Worst College Essay Topics: What to Avoid and How to Stand Out

The college essay is a crucial part of your application, offering a chance to showcase your personality, values, and perspective. However, many students struggle to choose the right topic, and some common themes can actually hurt your chances of admission. To maximize your odds of getting accepted into your dream college, it's important to understand which topics to avoid and how to make your essay stand out.

What Colleges Look For in Essays

Colleges use essays to understand who you are beyond your grades and test scores. They want to get a sense of your perspective, values, and voice. The prompts are often intentionally generic, like "describe a time you overcame a challenge." The admissions committee is more interested in who you are and how you demonstrate positive traits.

An in-depth explanation of how you solved a complex dilemma can showcase your potential as a scholar and researcher. An essay about volunteering in your community can demonstrate your leadership skills and commitment to making the world a better place. The primary goal is to stand out from other applicants by showcasing your unique personality and writing style.

Cliche College Essay Topics to Avoid

Certain topics are considered cliché because they are overused, generic, or fail to reveal much about the applicant. While it's possible to write a compelling essay on any topic, these common themes require extra caution and a unique approach.

Resume/Academic Achievements

Listing achievements without providing context or personality is a common mistake. Many students treat the essay as a job application, focusing on academic achievements and extracurricular activities. The problem with focusing on accomplishments is that it misses the point of the essay. It doesn’t give a sense of who you are. A long list of accomplishments feels cramped and doesn’t leave much room to contextualize the achievements or humanize yourself.

It's better to craft your essay around a single, awesome experience than to turn it into a resume. Use the Activities List and Additional Info sections to highlight your accomplishments.

The Mission Trip Essay

Religious students often write about mission trips, thinking it showcases leadership, community service, and a willingness to help others. However, this is one of the most common college essay topics. Some committee members may be annoyed at seeing "yet another one" in their stack of essays. It's going to be hard to not sound like hundreds of other applicants.

Describing the communities you helped can be tricky. You may use language of exclusion or xenophobia. Instead of making yourself look good, this could make you look judgmental or even bigoted. Writing an essay trying to make yourself look good for helping people may end up seeming overly self-congratulatory.

Sports Challenge Essays

Athletes often write about sports challenges, such as winning or losing a big game, making or not making the team, or getting a sports injury. However interesting the sports challenge itself was, though, these typically make for bad college essays topics. Like the mission trip essay, a sports challenge college essay is very common. Since one of the main goals of the essay is to help you stand out, it doesn’t really help to do the same thing that countless other people are doing. Everyone writing about losing the big game ends up writing the same "lessons learned" about humility, teamwork, overcoming disappointment, etc.

Explaining the context of the big game, the major plays, and the outcome takes up too many words. This doesn’t leave much room for personal reflection or stylistic writing. You are left with an admission essay that mostly codes you as “generic athlete” in the eyes of the committee.

Read also: Gridiron Gloom: Unsuccessful Teams

The Big Performance

Essays about preparing for a play, musical solo, or major speech are similar to sports challenge essays. These essays are very common, and tend to have very similar plot points, so it’s tough to make your own stand out. The big performance always goes well or goes poorly. Performers almost always learn either the value of preparation or the inner strength to overcome a major disappointment.

As with sports essays, you will inevitably spend much of your essay word count describing what the performance is, how you actually performed, what made the performance great (or not so great), and so on.

Cliche Immigration Story

College essays focusing on immigration often emphasize the same things: moving to a new home, feeling out of place, and eventually learning to accept one’s cultural heritage and one’s new surroundings. There are more of these college essays than there are Lifetime movies about falling in love with a handsome stranger.

Try to pick a more unique story related to your immigration experience. A more unique topic can also help to humanize you as you describe the unexpected situations that you had to ultimately overcome.

Why X Person is Your Hero

Writing about someone who is your personal hero can be tempting. However, if you’re not careful, the essay ends up being more about the other person than yourself. This can lead to a reader feeling like “Your grandma sounds awesome. Too bad she’s not applying to college.”

The Tough Grade You Got

Many college essay prompts ask you to write about a time that you overcame a major challenge. There are many challenges students could potentially write about, and many choose to write about what they did after they received a bad grade. It’s generally never a good idea to use this as an essay topic, though. Framing getting a bad grade as a serious challenge next to something like escaping war may not go so well.

You don’t want to make poor academic performance the first thing an admissions committee hears about you. Try to focus on a topic that emphasizes your strengths more than your weaknesses.

