Examples of Creative Common App Essays

Every admissions cycle, the internet lights up with essays that "went viral" or "got a student into Harvard." And every cycle, a new wave of applicants reads those essays and tries to reverse-engineer the formula. They think the Costco essay worked because it was about Costco. They think the letter S essay worked because it was about grief. They think the sticky notes essay worked because it was about being Korean American.

They are wrong about all of it.

These essays did not work because of their topics. They worked because each writer found the single most organic, vivid, and honest way to show a reader who they actually are, how their experiences shaped them, and what they will bring to a campus full of people who are trying to build something together. The creativity was never the point. The creativity was the delivery mechanism for something much harder to fake: a real person, on the page, proving they have something to contribute.

Before we look at the essays themselves, you need to understand this clearly. If you read these and your first instinct is to write your own version of someone else's essay, you have already lost. An admissions officer who reads 30 applications a day will spot a knockoff in the first paragraph. What you should take from these examples is not a template. It is permission to trust your own weird, specific, honest lens on the world, and the confidence to build an essay around it.

Here is what actually makes a creative essay work at the T20 level: the student picks a small, concrete container (an object, a place, a process, a constraint) and uses it to reveal how they think, what they care about, and how they will show up in a community. That container has to be genuinely theirs. It cannot be borrowed. And it has to do real work across the whole essay, not just serve as a cute opening hook that gets abandoned by paragraph two.

With that framing in place, here are 15 essays that pulled this off at the highest level. Every one of these is publicly available, tied to a confirmed admission at a T20 school, and worth reading in full.

The Johns Hopkins "Essays That Worked" Collection

Johns Hopkins publishes selected essays from admitted students every year, complete with commentary from their admissions committee. These are as close to "official" examples as you will find anywhere. The committee explains exactly why each essay resonated, which makes them invaluable for understanding what admissions readers actually look for.

"Where Math Collides With Art" by Anthony M. (Class of 2029)

Anthony treats math not as a subject but as an aesthetic practice. He writes creative math problems for his peers and turns parametric equations into what he calls "cinematic universes." The essay works because every paragraph advances the same claim: this is how I think. He never lists achievements. He shows a mind in motion.

Read it here: https://apply.jhu.edu/hopkins-insider/where-math-collides-with-art/

"A Splash of Color" by Emily O. (Class of 2029)

Emily opens with a failed blush experiment on the first day of high school and ends up as her school's weatherwoman. The essay is really about what happens when you stop performing for other people's expectations and start experimenting for yourself. The admissions committee highlighted her willingness to take chances and discover what excites her.

Read it here: https://apply.jhu.edu/hopkins-insider/a-splash-of-color/

"Be the Salt of the Earth" by Maria G. (Class of 2029)

Maria uses salt as an extended metaphor for culture, connection, and global awareness. It starts with her mom warning her about oversalting soup and spirals outward into history, diplomacy, and civic engagement. The essay works because each return to salt adds a new dimension. It could have been a term paper. Instead it reads like a personal manifesto anchored in a five-year-old's curiosity.

Read it here: https://apply.jhu.edu/hopkins-insider/be-the-salt-of-the-earth/

"Building a Universe" by Shotaro O. (Class of 2029)

Shotaro writes about worldbuilding, the hobby of creating fictional universes from scratch. He spent months hand-drawing maps and researching plate tectonics, nomadic empires, and primate communication to make his world feel real. The admissions committee read this as evidence of interdisciplinary thinking and genuine intellectual curiosity. Shotaro himself said he chose the topic specifically because his resume made him "seem robotic," and he wanted to show the human behind the numbers.

Read it here: https://apply.jhu.edu/hopkins-insider/building-a-universe/

"Korean Sticky Notes" by Nancy P. (Class of 2028)

Nancy's bedroom door is covered in Korean vocabulary words on sticky notes. The essay follows her through H Mart with her mom, translating, budgeting, and gradually building a bridge between financial responsibility and cultural identity. The word "discount" starts literal and becomes metaphoric. The admissions committee highlighted how the essay reveals early responsibility paired with outward-looking curiosity.

