College Essay Ideas

Coming up with college essay ideas seems easy until you are trying to do it. It gets even harder when you are hungry, tired, anxious, in a hurry, or otherwise under stress.

In the worst-case scenario, you have struggled through the entire class, sometimes not understanding, sometimes hating, what you were studying. Now you are asked to come up with college essay ideas on your own!

Here is a previous post we wrote on the topic. This is from the OWL at Purdue. It describes how to come up with ideas and information about a known element, but what if you don’t know? Here are some tips for coming up with college essay ideas:

• Pick some other class or topic that interests you. Once you have done that, make an idea map or an idea list that investigates links between the topic you like and the topic for the class.
• Pick something from another class or area of interest, and search your library’s databases for that topic and the class subject. For example, “comic book movies” and “geography”, may come up with nothing, but “geography” and “film” or “movies”, should return something.
• If your professor is strict, then do not include the fact that your report on geography is about Iceland only because you heard that parts of Thor: The Dark World were filmed there.

Whatever your interests, it can probably be related to just about anything. With Thor, you could do more research in Scandinavian history, religion, and mythology, you could do research into elements of digital painting or filming for a tech class, the marketing plan for your business class, the funding structures for finance class, etc.

It might help to start with a breath of fresh air and a little snack or some deep breathing, whatever it takes to get you out of panic mode.