Your First Heartbreak

Due to the raw intensity of the emotions involved, many would-be college students focus on their first heartbreak as their college essay topic. But this is generally a bad idea for several reasons. Epic teen romance is usually far less important to those outside the relationship. It’s a bit of an uphill climb to even get the admissions committee to see this as an important topic.

Writing about a heartbreak means you’ll spend plenty of time writing about the other person. The more you talk about your ex, the less room you have to talk about yourself. If you spend hundreds of words talking about how much a single breakup nearly disrupted your life, it may make the committee worry about how easily you could get distracted by romance and start losing focus on your actual studies.

Illegal/Unethical Activities

Make sure your college essay doesn’t talk about you participating in illegal or unethical activities. If you casually mention illegal drug use in your essay, it will make the college worry about you partaking in illegal drugs while at the college. They may even worry about you getting others using illegal drugs as well.

Even when it’s not an outright crime, you should refrain from writing about unethical activities that make you look bad.

Making a Cliche Topic Work

It is possible to gain admission to your dream colleges by using these topics. The secret is to find a way to make cliché topics feel a bit less cliché.

If you decide to do a “resume” style essay, don’t try to dazzle them with all of your different accomplishments. Instead, zero in on one very specific accomplishment, and dive into layers of reflection and meaning. This gives you much more room to detail how the experience shaped you into the kind of person who will add real value to the college. The same wisdom holds true for writing about your mission trip: if you must write about it, try to focus on values that we’re not expecting. Like, did it teach you about healthy boundaries and autonomy and balance, instead of the cliche version.

If you must write about overcoming a sports challenge: try to avoid common topics such as, grit, resilience, determination (which are basically all the same thing), learning to trust teammates, how you were thrilled at winning the big game, or how heartbroken you were to lose. Instead, try more unconventional topics like how a sports injury forced you to learn new skills or how it helped you discover a new passion. One of the best we’ve seen was how playing cornerback helped a student read Dostoevsky better. In addition to being more unique, such a topic shows you are adaptable.

If you decide to write about a big performance, it helps if the performance itself is unusual. No matter the performance, though, try not to spend too much time describing that performance. Instead, you should use the outcome of the performance as a springboard to discuss the new skills and life lessons you have learned. Ultimately, it will be what you know now that gets you into the college of your choice rather than how you performed then.

If you’re going to write this essay, you’ll be better off focusing on something like a single specific moment (like what you did the first time you encountered racism or xenophobia) or a much less conventional challenge you faced (for example, asking someone out on a date when you are still struggling with a new language).

When writing college essays about your personal hero, be sure to actually focus more on yourself than on them. Help us see what you learned from them, how you’ve applied those lessons, and how they’ve shaped you into the thinker and scholar you are today.

You should similarly avoid writing about your first heartbreak because it is nearly impossible to write a brief essay about young lo…

Silly and Ridiculous Essay Topics from Universities

Some universities request submissions on reasonable topics like your first choice major, a leadership experience, or an obstacle you’ve overcome. Some essay topics are silly, ridiculous, and downright wacky.

Two years ago, Auburn asked applicants how they feel about Mondays. Penn State Schreyer Honors asks applicants to answer nine prompts in total, including “what is effective followership?” and reflect on the statement: “get comfortable with being uncomfortable.” The University of Southern California asks “what’s your favorite snack?” or “what’s your life’s theme song?” The University of Wyoming asks: Why Wyoming?

The University of Georgia asks applicants to “tell us an amusing story.” Pomona College asks: in 50 words, what’s your favorite way to eat a potato? The University of Virginia proposes the peculiar challenge to describe your favorite word in 250 words. Texas A&M Engineering Honors asks: “Describe the internet to somebody from the 19th century and how it is useful to address something you care about. Include who you are telling and why you decided to share the information that you did.”

Kentucky Honors and Scholarship essay asks: “Who are three people that you feel have made a significant impact on the world in the last 100 years? Who are they and why did you select them? How would you want them to be recognized or memorialized?” USC asks: “Engineering and Computer Science students are sometimes assumed to have personalities with shared traits or characteristics. What is a trait or characteristic you believe you share with other engineering and computer science students and another where you differ? Please tell us about these two traits and why you chose them” (250 words). The University of Chicago offers student-submitted essay questions, including, “Describe your own take on the Quadrivium or the Trivium” and “what’s so odd about odd numbers?”

Politely ask of the representative to justify their silly and vague essay topic or clarify inconsistent application guidelines. Don’t let them get away with their crimes against general sensibility and your wellbeing.

