 Hello my people, if you've been procrastinating on making your common app personal statement as much as I have been procrastinating on making videos for this channel, then today is the day for you. I'm going to give you eight different ways that you can brainstorm ideas for your common app personal statement that will stand out and get admission officers attention. Idea number one, conflict. Every essay, every good story has conflict. You can classify conflicts in different ways, but like the most common conflicts are man versus man conflicts, like somebody and their sworn enemy, man versus nature, society, you know everything around them, and then you've got the man versus self. That is usually where the best essays are going to be, so try to think about what you have to do to improve yourself. If you want really good writing, you need to be in a good creative mindset and nothing helps like nature, so literally I want you to go outside and touch grass. Idea number two, memories. A really special moment or memory in your life can be an awesome essay, but you need to watch out for a mistake that I see so often and that's telling the memory from beginning all the way to end and never talking about the present or the future of your life. A great memory from when you were 15 is cool, but we also need to know about who you are now and what you're doing today. And it also needs to be kind of relevant to some of the things that you want to do in the future. Like I have some really good memories on this here counter, but none of them are really appropriate for a college admissions essay, so you've got to pick things that not only are really good memories that tell us a lot about you but also tell us about your goals and your future, the kind of person you are now and the kind of person you're going to be at university. Third method, I want you to think of a prized possession. What is something that you have that you absolutely love and would be like devastated if you lost? For me, it's the most important thing I could ever have. My U.S. passport because that means I'm American and I have freedom and if I were to lose this citizenship, I would not be who I am today. It would break my heart. I could write a whole essay about this thing. Be careful not to describe the thing too much, okay? If you spend half your essay describing the thing and the history of how you got it, it's going to be a very boring essay. So try to just focus on what it means to you. Method number four, the beloved family member. Family is a really important thing. It determines in large part who you are and who you are going to be. Part of the reason I haven't been uploading videos is because I'm here with my family taking some vacation time and like I could write a whole essay about some of my family members but we don't want to spend half the essay talking about how great your family member was. We need to focus on you. Hey, so if you've got a good idea, so if you've got a good idea now like halfway through this video, go ahead and like leave it in the comments and tell me what you think and I'll give you my opinion about it. Method number five, unique cultural differences. I don't care whether you're an American student or an international student. You can always find cultural differences, whether that's from your country or even your city or even like your family. I'm from Pittsburgh and that means I'm going to be a Steelers fan until the day I die. I've literally filmed videos in my Steelers jersey. Like I'm not going to stop being a Steelers fan. That is something uniquely important for people from Pittsburgh. Think about your town or even your family. What are some of the things that you do that's just different from what other people do? This approach is really good. If you got made fun of for any of your differences, like I'll never forget going to Michigan from Pennsylvania with my Pittsburgh accent and being told that I had a funny accent when there were kids in the class that didn't even speak English. But apparently my English wasn't good enough for the Michigan people because it sounded different because I said words like major instead of measure. And anyway, the point is if you get made fun of for your differences, it adds a little bit of sympathy points to your essay. And I think that's always a good approach. Method number six, problems that you want to solve. There are so many problems in the world. We have war, climate change, Republicans. The list goes on. Maybe there's a problem out there that you would really like to solve. That could be the good basis for an essay. But if you are going to use this method, make sure that you are humble and that you recognize the fact that these problems are probably much bigger than you think they are at your age and at your experience. Patch eyes, dog. You want to make sure that you don't sound like you have all the answers. I mean, that's the whole reason you got to go to college is like to get the information and the knowledge that you need. Think about how your college education and experience will help you to do that after you graduate. This can also be a really good approach to take for a certain scholarship essay. So I would definitely recommend that you think of some ideas for this, even if you're not going to do it for your whole personal statement. I like to call the number seven method the rock bottom method. So I want you to just think about like the worst time of your life, right? Like the worst thing that ever happened and just make an essay about that. Here are some of the worst things that have happened in my life. I was in a burning building. I flipped my car upside down. I was robbed at gunpoint by two people. I was kicked out of an MUN conference at Harvard. Like there's so many bad things in life that I can't keep track of them all. But if you're going to go down this route, just make sure that you pick a thing that actually is bad. Please don't write this essay about like your dog dying. Like don't get me wrong, it would be sad if he died. But like if that's the worst thing that's happened to you in life, you've had a pretty good life and you really shouldn't be complaining. So just make sure you don't sound like you're out of touch with reality when you talk about your problems. Also, depression isn't a very unique topic. I hate to break it to you. And honestly, I don't trust people who aren't a little depressed in 2023, given the state of the world. If you're a girl and you want to write about your depression, please write about how you've gotten over it and what you're doing now. Don't write two pages focused on the whole history and how it was so sad and depressing. OK, focus on what you did to get out of that and like how you made things get better. I'm not going to write a whole essay about my house burning down. I'm going to talk about that event very briefly at the beginning. And then I'm going to explain how it affected me and how I changed as a person and all the important things that came out of that as for who I am today. If you want to watch me write that essay, I'm going to do a live stream soon and I'm going to be doing several actually as I write different essays for the common app. So you can subscribe and put on notifications because like then you'll know when I'm streaming and then we can hang out together. I got some new technology recently that I'm going to be trying out for my streams, so I'm looking forward to it. No, oh, that's right. There were supposed to be eight of these tips. Yeah, number eight, go to the common app website and see the different prompts that they give you and see if any one of those inspires you like you should have done that already. There you go.