Why You Shouldn’t Use a Montage Structure for Your College Essay
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.
So what is a montage essay? Montage essays can be about anything, but basically the applicant picks a visual thread — a household object, a musical instrument, a place, etc. —and uses it to reflect on a few values they hold dear. For example, you might pick your iPhone case and explain a few ways it reflects who you are.
The montage essay is very popular, but we’ve 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 your college essay.
Montage essays come off as gimmicky
Say you go ahead and write your montage essay about how your iPhone case reflects who you are. You explain that you have a thick skin, and you’re willing to travel anywhere, and you value usefulness over your appearance. Do you think an admissions officer will be impressed? Or will they lump you in with the 50 similar essays they’ve read that day?
The problem isn’t just that comparing yourself to an object is overdone; it’s that it simply isn’t believable. Are you really like your iPhone case? Of course not! You’re a human being who has had a range of complicated experiences. You don’t actually bear some deep resemblance to an everyday object. You’re just making this connection because you’ve found a clever hack for your college essay.
The montage structure is an obvious gimmick, and admissions officers (who are looking for any reason to rule out applicants in an increasingly competitive environment) will spot it in two seconds flat. They’ve just asked you to think very deeply about yourself, and you’ve told them that your life can be summarized by an iPhone case. After rolling their eyes, they’ll think: This applicant didn’t do the hard work. They didn’t reflect about their life in a meaningful way. They just used a clever trick to avoid answering the question.
The montage structure makes your college essay superficial
As we’ve discussed time and again on this blog, the whole point of the college essay is to communicate something meaningful about yourself to admissions officers. This is no easy task, but if you take the process seriously and think deeply about your life experiences, you’ll come up with a personal statement that reflects who you really are.
The montage structure forces you to do the opposite, and we’ll explain why. When you write a traditional college essay (or a narrative essay), you tell a story about yourself. There’s a beginning, a middle, and an end, and your paragraphs build on each other and relate to each other. If you do the hard work and tell your story in this way, the narrative structure will allow you to communicate something important about yourself to the reader.
But when you write a montage essay about how you resemble your iPhone case, you come up with a separate paragraph about each way you connect with this object. The first paragraph is about your toughness, the second is about how you love to travel, and so on. These paragraphs are brief snippets that have nothing to do with each other, so your essay ends up seeming a lot more superficial than if you developed a single idea throughout your entire essay.
The montage structure puts you at a disadvantage from the start because it prevents you from digging deep. If you approach your college essay this way, you’ll end up writing five unrelated paragraphs — and reducing your life to five clichés.
Montage essays give the impression you gave up on writing a real college essay
If you haven’t encountered a major challenge in life, that doesn’t mean you need to use the montage structure. It simply means you might need to do a bit more digging to work out a good topic for your college essay. We understand this might not be what you want to hear right now. You’re probably stressed after working so hard on the other parts of your college application, and you don’t want to sit around and wait for an idea to come to you.
We get it, but as we’ve written elsewhere, the college essay draws on a completely different skill set from the other parts of the college application. To do well on your GPA, SAT, and even your extracurriculars list, you simply need to excel; to do well on the college essay, you need to stop, be patient, and spend some time reflecting on your past. We usually get the process started with our students by saying something like this: “So you haven’t experienced an unusual challenge in life — but what does make your life unusual?”
It isn’t an easy question to answer, but it forces students to start thinking deeply about themselves. If they put in the work, they eventually write a compelling essay regardless of whether they’ve experienced a major challenge in life. Remember: you’re a human being who has had a unique experience on this planet. If you stop and reflect on your life, you’ll come up with something fascinating to say. It’s actually impossible not to.
The college essay is important, and you only get one shot at it. If you take the easy way out and hack the essay by using the montage structure, your application will suffer. College admissions officers will know you’re nothing like your iPhone case, and they’ll assume you’re simply trying to avoid answering their serious questions.
If you accept that there are no hacks when it comes to writing the college essay, on the other hand, and if you take the Common App questions seriously and put in some hard work, you’ll write a great college essay — and you’ll probably learn a lot about yourself in the process.