Does a College Essay Need to Be Tragic?

Years ago, during a personal narrative unit in one of my college writing classes, a student told me, “I don’t know what to write. Nothing bad has ever happened to me.”

I was reminded of that recently when a student working on a college application essay said nearly the same thing.

Somewhere along the way, some students have gotten the impression that a personal essay needs to be about something painful. A loss. A failure. An illness. A family crisis. Something they had to overcome.

It doesn’t.

I used to tell my college writing students, “It’s not like the person with the worst life wins the A.”

I was being glib, but I meant something important: tragedy in and of itself doesn’t make a personal essay meaningful. A difficult experience can certainly become the subject of a powerful essay, but the experience alone doesn’t do the work. What matters is how the student writes about it: what they notice, what they choose to explore, and what the experience means to them.

Over the years, some of the personal essays that have stayed with me have grown out of subjects that might not sound particularly momentous when reduced to a sentence.

One student wrote about teaching themself to play Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata by ear. Through the process of learning the piece, they demonstrated patience, persistence, and analytical ability without having to announce those qualities to the reader.

Another wrote about joining a handball team. But the essay wasn't really about handball. It was about finding a community, contributing to it, and discovering the joy of belonging.

A third wrote about their older brother, who had a disability and whom they described as their hero. Their essay was, in part, a celebration of someone they admired. But in showing the reader what they admired about their brother, the student also revealed something about themself.

These essays were very different from one another, but they illustrate something I often discuss with students: an essay's subject isn't necessarily what it’s really about. That's why I encourage students to look beyond the subject they've chosen and ask themselves, “What is this essay really about?”

The answer isn't always obvious at the start. Sometimes they discover it through writing and revision. Sometimes an experience that seems ordinary at first gives them a chance to explore something deeply meaningful.

If students believe a college essay needs to be about something bad, they may dismiss experiences that genuinely interest them because those experiences don't seem important enough.

Of course, students can write about grief, adversity, failure, or other difficult experiences. If that's the story they genuinely want to tell, it may be exactly the right subject. But hardship doesn't automatically make an essay meaningful, just as an ordinary experience doesn't make one insignificant.

The student who says, “Nothing bad has ever happened to me,” absolutely has things to write about. They may simply need to look at their experiences differently.

A college essay needs something worth exploring. It doesn't need a tragedy.