Stuck on the Common App? 15 Prompts to ‘Unstick’ You

In my introduction to what you should write about in your Personal Statement, I note that college admissions officers are reading your Common App Essay to find out: what you're passionate about; where you've showed initiative; how you've transformed in important ways; in short, what makes you YOU!

But as for actually CONVEYING all that….well, easier said than done, right? There are MANY mental obstacles that come up when it’s time to actually draft the thing. After all, a blank computer screen and a blinking cursor can even feel scary to lifelong writers, let alone high schoolers!

First I’m going to ask you to take a slow, deep breath with me. As someone who’s helped hundreds of students of all stripes write superlative essays, I can assure you that you, too, have PLENTY of things to talk about. We just have to find those gold nuggets in the hills of your experience and personality!

So, open up a blank Word/Google .doc or grab a piece of paper. You’re going to jot down your answers to questions below. Once you’ve answered these 15 prompts, common threads should start to emerge, and you’ll be on your way to a Personal Statement that stands out from the stack while staying true to you!

Article Contents

1. Video version of this article

2. What to ask yourself if you have Personal Statement writer’s block

A. How you spend your time

B. Your unique interests

C. Special achievements

D. Key life moments

E. Your unique personality

Video version of this article:

What to ask yourself if you have Personal Statement writer’s block

A. Finding Your Personal Statement subject: How do you spend your spare time?

The answers to these four Qs make up the basic foundation of your life—the water you’d swim in, if you were a fish. For that reason, you might not even realize that not everyone shares these interests. It’s easy to think that all teenagers spend their weekends closely observing nesting owls with binos, or making candles for their friends. But believe me, most people don't surf birding forums or visit apothecary shops just for kicks. This is a YOU thing that makes you—and your application—interesting.

1. In class: What are your academic and intellectual interests?

2. Outside of class: What are your favorite hobbies and activities? What do you enjoy about them?

3. Over the summer: Have you done any programs, classes, interesting trips, or taught yourself anything?

4. To relax: What do you do when you need to take a breather from life’s stresses?

B. Common App essay tip: Consider your special interests

5. Do you have any unusual talents or skills? If so, how did you develop them? How did you get into them in the first place?

6. Are there any global topics or social issues you feel passionate about? Why? What are you doing about it?

Again, you may assume that since you’ve been spending years rehabbing injured squirrels in your neighborhood, everyone else must be thinking about/working on the same thing. They aren't. Or if you're obsessed with watching football and teaching yourself every last detail about player stats, you may think that's just typical teenager stuff. It isn't. It’s special that you taught yourself how to splint a tiny leg from an anatomy book, and you should consider writing about it.

C. Personal Statement inspiration: your achievements.

7. What accomplishment are you most proud of? What did you have to do to accomplish it?

8. What was the most challenging ordeal or event you've gone through? How did you get through it?

9. When or how have you shown leadership?

You don’t have to have won a state championship in a given activity for an accomplishment to say something about you. More than how "big" an achievement appears by external metrics, it's the work you put in that's impressive to the admissions counselors. Not everything you want to do in life (and college) will come easily to you. In fact, even if you were truly born with a "natural" genius for something, you'll still only get better at that thing through hard work. What shows your character is how you put your nose to the grindstone and embrace the challenge—especially when success was not guaranteed and you had to take a risk.

D. Common App essay ideas: pivotal moments.

10. What was the best experience you've ever had? Why was this the "best"?

11. What was the worst experience you've ever had? Why was this the "worst"?

12. How have you changed over the past few years? Was there any event or person who caused/facilitated this transformation?

There aren't always major life events or "Aha!" moments that alter the course of your life and personality. However, if there are, the key is to look for the positive in the situation: how did you make lemons out of lemonade? How did you mature, even though a situation may have been really tough? Or if something wonderful happened, how has this made you a more appreciative and grateful person, someone determined to spread the good fortune you’ve received?

