All of your essays for school are completely different, with you as an author relegated to the third person, and personal pronouns are expressly forbidden. Your history essays and English papers are about the books you’ve read and the facts of someone else’s life. Your personal statement is your own story, and only you can tell it.

Thus when deciding what to write about, you need to first determine what you want colleges to know about you. Which of your traits is best? Which hobbies define who you are? Which of your experiences have shaped you, and become core to your being? These are the things you will write about.

Brainstorming a Personal Statement Topic

This will be easier for some students than others. You may have a single activity or experience so important to who you are that you can’t fathom writing about anything else. This doesn’t mean your brainstorming is done, and your task is over, merely that you have an easier starting point. 

If you don’t have a clear topic in mind, don’t worry, we’ll cover that in later exercises. First, however, we’re going to do the values exercise. 

The Values Exercise

The values you hold are important, and some colleges will ask for specific essays on them, usually leadership or community. These are far from the only values it’s possible to embody, however. When preparing your personal statement, you should first decide what values will be core to your narrative. To begin determining these, answer the following questions:

• What three words describe you best?
• Which of your traits are you proudest of?
• What beliefs shape your life?
• How have your beliefs influenced your actions?

The goal here is to determine which of your values are most important to you. You should write a list of your top ten, then narrow that to three, then pick your top value from there. While it is possible to talk about many values in an essay, it is better to have a single value provide a central theme. Whatever the essay is about, it serves to demonstrate your values to the readers through the narrative, and the lessons you learn within it.

Once you know which of your values you want to write about, it’s time to decide what your actual topic should be. For that, we turn to our next exercises. 

Objects Exercise

Pick ten objects that demonstrate one aspect or trait of yours. A past student’s object list looked like this:

• Running shoes
• Sewing machine
• Paint brushes
• Fresh strawberries
• Blue jacket
• Fountain pen
• Pocket knife
• AP Bio textbook

Each of these objects has a story to tell. Why is it important to you? What does its presence say about your life, and your values? What are your memories associated with the object?

Your essay will likely not be about the objects themselves, but each is a jumping-off point for a story about you. This stage of brainstorming is collecting stories and determining which are worth telling. That brings us to our next exercise.

Self Portrait Exercise

In this exercise, you list interesting tidbits about yourself. Not long ones, only a sentence or so, but interesting pieces. These are small details that added together make a full self-portrait of who you are. How many of these you end up with depends on you, but we suggest at least ten. Here are some examples from past Ivy Scholars students who have done this exercise:

• I’ve lived on the same street my whole life but in two different houses
• One of the most rewarding days of my life is when I saved enough to pay for half of my car. One of the worst days of my life is when I crashed and totaled that car.
• I never wet my toothbrush before I brush my teeth.
• I hate wearing sunglasses because I feel like I’m not actually seeing what I’m looking at and I don’t get to see the actual color that everything is.
• I love baking cookies and have a specific cookie cookbook that I try a new recipe from every time I bake.
• My mom made chicken pot pie for the first time for me when I was four and I said it was my favorite meal and it still is to this day so every year on my birthday my mom makes me a chicken pot pie.

Each of these is a small story themselves, and each says something about the student. While not all of these would work as a full essay, there are some with obvious potential. 

Elevator Pitch Exercise

For this exercise, imagine you are in an elevator with the head of admissions for your dream school. What would you tell them about you? What do you most want them to know about who you are? It has to be short and to the point – so what do you say?

Turning Brainstorming Into Essays

These personal statement topic ideas on their own are not essays but are the seeds of them. You can get a sense from each of what the essay will say about you, and what it will tell readers about your life. Then you can use the values exercise to see which of your values you want to inform colleges about and pick a topic that will let you do that.

Don’t be afraid to take several possible ideas and sketch outlines for each. See how the story develops, and whether you have enough to say for each to make a full essay. Not every idea will lead to a good essay, but coming up with a great idea is always the first step to writing a great essay.

Final Thoughts

Trying to find the right essay topic can feel intimidating or impossible, but knowing how to brainstorm can make the test far less daunting. By picking the right topic, you are well on your way to writing a great essay.

Of course, there’s more to an essay than the topic alone. If you want further help picking a topic, or with writing your essay, schedule a complimentary consultation with us. We have a long experience helping students write great college essays, and we’re always happy to share what we know.

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Brainstorming Exercises for Your Personal Statement Essay—aka the Common App Essay

• June 11, 2021
• Elite Collegiate Planning

Your Personal Statement essay (also known as “the common app essay”) is a huge part of your college application. However, many students find this essay to be one of the hardest parts. Why? Frankly – because it is hard! Writing an essay that reveals your unique characteristics and values in 650 words or less is not easy! But, that doesn’t mean it’s not doable.

While the Common App provides a few prompts for the personal statement essay, they are all fairly open-ended. In essence, you can write almost anything about yourself. The goal is to write about something that will help admissions see beyond your test scores and grades and provide a glimpse into your personality and character.

Start Early

It’s best to start brainstorming and thinking early. The more pressure you put yourself under, the harder brainstorming will be. Give your ideas time to grow beyond their original conception, and eventually, the winning topic will reveal itself and your story will unfold across the page.