Read it here: https://apply.jhu.edu/hopkins-insider/korean-sticky-notes/

"Finding Purpose in Trivial Projects" by Anjali V. (Class of 2028)

Anjali makes miniatures. Tiny dioramas. The essay argues that this supposedly trivial hobby is actually a philosophy of attention, and then draws a direct line from miniature construction to computational biology and programming. The bridge paragraph where craft becomes cognitive identity is the move that makes the whole essay click. The committee read it as evidence of strategic problem-solving built through detail-oriented creation.

Read it here: https://apply.jhu.edu/hopkins-insider/finding-purpose-in-trivial-projects/

"The Art of Imperfection" by Stella W. (Class of 2028)

Stella fell in love with painting at seven. Then she hit a wall. The essay is about how accepting imperfection in art trained her to handle frustration in science. "Learned from failure" is a cliche theme. Stella earns freshness through specificity and by showing growth as an ongoing practice rather than a one-time revelation.

Read it here: https://apply.jhu.edu/hopkins-insider/the-art-of-imperfection/

"My Spotify Playlist" by Alyssa C. (Class of 2027)

This is one of the best structural experiments in the bunch. Alyssa organizes her essay as three playlists, each representing a time she used music to bring a community together: a tennis team, a class during the pandemic, and a nonprofit classroom. The triptych structure lets her show range without fragmentation because every segment answers the same question: how do I gather people and raise collective energy?

Read it here: https://apply.jhu.edu/hopkins-insider/my-spotify-playlist/

"Classical Reflections in Herstory" by Maddie W. (Class of 2027)

Maddie turns Latin translation into a metaphor for re-reading a canon. The essay starts with puzzle-piece imagery for decoding sentences and evolves into a values-driven inquiry about who gets taught, whose work is preserved, and how gender shapes classical scholarship. The Hopkins references are integrated as a genuine continuation of the intellectual problem the essay builds, not a brochure echo.

Read it here: https://apply.jhu.edu/hopkins-insider/classical-reflections-in-herstory/

"My Rock" by Kashvi G. (Class of 2027)

Kashvi writes about adopting a 10-year-old retired police dog with PTSD and separation anxiety. The easy version of this essay is a pet story. Kashvi avoids that by connecting the relationship to specific learning: patience, compromise, mutualism. The essay shifts from being the youngest kid in the family who was always looked after to being fully responsible for another life. The admissions committee said the essay let them truly connect with Kashvi as a person.

Read it here: https://apply.jhu.edu/hopkins-insider/my-rock/

"Research as an Echo to Storytelling" by Summer Mai Li S. (Class of 2026, transfer)

Summer Mai Li defines research itself as narrative continuity. Instead of writing "I want to do research because..." she builds a chain from intergenerational family stories to human rights questions to culturally sensitive research engagement. The essay reads like braided nonfiction. It works because big global questions stay anchored in family stories and specific projects.

Read it here: https://apply.jhu.edu/hopkins-insider/research-as-an-echo-to-storytelling/

Beyond Johns Hopkins

The following essays come from journalism reprints, official university blogs, and admissions platforms. The sourcing varies, but each essay is publicly available with a credible tie to admission at a T20 school.

The Costco Essay by Brittany Stinson (Stanford, plus Yale, Columbia, UPenn, Dartmouth, and Cornell)

This is probably the most famous college essay of the last decade. Brittany uses Costco as a laboratory for curiosity. She is a two-year-old rampaging through the aisles, she is a teenager pondering whether cultured yogurt is more well-mannered than its uncultured counterpart, she is connecting a Costco ham to Andrew Jackson. The essay works not because Costco is funny, but because it is a recurring stage that reveals how Brittany thinks: rapid association, delight in ideas, social observation. The creativity is the delivery system for an unmistakably curious mind.

Read the full essay and expert analysis here: https://www.businessinsider.com/high-school-senior-who-got-into-5-ivy-league-schools-shares-her-admissions-essay-2016-4

"I Hate the Letter S" by Abigail Mack (Harvard, Class of 2025)

Abigail lost her mom to cancer at 12. Her essay's defining creative device is treating a single letter of the alphabet as the antagonist. The letter S is what separates "parents" from "parent," and it follows her everywhere. The essay uses quantification (164,777 words with S, and she only grapples with one) paired with plainspoken emotion. The tone is the hardest part: too much darkness reads like manipulation, too much humor reads like avoidance. Abigail walks that line with extraordinary control. She was explicitly aware of the "sob story" risk and worked to avoid it.

