 Hi guys, great college application essays are about so much more than one topic. Stay tuned for how I help students visualize their topic and bring in more bang for their buck. Hi, thank you for joining me on my channel for the best college essay advice. Subscribe and hit the bell to be notified when I post a new video every Tuesday. Visually you want to think about your essay like that middle school solar system you kind of had to build with Styrofoam where you are the sun or actually an aspect of you because you don't want to cover everything in your college essay, right? And then you have kind of strings or like planets orbiting you and they're kind of connected some way, right? And those are different themes or topics that you mentioned, that you break down, that you analyze in connection to the sun, in connection to you, which is always the main topic. Hi, I'm Dr. Josie with Right Year Acceptance with hundreds of students in college in their dream schools like NYU, Georgetown, Bryn Mawr, Michigan. The list goes on and on. I know what they're looking for and how to help you out. Stay tuned. Tip one, once you pick a topic, think about drafting a list of potential kind of side or sub topics that you can then relate. So for instance, maybe your essay is about summer teaching social studies to middle school students, but your related topics could be Hamilton, the Tony Awards when they sang one of the songs, a conversation on class, on privilege, on what history is and history making, right? On the responsibility of teaching and kind of fostering the love of history to the next generation and how history is not only found in history books, but it is history in the making when you have these conversations and you're nurturing someone's kind of future relationship to a discipline so important as history where we kind of understand who we are and how we kind of fit in to society and generations. So think about that list of related topics and then start kind of connecting it to your subject of the essay. Tip two, reveal a universal truth. Great college essays give you kind of space to philosophize a little bit. So for example, you have a student who's writing about living abroad, so she's been living abroad for the last five years and her parents are American born, she's American born but they've been living abroad and so she wants to write about how that has kind of shaped her perspective and how she kind of sees difference and cultural difference and diversity a little, little kind of more personal because she's been living abroad. So maybe she begins with this idea that while on the surface we may be different kind of to the core, the essence of who we are despite cultural borders or national boundaries, we are the same. So that is the universal truth, right? So she maybe narrates a very Eastern European custom that she kind of fumbled through at the beginning of her living abroad and how that would have been different in kind of an American tradition and then she kind of goes into the state of play, explains kind of her journey throughout living abroad and then at the end maybe she narrates a custom that is exactly the same in both countries or in both regions of the world so that you're not only telling us that on the surface we may be different but essentially we're all the same but you're kind of showing that with the narrative thread that you've kind of drafted throughout. Are you starting the process now? You're hearing the kind of tick, tick, tick of the clock. Comment below. I'd love to help you out with your brainstorming and kind of get you going. Tip three, whenever possible teach us something. The tone automatically kind of shifts to a more authoritarian, more confident bravado when you are teaching us something. So let's say your essay is about fishing, maybe dedicate a short paragraph, maybe even an italics or with a subheading where you are teaching us the one, two, three of how to fish, how to land your first fish. So you kind of shift into gear, into kind of knowledgeable gear, right? And it really kind of shows authority but it also kind of shifts the dimension and the tone of the essay which is great for kind of keeping the interest and engaging kind of interest of your reader. If you want more tips, more expert guidance, check out my free college essay template below in the description. You will have information on how to structure your essay depending on topic. You will have how to write an effective opening anecdote. So how to kind of shift into storytelling gear which is super important. If you found this video helpful, please give us a like. Comment below, thank you, thank you. And please, please share with your college-bound friends. Thank you so much, I'll see you soon.