If you’ve landed here, you’ve probably heard that you should “sell your trauma” in your college essay. In other words, you should tell a sob story and capitalize on the worst thing that’s ever happened to you, because that will get you into the college of your dreams. We totally disagree with this, and in today’s blog, we’ll explain why.

It’s one of the most popular college essay prompts students respond to, and it may even be the classic college essay topic. If you do it well, you can really distinguish yourself from other applicants, but if you do it poorly, you will probably be placed at the bottom of the pile. In today’s post, we will reveal three big mistakes students make in writing the “Overcoming Challenges” college essay, and in each case, we’ll explain what you should do instead.

Let’s begin with the prompt itself, which you should read multiple times: “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?”

After reviewing college essays for many years, we strongly believe that Common App prompt #7 is the single worst college essay prompt for most applicants. You may be tempted to think that because the prompt gives you a lot of freedom, it will allow you to express yourself and stand out more - but it usually ends up doing the opposite. Here are three big reasons we urge you to select one of the other prompts when you write your college essay.

What is an essence object? Essentially it’s an object you own (or use regularly) that represents one of your fundamental qualities. So you could pick the violin you’ve been playing since you were a child, or the soccer jersey you were wearing when you scored your first goal, or the book your grandfather gave you before he died. You start by brainstorming ten or twenty of these essence objects, and the one you pick forms the basis for your college essay.

Unfortunately, essence objects won’t help you write a great college essay. Instead, they prevent you from thinking through your life experience seriously and maturely. Here are the main reasons we don’t recommend getting lost in this brainstorming exercise.

There’s a lot of confusion around what it means to brainstorm your college essay. The standard advice is that you should rack your brain and write down every single idea that comes to mind, as if this will somehow lead to a magical idea that will get you into college. But it’s not that simple. You can only brainstorm effectively if you do it from the right starting point.

Here’s an example of the wrong starting point: a handful of college essay websites suggest that you should brainstorm your values for college essay ideas. This means you should look at a list of abstract concepts and pick out the ones you value the most. Unfortunately, this doesn’t help you get started on your college essay, and it can actively sabotage the writing process. In this post, we’ll explain why, step by step.

The topic of this week’s blog may seem absurd at first glance. But students often come to us with drafts of their college essays already completed, and when we ask them which prompt they’re responding to, they shrug and say they didn’t know they had to respond to a prompt.

This happens so frequently that we started to suspect something was going on - and then we discovered that some most popular college essay websites explicitly suggest: “don’t read Common App prompts.” This is terrible advice for any kind of writing, and in almost all cases, it will guarantee that you’ll write a mediocre college essay. Here’s why.

Here’s one of the most popular pieces of internet advice about college essay writing: If you’ve experienced a major challenge in life, you should use a narrative structure - that is, you should tell your story from start to finish. If your life has been basically normal and drama-free, you should use a montage structure and come up with a clever concept that brings several experiences together.

The montage essay is very popular, but we’ve basically never seen one we liked, and we’ve decided to explain why. Here are the three main reasons we strongly discourage you from using the montage structure for a college essay.

If you’re a junior in high school, you probably have a lot on your plate right now. You’re trying to get the best grades you can while building your resume and studying for the SAT or ACT… and if you’re like most people, you’re leaving the final part of the college application – the dreaded college essay – to the end.

We believe this is a big mistake. Treating the essay as an afterthought is the most common way students self-sabotage when applying to college.