E. College essay brainstorming: your personality.

13. How are you unique or different from other people you know?

14. Is there anything about you that doesn't fit the stereotype, or that's unexpected?

15. Do you have any principles or beliefs that guide your actions? What are they?

The person reading your application wants to know what kind of person you are and where you'd fit in on their campus. They want to know what makes you tick—and bonus points for being self-aware enough to already have some ideas about this in high school! Are you the philosophical type who actively thinks about the values you hold, and how to act on them? That means you think for yourself, which will serve you well into college and beyond. Do you surprise people by being different from what they'd expect, like the varsity swimmer who also closely follows the clarinetist Martin Frost and listens to his concert recordings every night after school? Surprising traits and combinations like this will make you stand out—and help you get into your dream school!

***

I hope this brainstorming sesh has helped illuminate some common themes from your life. If one topic has come up several times, chances are, that's what you should write about to let the admissions officers know exactly who you are and why you're special!

More than that, I also want this exercise to assure you that you have several unique qualities that you probably take for granted, but that others would find awesome.

Though I'm able to give out this advice for free, sometimes you need extra one-on-one help to get the guidance and confidence you need.  To learn about working together one-on-one to bring out the real YOU in your Common App and supplemental essays, contact me here. Or, if you’re more of a self-study type, check out my full guide to writing a killer Personal Statement here.

How to get a perfect score on the Digital SAT Math section

Everyone needs a different target score to get into their dream college. And some of you applying to extremely competitive schools might decide that yours is a 1600. How can you make sure you nail the math half of that—on the (relatively) new, Digital SAT?

If that’s your goal, there are eight essential steps you should follow. Read on to find out what they are.

(BTW, why should you listen to MY advice on this subject? Well, part of why I’ve chosen to work as an SAT and ACT tutor for 14+ years now is that I’m a math nerd by nature. In elementary, middle, and high school, I participated in (and won) math competitions multiple times a year…and loved every minute of it. Ever since then, I’ve kept math, especially standardized testing math, extremely fresh in my mind.)

ARTICLE CONTENTS

1. Watch this article as a video instead

2. The 8 steps to an 800 on the SAT Math Section

a. How many questions do you have to get right for a perfect score?

b. Write out what the test is really asking

c. Don't rush the early Qs

d. Learn essential math shortcuts

i. Cross-multiplying

ii. Percentages

e. Know cold EVERY math topic covered by the test

f. Improve your “math intuition”

i. Use answer formats as clues

ii. Clumping

iii. Weird shapes

g. Calm test-taking nerves

3. Conclusion

Video version of this article:

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8 steps to an 800 on the SAT Math Section

1. How many questions do you have to get right to get a perfect Math score?

The first thing to know is that in order to get an 800 in Math, you almost ALWAYS need to get all of the questions correct.

I have occasionally seen a scoring curve on past tests where you could miss or omit one question and still get an 800—but NOT all of the test sittings shake out that way. That means the only way to GUARANTEE that you actually get a perfect score is to literally attempt a 100%.

If a pure 800 is your goal, you can’t risk missing (or failing to answer) even one question.

2. Write out what the question is really asking.

A leading cause of careless errors that I see students make isn’t that they actually carry out a calculation wrong. It’s that they mix up what the question is actually ASKING—and therefore select the wrong answer.

Maybe Question 14 asks you to solve for y, but you read the question too hastily and actually clicked on the answer indicating what x comes out to. Doesn’t matter that you didn’t make any mistakes in your solving process; what matters is that you bubbled the wrong answer. Goodbye, points.

So, in order to make sure you're very clear about what, in fact, is being asked, I strongly recommend you make a short written note about what every math question is actually asking. You can do this either by using Bluebook’s “annotate” function or by jotting it down on a piece of scratch paper that you’ve brought with you to the exam. Is the test asking you the value of “x + 5”? Is it asking you for “n/p”?

Taking that second or two to deliberately draw your brain’s attention what’s being asked will help you avoid making a split-second mistake….and needlessly losing points.

3. Don't rush the early questions on the SAT.

The third item on my must-do list is also related to careless errors and how to avoid them.

If you’re gunning for an 800, you can’t afford to make those little mistakes on questions where you know the concept and how to do it, but your execution of the question doesn’t match your knowledge. Most often, this happens because you’re rushing.

Though the SAT is now a computer-adaptive test, and depending on how well you’re doing, you might get an easier or a harder second module, the Math modules themselves tend to be easiest at the beginning. As you progress within a module, the questions tend to get harder. (This isn’t a perfect science, but it’s roughly what I've seen.) So what I need you to do is avoid the temptation to totally rush through those first questions in each module just because they’re easier.

