Don’t Write About COVID-19 For Your College Essay -- No Matter What the Wall Street Journal Says

A lot of “common sense” advice out there will really steer you wrong, and last week, the Wall Street Journal added another piece of bad advice from well-meaning but clueless people.

Seriously: not everyone knows what they’re talking about when it comes to college admissions.  But everyone has an opinion.  It’s just one of those things like politics or losing weight that everyone thinks they understand and almost no one does.

But seriously, please don’t write your essay about the pandemic.

Courtesy of Raychel Espiritu via Unsplash

The part of the articles that is right, is that tests are (thankfully) taking a back seat this year and likely next year.  I only hope that it permanently weakens their stranglehold on the college admission process and college rankings.

So in order to compare students across the nation (which standardized tests never really did anyway), colleges are putting more attention and emphasis on the essay, the interview, the short answer questions, and the thing that all of these tools are actually meant to get at: What are your accomplishments and goals?

Your essay and your interview are meant to highlight the things that make you special (and ideally unique, but that’s hard in reality).  They are your chance to show what you have contributed (specifically what you have done and left behind) to an organization ( / club / movement / group) that matters to you.

Does writing about being trapped in quarantine do that?  Really? 

What unique contribution to the world have you made because of COVID-19?  That would set you apart from every other high school student?

Most long-term volunteer opportunities, club leadership, academic enrichment summers were cancelled by quarantines or other issues.  How can you show how hard you worked by wailing about something being cancelled?

The article has a quote from Catherine Davenport: “This wasn’t something you could study for or plan for, but it offers a great opportunity for students to show us what they were able to do when they just had to figure out how to make it work. That’s a unique story.”

No it isn’t no it isn’t no it isn’t!  It’s a unique year for our world but it’s not a unique thing about you.  The pandemic did not make you special. 

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Don’t Come At Me With Question #2.

The Common App Essay Prompts Question #2 is way too popular a choice for a host of reasons, another of which I cover here.

 It reads: 

2. The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?

I get that this sounds like something the pandemic fits perfectly.

BUT – remember about showing what makes you special and unique?  The pandemic happened to everyone.  I’m sorry you suffered, but it doesn’t make you special.

And the main problem I have with people who write for Question #2 is that they focus too much on the obstacle.  The question is asking you for how you overcame it, learned from it.  But not just in sweet platitudes at the end!

Let me say that again:

Your essay should be less about the challenges than how you overcame the initial failure.  

This question is not asking for a time you failed because they want to talk about your flaws! 

They want to see you overcome something or face a setback and adjust your plans.  Both of those are top notch skill sets for basically any job or other goal.  They do NOT want to see you fail and then stay down.

Maybe, maybe there is some version of a college essay about a straight up failure you didn’t rebound from.  Maybe something about being dead wrong about something important – maybe you had a really hard time understanding the Breonna Taylor protests, and you were a jerk to some people who taught you to see things from a new perspective.  So you failed to change their minds going into that debate, but you won something better: a new perspective.

And even that’s really about overcoming a different obstacle – whatever programming in your head kept you from wanting to defend a woman killed while sleeping peacefully in her own bed.

Do you see how that is just not the same thing as losing the Study Body President election but thinking it “all turned out for the best” in the end?  Or complaining about losing the election for four paragraphs before saying “but yay the Democratic process!” in the last paragraph like you learned something about the fickle electorate?

On a larger level, that’s what’s happening in your COVID essay.

You did not overcome the pandemic.

You just didn’t.  Even if you are not in the US and your country had a better response, you are not the leader of a country.  You did not solve the pandemic.

You’re just complaining for several paragraphs and then saying, “But I learned to value my family!”

That’s not special.  The vast majority of humanity loves their families.  It’s a whole thing.

Courtesy of Gayatri Malhotra via Unsplash

Allow Me to Prove the Rule With the Exceptions

A lot of people hate that phrase for some reason, “The exception proves the rule.”  And I do agree that it’s often applied to cases where that doesn’t seem precisely true.  When it’s used to dismiss strong anecdotal evidence, that can be frustrating.

BUT it’s useful here.

Because there are students who I would advise to consider a pandemic-related topic.

1. If you became the sole provider for your family, as a part-time essential worker, when your parents were laid off but you helped your parents through while also keeping up with your studies even though your attempt to save money for college took a major hit to help your family stay afloat
1. I could see essays about taking on that responsibility
2. I could see essays about seeing the strain on the people you worked to serve and either their kindness or having to find calm when they lashed out
3. I could see essays about standing up for yourself and fellow workers when managers wanted to cut corners with safety protocols or if you were part of the Amazon strike
2.  If you were in a junior EMT training that involved being dispatched to COVID swamped hospitals and you stepped up to help people who were dying alone and tragically as well as make people who weren’t taking the virus seriously see what it was really like
1. I could see essays about helping people see the truth of the science
2. I could see essays about powering through a particularly long and hard shift to get to one life-affirming moment
3. I could see essays about the patients who finally pulled through and came off the ventilator
4. I could see essays about ways you helped your fellows and superiors find the strength to soldier on
5. I could see essays about the desperate need for health care reform you saw on full display - especially if you have a VERY specific and VERY PRACTICAL solution 
3.  If you started a local fund to raise money to buy better PPE for the doctors and first responders in your community, organizing and recruiting others to donate (note: NOT just sewed some masks yourself -- though that could get a mention in the short answer below – but organized others and built up your community in isolation
1. I could see essays about seeing a need in your community and gathering support virtually to make it happen, organizing and recruiting and asking the most vulnerable what they most needed
4.  If you were a spinoff of John Krasinski’s Some Good News (or something similar) for your local area, becoming a popular beacon of light during the darkest times of COVID quarantine
1. I could see essays about trying so hard to find the bright spots and the new research sources you found and the community outreach you did to find more
2. I could see essays about overcoming filming difficulties to not let down your fans and the new people you met who you grew attached to
5.  If you successfully pushed your local government to take the virus more seriously and overcame the protests of the few to keep the many safe
1. I want to read that essay!  So badly!  A young citizen changing a sluggish government?  Yes please
6.  If you organized a support system of some kind for a vulnerable population. Notice I said organized, not participated in, save that for the short answer.

