Mark’s final post in a series on essays explore the prompt in which students are asked to recount an incident that marks their transition from childhood to adulthood.
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The new perfect college essay prompts for the Common Application are much more narrow than they have been in the past. However, some of the questions are new takes on questions that have sometimes appeared on various essay supplements. Thus it’s hard to say that these new prompts are all that “new.”
We’ve been looking at each of the prompts, starting with the background story, followed by the failure, and ending with the beliefs and ideas prompt. Today we take a look at the “place or environment” prompt.
Describe a place or environment where you are perfectly content. What do you do or experience there, and why is it meaningful to you?
As we have with the other prompts, let’s take a look at the key words in this prompt. We’ll examine the words in the order of their importance, rather than in the order in which they appear.
Unlike most of the other prompts that ask you about items fixed in time (an incident, an event, an occurrence), this prompt is anchored in space. A place or environment has a particular geography. It has a location. Generally, this prompt will work best if you can identify a very specific location. But sometimes a more general environment might do quite nicely. More than one student will likely take a metaphorical tack on this prompt, identifying an abstract space or place around which they will build an essay. But a place or environment is fixed in space.
Again, this is a word that is quite different from the other prompts in which you are asked to tell a story. Here, we want a description of the place you have identified. Again, the more specific the place, the more detailed description you might be able to provide. But just as you want a story to be interesting and vivid, you also want to paint a picture of this place that helps your reader to see it in her mind’s eye.
Again, this prompt is not looking for a particular instance or event upon which you can construct a story or narrative. Instead, this prompt assumes that your relationship with this place is not fixed at one particular moment; rather, the prompt assumes that you return to this place again and again, and that you engage in particular activities or experience particular sensations or emotions. So just as you need to describe the place, you also need to describe yourself moving about and interacting with that space.
This is the core of the prompt: contentment. And what is contentment? Aha! This is the core of the core: you have to define—for yourself—what contentment means for you. Fortunately, you don’t have to write a philosophical treatise on the qualities of happiness. But you do have to explain what you mean by contentment within the context of this place. Why do you continue to return to this place?
What benefits—material, spiritual, intellectual, social, and whatnot—do you derive from this particular place or environment. Don’t limit yourself to just one aspect of your contentment in this place: break it down. As you brainstorm this prompt, see if you can come up with three solid aspects of your contentment in this place or environment.
This word is related to contentment. This place, if you have chosen it correctly, has some sort of intrinsic meaning to you. It may not have much meaning at all for other people. But for you, this place or environment is a source of satisfaction, of ease, or of spiritual tranquility. It will not be enough to say that the place is meaningful: you need to come up with why it is meaningful. So going back to the idea of contentment, if you can come up with three reasons why this particular place has meaning to you, then you’ll be well on your way to writing a fantastic essay that addresses this prompt.
This prompt is quite different from the others, both in terms of what it is asking you to write about, but also in the structure of our essay. You can tell a lot about a person by the spaces they inhabit.
So what place makes you content?
Tune in tomorrow when we review the final prompt: the transition from childhood to adulthood.
VIEW THE COMPLETE SERIES OF POSTS ANALYZING THE COMMON APPLICATION PROMPTS
Writing About Failure
Writing About A Belief or Idea
Writing About A Place or Environment
Writing About the Transition to Adulthood
Writing About Your Background Story
The Princeton Review announced that it will rate colleges on how environmentally conscientious they are. You can view an article about this new ratings system in Inside Higher Ed.
Environmental stewardship is important on many campuses today. When I visited Carleton College last week, the cafeteria banners were crowing about the College’s composting initiatives.
Here’s a snippet from the article in today’s Inside Higher Ed:
Rob Franek, a vice president and publisher at the Princeton Review, said that visiting hundreds of colleges made it clear to him that green issues are a top priority for today’s college students and deserve a place in the review’s ratings.
Colleges featured in the Princeton Review will get a score of 60 to 99 based on how they responded to almost 30 questions, like “What percentage of your grounds are managed organically?” or “Please list your school’s top three undertakings that represent your environmental commitment.”
I don’t have any real objection to this ratings system, except to say that the ratings are not necessarily going to be any more helpful in choosing a college than any other ratings system.
Mark Montgomery
Great College Advice