A wrong answer early on will still (likely) ruin your shot at an 800. So give each and every question the basic respect it deserves, and double-check before you move on: did I actually answer what the Q was asking? Did I do this calculation correctly? Did I enter it into my calculator or the Desmos calculator correctly? Patience really is a virtue, here.

4. Learn the most important Math shortcuts.

Now, you need to balance the patience I’ve advised in #3 with the fact that you still can’t move at a total snail’s pace. The SAT Math moves quickly, and so you need to save time wherever you can, if you’re going to make it through all of the math section’s questions (as you must do for a perfect score). Part of moving quickly enough is having a few key math shortcuts under your belt so that you don’t waste time solving easy- and medium-level questions the long way.

Here are two of my favorite hacks that make it easier to solve more problems, more accurately:

A) Cross-multiplying.

This one’s sweet and simple. If you have a fraction equal to anything else, you cross multiply FIRST. Now, it's no longer a fraction, and solving is easy.

Something else related to fractions is this: easy fraction multiplication. Say you have a bunch of fractions and you need to multiply them all together. Can you simplify them first—simplify any numerator with any denominator—before you then multiply? Basically, you’re making your numbers smaller before you make them bigger.

Yes, I know you can use your calculator, but sometimes these things are better done with scratch work on hand. What I’ve just described is a simple way you can do the latter.

B) Percentages on the SAT

Another little trick that I like to tell my students about is easy percents.

A lot of percentage problems can be completely solved merely by translating English words to math symbols, word for word. Here’s what I mean:

• Let’s say you get a question that asks, or that involves calculating, “What is 5 percent of 60?”

  • “What” becomes “x”

  • “is” becomes “=”

  • “5 percent” becomes “5/100”

  • “of” becomes “times”

  • “60” becomes “60.”

  • So your new, translated formula is: x = (5/100)*60.

Now you’ve got a straightforward equation you can quickly crunch. You don't need to think about it. You don't need to conceptualize what it means. You just literally translate the question into math, one word at a time, and you’re done.

If you had instead tried to answer this question by asking, “What does this mean?” you would probably get a little confused.

That’s just a quick sampling of the little tricks and hacks you should have up your sleeve. We want to make sure you can quickly manipulate fractions, percentages, and decimals. (If you want all of my tricks, btw, you can get the full list in my Ultimate Digital SAT Math Guide.)

5. Learn EVERY topic on the SAT Math—'til it's second nature.

The fifth item on your perfect score checklist is to take a completionist approach to your studying. As item #1 in this post noted, if you want an 800 on this section, you should assume you need to get every question correct. (You may end up having the wiggle-room of one missed question, due to the scoring curve, but it’s not safe to bank on that!) This means, by extension, that you need to know every single concept and formula that might be on this test, even those that don't show up too often. You can't spare even one question, right?

And it’s not just a matter of kind of learning every possible concept. You’ve gotta study and practice those concepts enough that you know them COLD. Yes, it’s true that the Bluebook app provides you with a reference sheet. However, if you have to look at the reference sheet to review, say, your special right triangles, what that says to me is you don't know the concept well enough. And now you're just wasting time scouring the reference sheet for the right formula.

You’ve got to adopt a perfect score mentality: don’t leave any topic unturned during your studies, and know every topic like the back of your hand.

6. Improve your Math intuition to get 100%.

To ace Math on the Digital SAT, you need to improve what I call your “Math intuition.” This is a spidey-sense that will naturally improve as you become more well-versed in all the concepts that the SAT tests: your problem-solving, your algebra, your geometry, your trig functions, your advanced math.

When you become really fluent in math and in how numbers work, you start to develop a certain sixth sense for what a given exam question is really asking you.

And here’s why that’s important: when the questions get harder towards the end of each module, it can be hard to even know which math subtopic(s) to pull down out of your brain and deploy. Typically, the calculations themselves remain easy as the test progresses. You could probably even do them without a calculator. But in order to know which calculations to perform, you sometimes have to read between the lines. You have to see if there's some secret relationship between some of the bits of information that maybe gives you another piece of information that you didn't immediately see. 

Here are just a few of the ways that you can improve your Math intuition.

