The Values Exercise Won’t Help You Write a College Essay

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 values exercise just gives you a bunch of labels

If you look at the lists of values, you’ll see they contain general ideas that people use to describe what’s important to them. Examples are “family,” “fun,” “beauty,” and “laughter,” as well as “creativity,” “excitement,” “honesty,” and “compassion.” These aren’t great insights into a person’s character. On the contrary, they’re the most basic things you can say about a person. If you follow the brainstorming instructions and pick out your top five words, then your top three words, and finally your top word, you definitely won’t be discovering anything unique about your personality.

Ultimately, the list of core values is just a bunch of clichés - and as we’ve said numerous times on this site, clichés are the enemy of the college essay. The list reminds us of how some parents try to distinguish between their kids (“so-and-so is the sporty one, and so-and-so is the intelligent one”). In other words, it reveals something really boring and uninteresting about a person, which might not turn out to be true, anyway.

If you think you can get started on your college essay by picking from a list of clichés, think again. It’s not that easy. But that isn’t the worst thing about the list of values.

Brainstorming core values prevents you from true self-reflection

The whole point of the college essay is to think deeply about yourself and uncover something you might not have known when you got started. This is what makes the best college essays so exciting to read. Someone sets out to describe an aspect of their personality, and it’s obvious that they’ve thought long and hard about themselves, because they never reduce their experience to a cliché. Instead, they say something genuinely perceptive and interesting.

If you begin by picking your core value from a list that describes just about everyone on the planet, you shut off this kind of self-reflection from the start. Why? Because you act like you already know yourself, and in doing so, you stop being curious.

Imagine you look at the list and decide that the value that most resonates with you is “self-disciplined.” Then you’ll likely give a bunch of examples that show how self-disciplined you are, and you’ll write an essay about how your life has always been characterized by self-discipline (or how it didn’t used to be, but now it is).

What will happen if you write that essay? You’ll be graded by admissions officers, and you’ll be assigned the equivalent of a B or C.

If you start out by deciding you’re self-disciplined, you won’t ask yourself any of the interesting questions. Why are you self-disciplined? Is there a deeper reason why you need to see yourself this way? Are you self-disciplined, or are you just afraid of what would happen if you let yourself go for a minute? The questions could go on and on, but you’d never ask yourself any of them.

To write your college essay effectively, you shouldn’t start out by giving yourself a label. You should assume you don’t know yourself that well. Only then will you explore, dig deeper, and ask yourself the tough questions.

The starting point should be your experience, not your values

Instead of beginning the college essay process by asking, “How do I fit into a list that describes everyone on the planet?” you should start by asking “How am I different from other people?” This is a much harder question, but it will eventually force you to write a college essay that’s distinctive and original rather than clichéd and boring.

How do you work out what is different about you? The answer is that you don’t start with your values. You start with your experience. Think about it: a term like “self-disciplined” or “creative” or “intelligent” could apply to millions of people. But your life experience applies only to you. So this is what you should turn to when you start working on your college essay. You should brainstorm episodes that were surprising or difficult or challenging and that shaped the person you are today. Then, over the course of writing your essay, you will come up with an interpretation of your unique personal story.

When we meet with students for the first time, we never ask them to label themselves with a core value. Instead, we have long conversations about their lived experience, with lots of questioning and back-and-forth. You can of course do this with anyone you feel comfortable with: a friend, a parent, or a teacher. The point is that you should find someone you feel comfortable with and begin the brainstorming process by talking about your unique experiences.

Writing a college essay is extremely challenging, and coming up with a topic is the hardest part of all. It would be amazing if you could just look at a list of values, pick out the most important one, and be done. But unfortunately it doesn’t work that way.