Read about the essay and see excerpts here: https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2021/05/13/i-hate-the-letter-s-this-college-essay-on-the-loss-of-a-parent-helped-a-bridgewater-teen-into-harvard-and-went-viral/

"My College Essay" by Cristen C. (MIT, Class of 2010)

Cristen's essay is about growing up in the projects and navigating the hidden costs of belonging in spaces that were not designed for her. She uses dialogue, concrete numbers, and sharp contrast between her reality and her peers' assumed norms. The tone is direct, occasionally biting, but ultimately hopeful. Cristen herself wrote on the MIT Admissions blog: "I gave MIT the new essay, and MIT gave me admission." That is about as direct a link between essay and outcome as you will ever find.

Read it here: https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/my_college_essay/

"The Admission Essay That Got Me Into Yale" by Subha Z. (Yale, Class of 2019)

Subha opens with a startling line about diagnosing her brother with autism after reading a neurology magazine. The essay unpacks what that discovery meant emotionally, ethically, and vocationally, and connects it to a goal of serving communities in Bangladesh with limited medical access. The high risks are substantial (disability diagnosis, family trauma, medical ambition can all read as exploitative if handled carelessly), but the essay manages them by emphasizing humility and support systems. This essay is hosted on an admissions platform rather than a university site, so the sourcing is less authoritative than the others, but the author is identified as a Yale student.

Read it here: https://plexuss.com/college-essays/the-admission-essay-that-got-me-into-yale

Why You Cannot Copy These Essays

Let me say this as directly as I can: if you try to write your own version of any of these essays, you will produce something worse than if you had never read them.

These essays did not work because someone discovered a clever trick. They worked because each writer found the most honest and vivid way to put themselves on the page. The Costco essay worked for Brittany because Brittany actually grew up wandering Costco and letting her mind run wild in the aisles. The sticky notes essay worked for Nancy because Nancy actually covered her bedroom door in Korean vocabulary while navigating her family's finances at H Mart. The letter S essay worked for Abigail because Abigail actually lost her mom and spent years running from a single letter that reminded her of what was missing.

You do not have these experiences. You have your own. And your own experiences, rendered with the same level of honesty and specificity, will be far more compelling than a secondhand imitation of someone else's life.

Here is what admissions officers are actually looking for when they read your essay. They want to see your lived experiences and how those experiences shaped you into someone who will contribute to the social and academic life of their campus. They are building a class. They have invested enormous resources into creating a community with specific academic programs, research opportunities, student organizations, and cultural infrastructure. They want to know that you will show up and make that community better, and that you will take advantage of what that community offers. Your essay is your chance to show them, vividly and specifically, why you belong in that exchange.

The students in these examples understood that instinctively. Shotaro's worldbuilding essay was not a quirky hobby piece. It was proof that he thinks across disciplines and will thrive at a research university that values interdisciplinary work. Alyssa's playlist essay was not a music recommendation. It was evidence that she builds community wherever she goes. Cristen's essay was not a hardship narrative. It was a demonstration of persistence, dignity, and optimism in the face of structural barriers.

Every one of these essays answered the same unwritten question: what will you bring to our campus, and what will you do with what we offer? The creativity was just the vehicle that made the answer impossible to forget.

What You Should Actually Do

Read these essays to understand what good looks like. Then close the browser and think about your own life.

What is the small, specific thing that only you would write about? Not the impressive thing. Not the thing your parents want you to write about. The thing that, if your essay fell on the floor with no name on it, your best friend would pick up and immediately know it was yours.

Start there. Write one vivid scene, five to seven sentences, that puts the reader in a specific moment. Then write a short paragraph explaining what that scene reveals about how you think, care, or build. Then add a forward-looking sentence that is not a slogan: a specific kind of work, community, or inquiry you will pursue, consistent with what the essay has already shown.

That is the whole formula. There is no secret beyond this. Find your own container. Fill it with your own life. Trust the reader to see you in it.

If you want help finding the most powerful way to convey the hard-earned experiences that will distinguish you from the crowd the way these applicants did, schedule a free consultation with an admissions expert today.