Biggest Common App Essay Mistakes

A complete list of every mistake students make on the Common App essay would be too long and frankly insufferable to read. So we are going to skip the exhaustive catalog and focus on the five that show up the most often, do the most damage, and are the easiest to avoid once you know to look for them.

1. The Essay Is Not About You, the Applicant

This is the single most common mistake we see. A student sits down to write about themselves and ends up writing about their grandmother, their younger sibling, their soccer coach, or the friend who got them through a hard year. By the end of the essay, the admissions officer has learned a great deal about a wonderful person who is not applying to their school.

You are the main character of your Common App essay. Every paragraph, every anecdote, every reflection has to come back to you. Other people can appear in your essay, but they appear as supporting characters in your story. If you cut every sentence about the other person from your draft and the essay no longer holds together, you have written about the wrong person.

When you finish a draft, read it back and ask yourself one question. Whose application would this essay belong in? If the honest answer is anyone other than you, start over.

2. Talking Too Much About Childhood

The Common App essay is supposed to give an admissions officer a glimpse of who you are now, as the person actually applying to college. You have 650 words to accomplish that. Not 650 words to walk through your entire life. Not 650 words to explain how you got here. 650 words to show who you are at this exact moment.

Telling an admissions officer about who you were as a seven year old will never do as good a job as telling them who you are at seventeen. The version of you who built pillow forts, who first picked up a violin, who collected rocks in the backyard, that version of you was charming, but they are not the version applying to college. The admissions officer cannot admit your seven year old self.

Keep origin stories to a bare minimum. If you absolutely need to anchor a story in something earlier in your life, do it in a sentence or two and move on. Spend the rest of the essay in the present, showing the reader the person you have become.

3. Vastly Going Under the 650 Word Limit

You will hear advice that says a good Common App essay can be any length, that quality matters more than word count, that a tight 450 word essay can outperform a sprawling 650 word essay. There is a kernel of truth in this advice, and that kernel will hurt you if you take it too far.

Remember how little space they give you. 650 words. That is all you have to distinguish yourself from tens of thousands of applicants. It is not a lot. It truly is not.

Not getting near the maximum word limit on an essay this short can say more about you than your words ever could. It can say you did not have enough to write about yourself. It can say you did not push yourself to dig deeper. It can say you are someone who turns in the minimum and walks away.

Do not take a meaningful event in your life, something with the depth of an encyclopedia of experience and commentary, and compress it into something 60 to 200 words short of the already small 650 word limit. If your essay is sitting at 480 words and you feel done, you are not done. You have not yet reached the depth the prompt is asking for.

4. Bragging About Your Achievements

Your achievements live in the honors section and the activities section of your application. The admissions officer will read those sections. They do not need a third recap of the same accomplishments inside your essay.

Listing your awards, your titles, your varsity letters, your competition placements inside the Common App essay creates redundancy across your application. Redundancy weakens your application by wasting space that could have been used to reveal something new about you. The honors section already proves what you have done. The essay needs to reveal who you are, which is something the honors section cannot do.

Use your 650 words to tell the admissions officer something they cannot get anywhere else in the application. Save the trophy case for the parts of the application that exist for the trophy case.

5. Saying Anything Negative About Your Peers and Teachers

Writing that you were smarter than your classmates, that your peers were unmotivated, that the kids around you were a negative influence, that a teacher was unfair or cruel or incompetent, all of this hurts you in ways students rarely see coming.

It hurts your likability. The admissions officer is a stranger reading 650 words about someone they will never meet, and the impression they form on the page is the impression that lasts. A student who criticizes the people around them reads as someone who will be difficult to live with in a dorm, difficult to work with on a group project, and difficult to teach in a seminar.

It is also useless to the admissions officer. They are only hearing your side. They do not have your classmate's perspective. They do not have your teacher's perspective. Without the other side of the story, the admissions officer cannot reach an independent judgment about whether your criticism is valid. So they default to the safe assumption, which is that the criticism reflects more on you than on the people you are criticizing.

Avoid negativity toward others at all costs. Even if you are right. Even if your critique is fair. Even if you have evidence. The Common App essay is not the place.

A second set of eyes is the fastest way to catch these in your own work. If you want one of ours on your Common App essay, schedule a consultation with a college admissions expert today.