1. Pay attention to the format of the answers.

On a given question, take a look at the answers the test provides and ask what Math topics they bring to mind. Are they percents? Do they all look like ratios? Are they decimals? Are they all something squared? Does it look like factoring—like, there are parentheses with x's and numbers in the middle of them, like “(x+4)(x-3)”?

Here’s another way of putting this: if you were to look in a Math textbook, what chapter do you think these answers would fall in? That might help you recall the relevant formulas. 

2. Notice clumping.

Another thing that should tip you off and make your math intuition go into overdrive is what I call “clumping.”

Let's say the test question doesn't ask you, “What is x?” but rather, “What is 2x - 3?” Huh, that's a weird thing to ask. So you've got to ask yourself, “Why? Why did the test ask me what 2x - 3 is instead of just what x is?” And usually that means that there's a shortcut to be found. Typically there's a way to get to that weird thing, the “2x - 3,” faster than if you figured out what x is and THEN plugged in x to “2x - 3” and solved for that. Consider what the shortcut might be.

3. Weird shapes.

I know geometry makes up a relatively small part of the Digital SAT, but remember that you’ve got to master ALL possible topics for a perfect score.

There’s a finite set of specific two-dimensional geometrical shapes you’re required to know for the SAT—no more, no fewer. So, if the test throws at you some weird shape you've never seen, it’s got to be a combination of shapes you are required to know for the SAT—the areas would be either added together or subtracted from each other.

Let's say there's a geometry question with multiple figures in it: maybe a triangle, a square, and a circle. You should ask yourself: why would the test-maker choose those particular shapes? What's the relationship between them? For instance, is a diagonal of one shape the diameter of another? Especially when it comes to circles, there simply MUST be something in there that relates to both. And your job is to find that missing piece, that missing connection.

When it comes to three-dimensional shapes, there are only three basic ones the exam might ask about: a pyramid, a prism, or a sphere. There are basic general formulas for those, and so long as you know them, don't distract yourself with the specifics of each (like “cylinder”). You can figure it out. 

Same with triangles. There are really only seven things they can ask you about triangles:

• area,

• perimeter,

• 30-60-90 and 45-45-90 special right triangles,

• the Pythagorean Theorem

• SOHCAHTOA,

• the complementary angles trig relationship, or

• the fact that all of a triangle’s angles must add up to 180.

That's basically all they can ask you. So your job is to use your math intuition to figure out: which subtopic is being tested? 

7. Make your calculation look like the answer choices.

Let’s say you do your scratch work calculations for a question, but what comes out is something that doesn't seem at all related to these answer choices. That throws you off—you don’t think you made an error, but you still don’t know which answer to choose.

Here’s how to make the answer you calculated look more like the format of the answer choices the test has provided.

Let’s say you come up with an answer that’s something like g + 15. But, uh-oh—the answer choices all appear to be fractions instead. Don’t panic! Instead, ask yourself: how can you make your calculation look like a fraction? Ok, the test has provided answers with “g²” in the numerator. Cool. Ask yourself: do you need to square something to make it be “g²”? Do you need to move around your “g²” to be in a numerator? Because that's what you're seeing in the answer choices.

Can you think of one step that at least gets you closer to what the answer choices are? That might also be a clue. 

8. Relax during the Digital SAT.

The final step on your path to a perfect score is easier said than done—but no less important for it. That step is: relax and focus.

If you've done the work—if you have literally learned ALL the formulas and content you could possibly need (here’s the full list)—your final step is to TRUST you’ve got all the knowledge you need to succeed. The College Board is not allowed to ask you anything that's not on the menu.

So if you encounter a concept on the test that looks unrecognizable at first glance, you've got to have the confidence to realize that literally can’t be true. You did in fact, learn it. And then it’s time to lean on item #6 of this list and figure out which math “bucket” this question is pulling content from.

(By the by, if test-day nerves are still damaging your scores even AFTER you master all the relevant content, my testing confidence course is designed to help even the most anxious test-taker get the score they deserve!)

Conclusion

With these tips in mind, you’re already on your way to achieving a perfect 800 on the math section of the SAT. However, if you’d like more help, you can learn more about working with me one-on-one, or about my digital course and ebook, The Ultimate Digital SAT Math Guide.