Decoding Common App Essay Prompts

The Common App released their prompts for the 2025-2026 admissions cycle a couple of months ago. Students will be needlessly stressing themselves out trying to decipher them and figure out which ones they should choose. If you want to save time, just choose prompt 7 and never look back.

Prompt 7 states: "Share an essay on any topic of your choice. It can be one you've already written, one that responds to a different prompt, or one of your own design."

To translate this into plain English, it means you can write about whatever you want. Are you obsessed with a new series on Netflix? Write about why that series captures your attention so greatly, and what experiences in your life predisposed you to liking it. Have a favorite subject? Spend 650 words nerding out about it. The truth is, the prompt you choose really doesn't matter, the essay does.

One of the worst things you can do is first pick a prompt and then force your essay to conform to it. This limits your creativity and pigeonholes you into writing inauthentically. Focus on writing the essay that you genuinely want to write, about the topic that excites you the most. Then, after you have written the best essay you possibly can, think about which prompt best describes your essay, or better yet, just skip that step by picking prompt 7 and move on to your supplemental essays.

With that said, understanding what each of the prompts really means is useful, because the same language used in Common App prompts also appears in supplemental essay prompts. If you can decode what each Common App prompt is really asking for, then you can understand what colleges are looking for in their supplemental essays. In this article, we will cover what prompts 1-6 are really asking for, so that you can become an expert in understanding what certain words, questions, or phrases commonly used in supplemental essay prompts actually want from you. This will help you write supplemental essays that provide colleges the exact information they need to ascertain whether or not you'll be a good fit and contributing member of the incoming class they are curating.

Prompt 1: Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.

Don't choose this prompt. Because it is the first prompt, many students will choose it by default and force their essays to conform to it. Admissions officers know this. Whenever they see this prompt chosen, it causes them to create negative expectations regarding the quality of the essay they will skim through. If this prompt truly describes what you want to write about, consider prompt 6, where you can write about a topic that interests you, or simply choose prompt 7.

With that said, understanding the language of this prompt is important. When colleges ask for your background, they are looking for you to paint a clear picture they can easily visualize of the environment that shaped the person you are at the time of writing your essay. For such an essay, it is best to keep the bulk of your focus on the present, not on your childhood. Colleges want to know who you are now, not when you were a kid, because the current version of you is the best representative of who you will be in college. Colleges want to see that your current environment is still able to shape you, because they hope their environment will similarly shape you.

Identity doesn't just mean a label. It means a set of perspectives. A label without content is meaningless. It is vital that whenever you talk about identity, you use it as a lens through which you explain how you see the world and form opinions and perspectives about it.

To stand out when talking about interests, you need to ensure yours is a niche interest. If you like math, try to focus on a specific field of mathematics. Better yet, focus on an unsolved problem in mathematics. The more narrow your interest, the more depth you can write about it in 650 words. The interest should also be one that clearly demonstrates the value you will bring to colleges. Being interested in whistling different countries' national anthems—unless you can establish a really strong personal connection to whistling that is rooted in activities that broaden your horizons, such as making a quantifiable impact in international NGOs—isn't going to impress admissions officers.

When it comes to talent, you want to show the reader your talent and give them a front-row seat into how your mind works as you execute your talent. You want to show the reader that positive outcomes result from this talent of yours.

Prompt 2: The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?

For this essay, you need to create a metaphorical dragon that represents an obstacle you've overcome. Your narrative should clearly demonstrate several key elements:

First, show how this obstacle tangibly impacted your life. Then, explain how your previous methods of overcoming challenges failed to work in this situation and how you responded to that failure.

Describe the internal struggles you faced while adjusting to new approaches for dealing with this obstacle. Detail the lessons you learned during this adjustment period, and provide a vivid depiction of your triumph in overcoming the challenge.

Finally, explain how the lessons learned from this experience have shaped your future goals and aspirations for college and beyond.

Throughout your essay, use vivid, first-person language to bring this obstacle and its impact on you to life for your readers.

Ideally, talk about an obstacle you faced recently, the more recent the better.

Prompt 3: Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea. What prompted your thinking? What was the outcome?

Whatever you do, don't write about the church. Questioning the church, or any religious institution, is the oldest disagreement in documented human history. Who doesn't disagree with the church? Admissions officers have read such essays countless times, both in academic settings and on the job throughout their careers.

