 Prompt one for the common application is basically the culture identity essay, which I love, I can't lie, but you want to stay away from the basic who am I biography essay. Stay tuned for tips on how to add nuance and depth that will impress the admission officers. 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. This college essay encourages students to take stock in their life and who they are socially and academically, intellectually, personally. However, beware of kind of that cliche. My family's crazy, but I love them anyways type idea. By the end of this video, you'll have two key tips with examples to how to make this work. Hi, I'm Dr. Josie with Write Your Acceptance. As a college essay expert and university faculty member, I know how to make them remember you and root for you. Now it's your turn. Very popular scenes in this essay are family dinners, holiday parties, cultural traditions, funny sayings. They're great because they add a bunch of voices and different characters into the narrative. So it's not only you in a vacuum speaking directly to the admission officers. It's almost as if they have more to root for because you're bringing it's like a family affair. You're bringing a lot more people to the mix. So tip number one, open up the topic. Consider that this essay doesn't have to be only about who you are culturally or your heritage. It could be kind of something that you were teased about all your life or your ultra competitive street or your role as a soccer player or how even you love 80s movies. They could be kind of random aspects, dimensions of culture with the capital C that you can kind of show your relationship with. Tip two, once you've expanded the idea of culture, now pick a topic or a theme that works for you. So you can either do how you love 80s movies, super random, or your relationship to Colombian American, Spanglish, let's say, and how you think in Spanish and speak in English or kind of that idea of culture as practice and lived. Are you stuck trying to figure out how to think through the theme or topic of your essay? Comment below and we'll start figuring it out together. Okay, so here are two examples. Number one, the 80s movies. Let's say I start with kind of a key scene from Ferris Bueller's Day Out or whatever random 80s movies you want to pick. And then you talk about how you value this ode to a slower paced lifestyle. Nobody was glued to their phones, there's the H.E.A., although there's some adventure, there's always like a happily ever after happy ending type ideal resolution. So that you kind of value that. So you'll kind of open with an anecdote of the movie and then kind of philosophize why it's important to you. Then you'll bring in a memory of story and anecdote from your life and how you brought in those lessons into 2019. And so now that you're working and emulating within values that you find important, you are bringing the 80s to you today. And it's not necessarily kind of like a nostalgia thing, it's more kind of like shaping your character and values in today's world. Boom. Example knew it up those. So let's say we're doing the Colombian American Spanglish and this could be any multicultural blend, any language really, but we would start with a phrase or two phrases and maybe you kind of contextually translate that. Maybe it's an anecdote where you're talking to a grandparent or someone that generationally has kind of been a major player in you inheriting this culture and this language. So you start with that and then you kind of go into how you've learned that kind of true fluency and communication is not about losing an accent, but about kind of meeting someone and authentically connecting with them and allowing the other person to be seen and heard on their own terms. Ooh, that is pretty. So all of a sudden you're talking about way more than just kind of, you know, how you kind of code switch in language. As you're talking about communication, you're talking about empathy, compassion, you are philosophizing what communication means to you. And that is nice, nice, nice. So this essay is part learn something, teach something, part quirky. And if you want to learn more, I have a college essay guide for free to download in the description below. It'll kind of advise you on where you should put what information to maximize engagement. If you found this video useful, please comment boom below, give us a like, subscribe, and share with your fellow College Beyond friends. We'll see you soon. Thank you so much. Bye.