Links Mentioned in this Video:

Password organizer 🔐 

Supplemental Essay Finder 🔍

Meditation App 🧘🏻

This is one of my favorite brainstorming exercises. It’s called the “21 Details” exercise. 

It’s super quick and will help you generate plenty of ideas for your personal statement or supplemental essay topics. All you need is something to write on and 12 minutes.

Read the full guide here. 👈

We partnered with the amazing Amanda Miller (and a few other financial aid experts) to create a brand new resource to help students and families navigate paying for college.

By the end of this guide, you’ll know how to ...

Find and apply for scholarships efficiently and successfully

Determine which colleges are most likely to be affordable for you

Apply for grants with minimal stress (#FAFSA)

Make sense of your financial aid award letters so you can make an informed decision about college costs

✏️ The first exercise is called “Everything I Want Colleges to Know About Me,” and the second exercise is called “21 Details.” 

Grab a sheet of paper or open a blank word document and start listing what makes you ... you! 

Don't overthink it! 😊

his series of short exercises, I’ll help you try to find your personal statement topic. In fact, by the end of this video, you should be able to have 7 great personal statement topic ideas that demonstrate your skills, qualities, values, and interests.

Grab your favorite drink, throw on your headphones, and let’s do this.

I frequently have students tell me that they’ve faced some challenges they think might make for a good college essay, but they aren’t sure how to gauge the strength of their topic, and they aren’t sure how to write a college essay about the challenges they’ve faced.

And those questions and confusion are understandable: While high school has probably helped prepare you to write academic essays, it’s less likely that you’ve spent much time doing the kind of personal and reflective writing you’ll want to do in a personal statement focused on challenges (which I’ll also sometimes refer to as a narrative essay).

Even the phrase “reflective writing” might seem a little new.

But no worries—I got you. In this post, I’ll walk you through:

An example challenges essay with analysis

👉 By the end of this post, you should be all set to write.

One of the most daunting aspects of applying to college is the sheer number of essays you have (wait, get to!) write. 📝 

What do I mean? 🤔 Say you’re applying to eight to ten schools. Each has anywhere from one to five (hi, MIT!) supplemental essays. Quick math tells us that's between eight and fifty college essay prompts to respond to. And that's after you write the personal statement for your Common App. 😬 

But guess what? ❗YOU TOTALLY DON'T HAVE TO WRITE 50 ESSAYS. In fact, you may end up writing fewer than ten. 

Why? 

I’ve developed a pretty simple step-by-step process to help you see which essay prompts can overlap. Follow my lead and it may not only save you dozens of hours or writing, it could improve the quality of those essays. 🏅 

How? 

The secret involves doing a little bit of research and creative brainstorming before deciding on your topic. 🧠

🗣 “How do I write about my challenges without sounding like a sob story?”

This is a question that comes up often. And, to be frank, there are many ways to write about challenges in your college essay.

🙋🏻‍♂️Here are three good techniques. 👈

📝 Click here for the full guide. 👈

In this guide, I’ll share with you a series of step-by-step mini-guides to answering the top 10 most common scholarship essay question prompts.  

How do I know these are the most common scholarship prompts? Because they’re based on a random sample of about 700 scholarship essay prompts analyzed by my friends at the scholarship site Going Merry.

First, we’ll get into questions like:

Where do I find scholarships?

What are colleges and organizations looking for in a scholarship essay?

How do I write a creative scholarship essay that stands out?

Can I re-use scholarship essays as college essays (i.e. personal statement or supplemental essays)—and, if so, how?

After that I’ll break down how to write each of the top 10 most common scholarship prompts:

Tell us about you. (Or another very generic bio request)

What impact has sports had on your life? (Or some other athletics-related question)

How have you contributed to your community, or what community service have you provided?

Why do you want to study/pursue [X]?

How are you unique?

Tell us about a time you failed and what you learned from it.

What are your academic and/or career goals?

Tell us about a time when you had a belief or idea challenged.

Why do you deserve this scholarship?

How will this scholarship help you?