Welcome / Time to start thinking about the Common App Essay

Welcome to the blog section of Jamie Berger: Tutor and Academic Coach for College-bound Students, where I’ll be posting updates, tips, and videos. I’m going to get right to a detailed debut post below. For a general intro to who I am and what I do, please click HERE to go to the home page. Thanks.

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It’s time to start thinking about the Common App Essay!

Here’s one for current high-school juniors. Recently, the New-York-based tutoring site Noodle Pros, asked me to write two entries (see below) for their series on writing the Common App essay, something you should be taking a look at and starting to let percolate in your minds starting now. Start to ponder what it is about yourself that you want to let colleges know that they won’t see by looking at your GPA, test scores, and list of extra-curricular activities. (No, I didn’t say start to ponder what you don’t want them to know about you, stop that right now!) The idea is to show them something that makes you unique, that would make you an integral part of an incoming freshman class.

Take a look at the prompts on the Common App site, come up with five (5!) possible topics, and write a couple of sentences on each. Ready? Go!

Below are links below to my entries on two recent prompts, the “failure” prompt and the “choose your own topic” prompt.

https://www.noodlepros.com/blog/2017/08/01/how-to-write-your-common-app-essay-part-3-of-8/

https://www.noodlepros.com/blog/2017/09/15/common-app-essay-prompt-7/

To be clear, you’re in the middle of a busy and very important semester. Unless you have a shocking amount of free time, don’t dive deep into this until the school year ends, But take a look now, while you’re also starting to look at colleges. And, as best you can, have fun with it!

-jb