Essence Objects Won’t Help You Write a College Essay

If you’re just getting started on your college essay, you’ve probably been told that you need to begin by brainstorming your topic. That’s true, but “brainstorming” isn’t as easy as it sounds. You can’t just sit down and come up with a bunch of ideas. You need some direction or you won’t get anywhere.

That’s why a few college essay sites have come up with exercises to help you get started. But some of these brainstorming exercises push you in the exact opposite direction to the one you need to go in. We’ve already explained why you shouldn’t brainstorm your values in an earlier blog post. Today, we’re turning to another exercise that tells you to brainstorm your “essence objects.”

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.

Reducing your life to an essence object simply isn’t believable

It may seem like a clever idea to pick a seemingly random object and write about how it represents who you are. And sure, we’re willing to admit that the first time someone did this, they probably submitted a very original college essay. But by now, so many people have written essays based on essence objects that college admissions officers roll their eyes when they read them.

The problem isn’t just that writing about an essence object is overdone. It’s that reducing your life to an essence object simply isn’t believable. Let’s say you decide to write about the five stickers plastered on your laptop. Sure, these stickers may be important to you. They may capture your dedication to saving the planet and your passion for the latest album by Taylor Swift. But do they really define who you are? Of course not. You’re way more complicated than a set of stickers. 

That’s why the admissions officer who reads your college essay isn’t going to be impressed. Instead they’ll simply assume you took the easy way out and didn’t bother to reflect about your life in a meaningful way. And that’s not what you want an admissions officer to think when they’re reading your one-and-only shot at a personal essay.

Essence objects form the basis of montage essays, which don’t work

As we’ve written elsewhere on this blog, some college essay advisors say that if you haven’t experienced any major challenge in life, you should write a montage college essay rather than a narrative essay. This involves picking a visual thread (usually an object) and using it to reflect on a few values that are important to you. So, following the example above, you might pick the stickers on your laptop and explain how they reflect who you are.

We’ve read a lot of montage essays, but we’ve never seen one we liked. One reason for this is obvious: you’re reducing your life to an essence object. But montage essays also lead you to write four or five paragraphs about how you resemble this object, and these paragraphs always end up being superficial.

Let’s explain this more clearly. When you write a traditional college essay (or a narrative essay), you tell a story about yourself in chronological order. Your paragraphs build on each other and relate to each other, and there’s a beginning, a middle, and an end. But when you write a montage essay about the stickers on your laptop, you write a separate paragraph about each sticker. The first sticker is about your environmentalism, the second is about your passion for Taylor Smith, and so on. These paragraphs are brief snippets that have nothing to do with each other, so your essay ends up being a lot more superficial than if you developed a single idea throughout an entire essay.

We recommend you stay away from essence objects because they encourage you to write a montage essay — and montage essays inevitably end up being gimmicky and superficial.

Essence objects prevent you from doing the hard work of thinking through your life experience

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: the college essay is extremely challenging, and coming up with a topic for your essay is the hardest part of all. You may encounter websites that claim you can hack the essay by following a clever strategy, but this never works. Admissions officers know every trick in the book, and with college admissions becoming increasingly competitive, they’re looking for any reason to eliminate you from consideration at their school.

The problem with the essence object exercise is that it encourages you to bypass the hard work you need to do to write a real college essay. Sure, it may sound appealing to do a few simple exercises so you can get started quickly, but coming up with a topic takes time, patience, humility, and maturity. Are you ready to accept the challenge and come up with a legitimate topic, or are you looking for the easy way out? Admissions officers will know the answer to this question within a minute of looking at your essay.

If you do accept the challenge, here’s what you should do. Forget about any trendy brainstorming exercises, and instead, have a long, in-depth conversation with someone you trust. It can be anyone - a friend, a family member, or a college essay coach - but use the opportunity to think seriously about your life experiences, and try to work out what makes you distinctive or unusual. Leave time for lots of questions and back-and-forth, and pay close attention to the parts of your life that aren’t run of the mill. If you spend time reflecting on your experience with someone you trust, you’ll eventually hit on an idea that feels authentic and compelling — and that’s what it’s all about.