Really look at those stories.  Those are impressive things to do.  Those are stories worth telling. People like that overcame something.  Not the pandemic itself, but they saved their families or their fellow students or raised morale or otherwise did something for people outside of themselves and their pods.  That’s what colleges have always wanted to see in your college essays, long before COVID.

Now about the Rule, after all of these exceptions…

I say this with love: really think about how your essay will look if it comes after one of those stories.

You can’t control where in the Pile your essay ends up, and do you want to talk about struggling with Zoom fatigue after someone who worked 10 hour shifts to make rent?  If you just write about how weird online school is or how frustrating the different apps are, are you going to be glad to follow an essay by someone who taught themselves video editing in order to bring joy to their neighbors?

Or what if your essay is the 5^th one in a row to talk about how heartbreaking it was to cancel the prom you helped organize?

Look: I'm not saying you should be too afraid to write your college essay, because you might not be the most remarkable story they've read all week.  I'm saying you need to mindful of the possibility that your COVID essay might be nearly identical to the last five or six they just read.

Be honest: is your experience of the pandemic unique and impressive?  Or is just hard?

I’m not saying it’s not hard.  Literally everything feels a thousand times harder than it should be right now.  But that doesn’t mean it makes for an inspiring essay.

Courtesy of Solen Feyissa via Unsplash

Besides, Colleges Have Added a Short Answer for COVID anyway.

The fact that they added a short answer question about COVID proves two things:

1. The most they want to hear about the pandemic in most cases is a short answer not an essay.
2. They are categorizing most COVID difficulties more like a Special Circumstance that would explain anything unusual in your record.
3. Your GPA went down between 2019 and 2020?  Here’s your chance to point out your neighborhood wifi was unreliable or you had to watch 1-7 younger siblings because your parents were essential workers or any other understandable excuse that could keep them from dismissing you because of that dip in academic performance.
4. Attend a protest (before and after COVID perhaps) and find them more / less / confusingly powerful with social distancing but solidarity?  Good thing to mention here, a nice break from all the problems people will have to list and explain normally.
5. Have an extended absence as your family dealt with death in the family?  This is the place to give the bare bones of the story and let them fill in as many details as they can emotionally handle on the day they read your application (I wouldn’t normally advise you to worry about admissions officer fatigue too much, but it’s 2020 and we are all exhausted).
6. Attend an anti-masker rally and think the whole thing is a Democratic hoax?

They want to know if there’s anything they should give you extra consideration because of, something that puts you in context.

And in the last case, they want to know if you are going to be bringing that kind of hateful, selfish energy to their campus and ruin their face-to-face re-opening plans so…yes, please share.  

Courtesy of Edwin Gonzalez via Unsplash

But I Can’t Just Ignore the Pandemic, Can I?

I mean, maybe you can.  

If you have stories and accomplishments to focus on that happened before 2020…why not?  You might have a sentence or two about how the club you founded transitioned smoothly to Zoom meetings.

But that’s the level I suggest you keep it at.

Going back to that cancelled prom example from the previous section:  Almost everybody cancelled prom.  It was sad.

BUT, you could focus on the planning work you did, especially if you did actually plan the prom.  I don’t mean to be rude, but I am good friends with student council sponsors and, by and large, students don’t plan prom.

Tell the story about fighting to change the rule about straight-only couples from this year’s prom restrictions or how you recruited the theatre tech students to build stunning decorations that blow the socks off everything else that came before or what ever you did beyond the normal decorating and ticket sales.

And then talk about how the pandemic happened, and you had to pivot again.  Spend a short paragraph (think the length of a short short answer question) talking about the debates to do a Virtual Prom Dance or a Pajama Night with a prom-movie watch party instead.

But most student councils had to have that last meeting about what to do instead of prom, so spend most of your time talking about what made your accomplishment with prom unique before the pandemic gave every study council the same, disappointing end to the story.

And I think you have more going on in your life to brag about than you know.  Writing about how hard 2020 has been cheats you of the chance to set yourself apart.  You have more going on for yourself than I bet you’re willing to admit.

Need help figuring out what to write about and how, now that COVID is off the table?  Book a session with Renegade Writing Center to get help building your narrative and honing your writing skills.