Examples of "Worst" Essays

A student wrote about how he was more mature than anyone his age, how he never talked to anyone in school because they were too dumb for him, and how he spends his free time having conversations with scientists on the internet. He also felt the need to mention that he was straight edge and didn't understand how other kids of his generation found alcohol and drugs fun.
A girl sent in an application in larger-than-normal packaging, leading the admissions office to suspect it was a bomb.
A student explained a disciplinary action on her school report, detailing how she and her boyfriend got caught having sex in an empty room during a track meet.
An applicant wrote, at length, about how she panics under pressure, lacks leadership skills, and can't stand hospitals in a medical school application.
An applicant literally wrote something along the lines of, 'Please don't accept me; I don't want to go to your school,' in the addendum section of our application because his parents forced him to apply.
One student wrote about how adventurous she was, and used the time she lit her kitchen on fire as a supporting detail.
One year, this kid wrote that he had Asperger's and thus 'superior intelligence to all of the other normals.' He continued writing about his superiority and how people just don't 'understand him.'
This person answered a Johns Hopkins essay question asking what he would do if he had $100 by explaining that he would go to the local playground where homeless people congregated and host a mini Olympics. He would use the $100 to purchase 150 burgers from Burger King (during the Tuesday special), and the homeless people would compete for them.
One essay was essentially a love letter to the faculty superstar with whom the student wanted to work. However, what made it more cringe was the fact that the faculty member had never heard of the student.
An essay about your 'happiest place.' Her happiest place was the bathroom…while pooping.
A student wrote eloquently about how inner-city Black students ought to take up more sports - specifically polo, lacrosse, and squash.
One essay then read, verbatim, 'And bob was like, thats bodacious! but what sucks is…hes a pedophile!
A student began his essay by bragging that he was the king of his school.

Essay Topics to Definitely Avoid

Big sports games
Mission trips
Glorified resume
Major life changes that have happened to other people besides you
Anything that you have nothing good to say about.
COVID-19

Your essay should be something ONLY you could have written about. The bigger the issue, the smaller you write.

How to Brainstorm a Great Topic

Open up a google doc and write down literally everything you can think of about yourself. Formative memories, tiny memories that you don't know why you remember, places you've been with family and friends, your favorite things, aspects of your identity, people you care about, hobbies, experiences, etc.
Look through old notebooks and items in your house that are important/memorable to you.
Look back through the document and highlight anything that jumps out at you.
Try to connect the moment/memory/thing to anything meaningful you want to talk about (deeper topics like finding joy in trivial moments, how leaps of faith are super nerve-wracking but also rewarding, etc.)

Risky Topics to Think Twice About

Writing about someone else, however amazing or important they are, where you are the side character.
How much you love your dog or cat, gerbil or parakeet.
Family Trauma or illness (includes mental illness)
Death of someone you love
Illicit substance use
Self harm
Divorce of parents and how you were torn
That trip you took that changed you forever
That community service day that made you a better person
How you became amazingly skilled at a video game and went up many levels
The workload during junior year you almost couldn’t manage
The Pandemic and remote/online school
Working hard after a rough freshman year and getting straight A’s.

What Makes a Good College Essay

The Four Core Questions are at the heart of college essays and answering them is critical. By answering these questions, a student is able to share information that is otherwise hard to ascertain with admissions officials-things like personality traits, personal journey, interests, skills, and ambitions.

Résumés are an effective method to demonstrate achievements, but they’re boring to read. A better strategy is for students to pick one experience that stands above the rest and write about how it shaped the person they are today.
Instead of an applicant talking about how their team trained and improved to beat their rivals or win a championship, they should write about a unique way that sports shaped who they are.
To make an immigration essay work (and avoid being another cliché college essay), a student needs to make it extremely unique or incredibly personal. Another essay opportunity is to write about an experience that is truly unique.
The key is to keep it focused on the applicant and highly personal. To start, avoid overused themes like “life is short” and “make every day count.” Instead, highlight how the tragedy affected the writer.
Instead of writing your essay about overcoming a tough class, think about the personality traits you want to highlight. Pick something that is deeply personal to you and your background.
The primary pitfall of writing about an admired person is that the essay is often focused more on the other person than the applicant.
One way to avoid the cliché volunteer essay is to write about a specific moment on your trip, rather than giving a chronological account of your time. Get really specific and bring the reader into the moment and share with them how it affected you.

Topics That Inspire Clichés

Casual use of drugs or alcohol
Trips to a foreign country
Over-dramatization, hyperbole, and enhanced self-importance
Sports-themed essays
Stream-of-consciousness thoughts

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