Showing Us Your Values in College Essays

“Show us your values!” If you’ve been seeking out college essay strategies, you’ve probably encountered this advice on countless websites. Counselors, teachers, and friends have probably emphasized it. Heck, by now you’ve probably heard it from your household pets. And guess what? It’s true! You really do need to show your values. Except it’s not so simple…

Firstly, what are values? At a basic level, they’re your principles or codes of conduct. But in college essays, they need to be given life, rather than presented as abstractions. Think of values as the meaning and purpose you’ve found in your recent experiences, and the meaning and significance you find in what you’ve experienced in your lifetime. Why does a certain activity, event, pursuit, idea, or issue fill you with joy? Inspire you? Incense you? Haunt you? Seize hold of you? If you don’t express your values to an admissions committee, they don’t know what matters to you, nor can they see you reflecting on what matters to you in your writing. In turn, your essay and the student behind it—you—will seem much less interesting, thoughtful, and distinct.

So, you really do need to talk about values. Except you can actually end up hurting your essay if you write about values in the wrong way.

Now, many applicants write about values by using familiar one-word values. Creativity, leadership, perseverance, etc. Typically, they’ll offer an example from their lives (like the time they led their scrappy robotics team to a major victory) and then provide takeaways using these one-word values (this experience taught me about leadership and perseverance). The problem is that our language only has a limited number of these basic one-word values, and lots of applicants are using them. So you sound like everyone else. Plus, these kinds of values are so general that they actually tell us very little about you. They’re dull.

A lot of college essay coaches/advisors talk about trying to use uncommon values. This is a step up, but in practice it often looks like putting a flashy outfit on the same basic values. Instead of perseverance, a student might try to offer a somewhat more nuanced version, like seeing obstacles as opportunities and setbacks as chances for growth or our outside-the-box thinking opened up a new way of solving the problem. In real life, these things are great, but in the world of essays, they’re still highly generic. Once again, they’re dull.

The trick is to show your values through thoughtful writing. You don’t even need to name the value at all. In fact, it’s probably better if you don’t! If thoughtfully and creatively written, a student’s reflections on their love of robotics, or their expansion they feel when writing poetry, or the depth of meaning contained in their family’s traditions, or their intellectual and emotional experience of collecting moss samples, will make their values come to life far more vibrantly than just stating a principle or lesson ever could. Try to show your values by not allowing yourself to plug in familiar words, phrases, and ideas. If your writing about values sounds like standard inspirational, corporate, or gym-wall rhetoric, you’re in trouble. The necessity of avoiding these familiar approaches will force you to develop a much more creative, personalized language. Ultimately, this is what will enable you to set yourself apart from other applicants.