With seven Common Application college essay prompts to choose from, which one should you choose?
Choosing Your Common App Essay Topic
More often than not, there will be a few application prompts that will jump out at you. Often, the prompts that catch your attention do so because they align with a story or value that’s core to your identity. Jot down the first thoughts that come to you as you browse these prompts. These can turn out to be great ideas off of which to expand your eventual essay topic.
Common App Prompt #3 Essay Prompt
Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea. What prompted your thinking? What was the outcome?
Analyzing the Essay Prompt: Why Colleges Ask
The core of this essay prompt is to understand your values and beliefs and your thought process. How did you come to have these beliefs or ideas? Why did you question your initial belief system? How did others react to that? Finally, how did you resolve those challenges?
Out of all the Common App essay prompts, this one best demonstrates a candidate’s critical thinking, which is a quality admissions officers want to see in a candidate. This prompt also demonstrates a candidate’s humility and willingness to admit being wrong. It can be difficult to articulate your thought process clearly, especially with very personal essay subjects, so this prompt could be challenging but worthwhile if done right.
The prompt also asks for the motivation behind your thinking. The essay should explore the values that triggered your challenge. There has to be a reason you adopted a new set of beliefs. By doing so, you’ll be able to write about the things that are important to you, how they came to be, and therefore paint a better picture of who you are to the admissions office.
Remember, analytical and critical thinking is a skill many institutions want to help foster, mostly through discussion-based lectures and seminars. Choose this prompt only if you’re very clear about your values and arguments.
Common “Challenged a Belief” Essay Topics
1. Religion
Religious teachings are often subjected to challenge, and it’s up to your faith and understanding to defend or reject them. If you were raised in a religious family, it may have been the only set of values you knew at first. However, as you step out of the home into other settings, such as school or other communities, you may have been exposed to different cultures and religions. For many students, learning about new cultures or belief systems can reshape opinions or even reframe moral beliefs that don’t fully align with what you initially learned. Usually, when a religious teaching is challenged, this can have profound consequences on a person’s worldview, self identity, and future goals.
If this is a narrative arc that speaks to you, writing about your religion can be a great way to showcase how your own values system has changed over time and based on experience. Religion can be a touchy subject, but this topic can be very successful if you demonstrate self awareness and tolerance (toward yourself and others). Examples include encounters that caused you to doubt your faith or a potential clash of ideas in a classroom setting.
A. Essay Topic: Religious Beliefs
Excerpt from StanfordNerd
Sociology Major
Stanford University ‘22
“”Oh no, Michelle! Can you even eat those?” Celia’s mother exclaimed, seeing the two cheeseburgers on my plate. The beef patties and slices of cheddar cheese stacked between two tiny buns were definitely not kosher. Yet, they definitely looked delicious. I was at an impasse. My family ate only kosher food in our household and my friend’s mother knew of my dietary restrictions. After years of following the scientific method in school, I deduced there was no solid evidence barring me from eating the adorably small cheeseburgers. I shrugged and bit into the slider.”
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B. Essay Topic: Religious Beliefs
Banking & Finance MajorExcerpt from Doodie123
Washington University in St. Louis ‘19
“Give us today our daily bread.”
Such words I would hear both at Sunday congregations and from occasion bread-lovers that show up at our family bakery. Propelled by the entrepreneurial mentality of my family, I started to develop a growing desire for success at a young age. However, this seemingly ambitious desire gradually transformed into a self-centered way of life as I began to yearn for a sumptuous lifestyle that ignored the welfare of others.”
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2. Gender and Sexuality
Identity is a tough topic to tackle for anyone at any age—it requires a great deal of self awareness and maturity. When it comes to gender identity and sexuality, that can be an even trickier area to navigate because it can be so easily misunderstood or misinterpreted with unwarranted social stigma. Therefore, taking on this topic requires authentic and clear writing. You want to communicate your story clearly so that the points you want to highlight are the points that come across to the reader; a bad outcome would be for the reader to take away a muddied or the wrong conclusion.
Discovering or acknowledging an element of your identity can be an incredibly transformative process. It comes with a lot of self questioning, growth, and catharsis. The more you can convey the inner transformation in your writing with clear, concrete examples to help the reader understand what’s happening in the cocoon before the butterfly emerges, the more compelling your essay will be.