Overwhelmed Already? Relax!

All of this can seem completely overwhelming, but don’t worry! One of the best things you can do is to simply relax. As you lay on the beach, by the pool, or hike through the mountains this summer, take some time to reflect as you enjoy what you’re doing. Engaging in an activity you enjoy can alleviate some of the pressure that comes along with starting the process; activities can also begin to get your creative juices flowing and provide inspiration for other essay ideas. So, where should you begin? Below, we’ve provided two exercises that can help you brainstorm topics or ideas for your personal statement essay.

Essay Brainstorming Exercise #1: 20 Questions

This exercise works by helping you think quickly, and succinctly about yourself and your life. Simply answer 20 questions about yourself. Don’t think too hard. Write down the first things that come to mind. It can be helpful to talk these out as well. Talking with your family and friends can help jog your memory of past events and situations. When you’re done, look through your list and see if anything, or a combination of items might make a good topic for your essay.

Here are your 20 questions:

• What has been the greatest moment in your life?
• What was the worst moment of your life?
• What accomplishment are you most proud of?
• What is your biggest pet peeve?
• What’s the most important relationship in your life?
• What, in your opinion, is the greatest problem facing the world today?
• What is your favorite hobby?
• What’s your most important idea, belief, or fact?
• What is your strangest hobby or habit?
• Do you have a quirky personality trait that makes you unique?
• What have you failed at?
• What challenge have you overcome?
• What is an item that you associate with home?
• What was your most embarrassing moment?
• What is one word your best friend would use to describe you?
• What is one word your sibling(s) would use to describe you?
• Who was your favorite teacher and why?
• What is the most disgusting food that you like?
• What is one item or object you associate with your Mom or Dad?
• When have you taken a risk?

Essay Brainstorming Exercise #2: Future You

What’s your vision for your future, ideal self? Thinking existentially can help you discover what your goals are. Describing who you want to become can also help you rediscover events and parts of your life that have already happened, and provide inspiration. While you can answer in whatever form comes naturally to you, here are a few ideas to jump start your futuristic thinking. Write down your answers.

• What’s more important to you: financial stability or doing what you love?
• What is your dream job and why?
• What will your life look like in 10 years? Where will you be living?
• Who will you have an impact on?
• How will you get to where you want to be?

When it comes to your brainstorming sessions and exercises, write everything down. It doesn’t have to be neat or orderly. You never know what thoughts or ideas are going to spark the perfect essay topic or story or anecdote to include in your essay. Most importantly, give yourself time! Allow your ideas and thoughts to roam and wander. If you are hit with inspiration – write it down – use the Notes app in your phone if you have to. Essay topics are as unique as the students who write the essays. No doubt, you will find the right topic for you!

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How to Brainstorm Your Personal Statement

The most important work on college application essays comes before you write the very first word of your very first draft of your very first essay.

Brainstorming is the essential first step in the college application essay writing process. While there are many ways to brainstorm personal narrative essays, we at Ivy Experience have fully embraced an intentionally open-ended style where we ask students simply one question: 

“What do I need to know about you?” 

We then ask students to brainstorm anything and everything they can think of to answer this question. They do not need to write in full sentences, just bullet points. 

While a blank page with just that one question can be daunting, intimidating, and challenging, it is an amazing and invaluable approach. After all, no matter what a college application essay prompt is asking, at the end of the day, every prompt wants students to reveal themselves—who they are, what their values are, and how they see the world. 

The more personal and personally insightful an essay is, the more it stands out from the crowd. Whether they are writing a personal statement about their service experience, an academic essay on why they want to study biology, or an identity essay about their cultural background, a student needs to assume that dozens if not hundreds of other applicants will be writing about the same topic. 

But that doesn’t mean there is no hope of writing a powerful essay. In fact, fully embracing this idea—that there is no truly “original” topic—can and should be incredibly liberating for students because it means the pressure is off: they can and must share their personal experiences with and perspectives on that topic. 

And that starts with brainstorming.

Framing the practice of brainstorming with an open-ended question—”What do I need to know about you?”—helps students think more expansively about the essay-writing process. Direct, focused questions often signal to students that certain facets of their identities, backgrounds, and lived experiences—those not reflected in the questions being asked—are less important.  Asking “What do I need to know about you?” invites students to reveal these pieces of themselves.

As we tell students over and over again during the brainstorming process, every detail—about themselves or their lives—CAN have value. That is what we tell students over and over and over again. Anything that is important to you, put down. Anything that feels meaningful to your story, put down. 

And students: do not carry this burden only on your shoulders! Bring your computer to the dinner table and ask your family members and loved ones to share what comes to mind when they think about you. Ask your friends, too! Sometimes we are so close to our own experiences that we will overlook certain stories, quirks, hobbies, qualities, etc. 

Not everything will go onto the application. But as we tell our students: let’s lay everything out there so we can decide what pieces you want to use to create the most beautiful, insightful, strategic, and authentic mosaic to present to admissions officers.

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