Again, you want to write about a recent disagreement. Admissions officers expect that as you mature, you become more likely to disagree and voice your concerns, not less. You want to be crystal clear about what you were questioning, and showcase through vivid first-person language your lived experiences that led to the formation of the values that enabled you to question or challenge that belief.

You also want to clarify what was at stake in the disagreement. Did you risk losing a friend, looking bad in front of peers, upsetting your parents, or worse? You want to show in first person how the disagreement unfolded, so admissions officers can visualize this pivotal moment in your life.

Finally, explain how this event shaped your beliefs pertaining to the matter of disagreement, and describe the broader impact on both you and the person you disagreed with, including any consequences you faced. Remember, even good deeds have consequences. Discussing negative consequences that resulted from doing the right thing, and how you handled them with grace, can make for a powerful Common App essay. Also, it isn’t necessary that you changed the person’s mind of who you were disagreeing with. This rarely happens in real life, so unless it really happened, I would not fabricate how you changed someone’s mind. Admissions officers can smell this type of fakery from miles away.

Prompt 4: Reflect on something that someone has done for you that has made you happy or thankful in a surprising way. How has this gratitude affected or motivated you?

For this essay, it is vital that you, not the person who helped you, are at all times the main character. You must be the focus of this essay, the applicant petitioning the college to accept you over many other qualified candidates for a place on their campus for four years. Focus primarily on showcasing your own lived experiences that predisposed you to find this person's actions so meaningful. Keep the description of the person helping you brief but vivid. Use powerful metaphors to describe the gratitude you felt when that person performed their act of kindness. The metaphors and language you choose should connect to the lived experiences you document throughout your essay.

This essay needs to show a clear before and after, showcasing aspects of your life prior to receiving this kind act and demonstrating how being the beneficiary of this generosity changed that aspect of your life for the better. Strong contrasts that readers can see for themselves are key to this essay's success. Finally, in your conclusion, describe how your experiences, combined with this person's act, have shaped your goals and aspirations for college and beyond.

Prompt 5: Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others.

Out of all the prompts, essays that satisfy this prompt are the most ambitious. For this essay to work, it is vital that you have a high-level, salient perspective on something and then show how your lived experiences led you to form that perspective. As usual, you want to use vivid, first-person language to describe the spark that caused this period of personal growth.

If your focus is an accomplishment, describe exactly what you accomplished, use powerful language to describe how it felt to accomplish that, and establish a personal connection to that accomplishment by describing what you needed to do to achieve it.

If your focus is an event, you want to use vivid first-person language to describe the event. It is vital that you describe in vivid first-person detail other events in your life that predisposed you to being impacted so greatly by this event.

If your focus is a realization, it is important that this realization is a high-level, salient one. If it is something that any adolescent goes through, your essay will sound cliché and won't help you stand out. You want to argue for the truth of that realization by using your lived experiences. It is vital that you try to be as persuasive as possible regarding why this realization was something that you allowed to shape your life moving forward.

From there, you want to show in vivid detail your interpersonal interactions with others in life post-accomplishment, event, or realization, so that the reader can imagine you as a student on their campus who will benefit from your peers and contribute to them as well. You want to show a strong before-and-after of who you were as a person before and after the central event in this essay.

For this essay more so than others, it is most important for the conclusion to talk about how this event shaped your goals and aspirations for college.

Talking about more recent events is better than older events. One can have a significant period of growth in their junior year or even early senior year. Growing as a child does not impress colleges, growing as a young adult does.

Prompt 6: Describe a topic, idea, or concept you find so engaging that it makes you lose all track of time. Why does it captivate you? What or who do you turn to when you want to learn more?

You want to pick a topic that you've spent the most time investigating on your own, and explain to the reader your lived experiences in vivid first-person detail that led you to fall in love with this topic and justify spending so much of your free time researching and learning about it. Given that this is supposedly the topic you've spent considerable time researching, it's vital to share some salient insight about the subject, insight that the reader probably hasn't encountered before, and give them a compelling reason to care about it beyond your personal connection.

Ensure that the sources you choose require active engagement. YouTube videos are not good sources because you can passively watch as the video plays. Instead, you want to demonstrate active involvement: reading books, taking notes, solving textbook problems, writing, coding, and similar activities that show deliberate effort and engagement.

If you are working on your Common App essay and want to make sure you are heading in the right direction, schedule a complimentary consultation with a college admissions essay writing expert today.