A. Essay Topic: Sexuality & Religion
Excerpt from sumiko05
Undeclared major
Princeton University ‘20
“I grew up in a devoutly Christian family. Every Sunday, we go to church, whether it was the first one in the woods of Connecticut or the last one, where my father now serves as priest. The main message of the church has always been love, first and foremost. Love of God for the world, love of humans for each other. The concept of pride—of being so proud of who I was that I proclaimed it to the whole world—has been a hard thing for me to grasp with regards to my sexuality.”
Continue reading her full Princeton University personal statement.
B. Essay Topic: Sexual Orientation
Excerpt from ssssnown
Women’s Studies Major
UC Berkeley ‘20
“I never faced any gender-based accusations of being strong-minded, aggressive and competitive for speaking out my opinions before. But when I broke up with my popular boyfriend and began hanging out with a girl who identified as lesbian, people changed their attitudes abruptly.”
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3. Stereotypes
Ah the classic high school stereotypes of jock vs. nerd / theater geek vs. math genius / class clown vs. teacher’s pet. As a high schooler, you may have had your fair share of being on the intentional or unintentional receiving or giving end of the stereotype. And like most high schoolers, you probably wanted to challenge the framework despite playing into it at times. The high school label is one such trope, however, there are many other stereotypes and labels we put on one another—stereotypes about race, ability, socioeconomic class, introversion, etc. If you’ve ever felt boxed into a label (or done the boxing), this is a great topic to consider.
In order to be successful with this topic, be thoughtful and deliberate about how you want to structure this essay. Is the story about self discovery? Is it about righting a wrong? Is it about fighting the system? Choose a clear narrative framework and a clear conclusion (a takeaway for yourself; not necessarily what you think the takeaway should be) so that your main idea doesn’t get lost in trying to do too much.
A. Essay Topic: Stereotypes: Racial/Cultural
Excerpt from Laurenwilson
Political Science & Government Major
Brown University ‘21
“It was around 6:30 in the evening when I filed onto the train to go back to my host family’s apartment in Shibuya. As I untangled my earphones in my seat, I noticed a little girl, clutching her mother’s hand, gasp at the sight of my dark skin and box braids, as though she’s never seen anyone who looks quite like me before. A cause of great discomfort just a few weeks prior, I shook it off as a normal part of being a gaikokujin, or a foreigner, in Japan.”
View her full personal statement in her Brown profile!
B. Essay Topic: Stereotypes: Gender
Excerpt from athomp19
Biomedical Sciences Major
University of Pennsylvania ‘19
“Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the typical reactions of my peers, mostly male. As if there were speaking aloud, I hear, “Are you sure you don’t need help with that? You don’t want to get hurt!” I flash them my own look of mitigated contempt. Steeping beneath the weight of the bar, the corner of my mouth twitches as I perform the back squats flawlessly and effortlessly, only imagining the gawking expressions on their faces. Not bothering to cast another glance so I can get back to work, I continue to add more weight. That was just a warm up.
Continue reading her successful Penn personal statement.
Formatting the Common Application Essay
How to Start Your Essay
There are a few ways you may want to format the essay for the most impact. You can start with the encounter or experience you had during which your belief was challenged. It can be an excerpted piece of dialogue or even just a blanket statement someone made. Use the event as the catalyst to talk about your belief shift.
Alternatively, you can start by discussing the set of values and beliefs you initially held. Describe to the reader what you’ve always known growing up, and then insert the incident that caused you to have second thoughts. Be specific about what you’re having doubts about. What are the questions you’re asking yourself? The more of a window you can provide the reader into your internal thought process, the better the reader can understand your mindset (and your critical thinking skills).
Lastly, you can lead with the values or beliefs you have now since the change. Reflect on a time you didn’t think this way and use the rest of the essay to write about the impetus for the change and why you no longer feel the same way.
How to Conclude Your Essay
Wrap up this Common Application essay with the outcome of your challenge. Were you able to change someone else’s mind, or at least make them a little open minded? Or, perhaps the change was more for yourself and personal growth. If appropriate, you can also discuss how you hope to continue the growth or change in college and beyond. How are you going to use this experience in the future? Feel free to tie this in with a field of study or extracurricular passion you hope to pursue in college.
No matter how you structure your essay, the important thing is to make sure you’ve done the following by the end of the essay:
Illustrate the shift—Use examples to accompany the internal shift in beliefs
Explain WHY—What led to this shift?
Don’t forget the outcome!—What was the reaction? Both your own and those of the people around you? How have you grown? How have you helped those around you grow? How will you apply what you’ve learned moving forward?
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