Writing about death in your college essay is a contentious strategy. Even now, many admissions advisors and counselors can’t seem to agree on the topic without getting into banal, oversimplified conclusions. Over the years, we’ve worked with many applicants who wanted to write about death. It’s a scary topic, and there are good reasons for it.
“Will the admissions officers turn my application away if I write about traumas?”
“Is it cliche?”
“Am I a red flag?”
These are all questions we were asked and more. And, roughly speaking, it’s fair. Most people are terrified of making mistakes in their essays.
The college admissions essay process is a time for applicants to demonstrate their worth and value to the school. This is a blessing and ensures schools don’t just judge based on numbers and statistics alone. Therefore, the essays give you a chance to stand out from the rest of the crowd. But, opening up about such personal experiences can be confusing.
Thus, we’ve compiled a comprehensive guide on how to write about death in your college essay.
Table of Contents
- Is it Okay to Write About Death in Your College Essay?
- Why Death is Both a Strong and Dangerous College Essay Topic to Write About.
- How to Write Your College Essay About Death.
- An Example of a College Essay About Death.
- Key Tips When Writing Your College Essay About Death.
- Conclusion.
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Is it Okay to Write About Death in Your College Essay?
Short answer: Yes, you can write about death in your college essay. But, you need to tread the topic with tact and care lest you appear insensitive.
In fact, it can even be a fantastic essay topic. There are a lot of great themes and ideas you can draw from your experience. Just be careful and tread lightly.
Note also that death is an unconventional essay topic.
Many people write about it; but, it’s an unusual topic since everyone’s experience with death is different. Some are traumatized. Others feel numb. Some feel nothing at all, and said apathy terrifies them!
The unique quality of death as an essay topic means you should tread this field lightly. Be smart with your words, and be careful with your word choice. It’s a high-risk high-reward strategy. If you do this properly and follow this guide exactly, you’ll stand out from the rest of the admissions pool. If you’re not careful, it’ll certainly be a red flag.
Why Death is Both a Strong and Dangerous College Essay Topic to Write About.
One of the other disadvantages of death is the utility it has for college admissions editors and advisors. Specifically, editors and counselors checking your work may have a hard time relating to your experience.
Not everyone truly understands what it’s like to have someone close to them pass away.
One of the greatest tools of a strong college admissions advisor and editor is their ability to listen. Advisors must listen to students like you to empathize and understand your perspective to the best of their ability. They do this to deconstruct what you say. Then, they use said info to analyze your situation and give best practices.
For instance, students struggling with Depression due to strict families often subscribe to harsh hustle culture later in life. Editors understand their experiences since this isn’t uncommon. Therefore, empathy is easier.
On the other hand, counselors and editors have less exposure to the emotional effects of death. Additionally, everyone’s unique coping with death makes it hard to empathize with.
So, you may need to work with an experienced editor or advisor. Have someone with the knowledge to handle the topic, and empathize with you.
Death may also help you stand out amongst the rest of the application pool. The lasting impact death has, the opportunity for personal growth, and the emotional weight of the experience all help.
But, there are disadvantages. Take the controversy. For most application essays, even a small amount of mistakes can be dismissed by admissions officers. However, mistakes made in a college essay about death can devastate your admissions chances if it happens to be insensitive.
Death is a sensitive topic. End of story.
So, remember that you’re playing with fire. As long as you’re careful, you’ll be fine!
How to Write Your College Essay About Death.
1. Articulate What Exactly Happened in a Separate List
One of the challenges of writing about death in your college essay is recalling everything that happened. Sure. There’s the death itself as well as how everyone felt. However, most of these traumatic experiences have details that the brain can easily shut off.
For instance, sometimes people forget all the characteristics of the victim while they are still alive prior to passing. Or, they forget what their life was like before the passing. These details may seem minuscule in the grand scheme of the college admissions essay. However, it is often the small details that contain a lot of information.
You can draw many conclusions from your experiences if you lay everything out in a comprehensive timeline.
So, before you get to writing about death in your college essay, get a sheet of paper and a pen. Write down a timeline and put as many details before and after the death in the timeline. When you do this, you can have an organized visualization of things you need to analyze about your experience. From there, it becomes infinitely easier to deconstruct the events and separate the wheat from the chaff.
2. Sort Through What’s Important to the Essay
Once you’ve created a comprehensive timeline, separate everything by relevance. Analyze each event in your story and draw out the principles, ethics, themes, and characteristics of each.
So, here are some examples.
Life before your brother’s death was simple and you always had someone who you looked up to. This demonstrates you had some semblance of order and rigidity in your life. However, it also shows you could outsource your orderly life to your brother by relying on them.
Therefore, a chaotic life after your brother’s death shows how you later could adapt to unreliability. In short, AOs can infer you learned to establish order on your own.
This may segway into self-reliance. Your essay about death then also becomes about adapting to an ever-changing environment. Academic is also stressful and anxiety-ridden. So, you won’t be a stranger to it. Think of this process as extracting the elements of candidacy. We’ll explore this more in-depth in the next section.
3. Extract the Elements That Make You a Great Candidate
When looking at the events before and after the death, you’ll want to extract the important parts of the events. Specifically, ask yourself this question:
“What do these events say about me as a person?”
More often than not, you’ll need to connect those characteristics to your fit for the campus.
So, here’s an example.
Your mother’s uncle passed away. But, you weren’t emotionally affected. Nonetheless, this had a rippling effect on your family. Additionally, his death unearthed a series of ugly truths including a life insurance scam, an ugly divorce, and other disasters. As someone who must “stay strong” for your family, you’ve developed a more emotional temperament.
You learn to be an adult when others cannot, become a shoulder to cry on and develop emotional maturity. In a university setting, you will translate this newfound temperament to become someone who others can rely on.
4. Connect Back to the Prompt
Students who write about death in their college essays may find it difficult to connect back to the prompt. There is a lot to be said about death. As such, it’s easy to get sidetracked and forget to answer the prompt. Remember that at the end of the day, the main objective is to answer the question.
Also, understand that you don’t even need to answer the question as fully as you may expect. Even essay questions briefly answering the question have helped students get accepted into fantastic schools.
You should consider how many words you will dedicate to telling your personal story. Do the arithmetic on how much you’re allowed to talk about before it starts to become a ramble. Calculate how long you can talk about your experience before finally getting to the point.
Note that some essay prompts are longer than others and, therefore, easier to write about death. Dedicating a story to death in 650 words may be more appropriate than 250 words.
5. Consider the Ramifications of Capitalizing on Death
This is a crucial element in writing your college essay about death. College admissions officers whose negative traits take a toll on the well-being of a campus. In this instance, it is entirely possible the admissions officers see your essay as capitalizing on death.
Yikes.
This would be a rather cold, utilitarian, and perhaps even Machiavellian personality trait. But, don’t fret. The admissions officers take careful consideration when reading your essay. They’ll read it with a fine tooth comb to ensure they’re not misinterpreting your work.
Nonetheless, it still helps to ensure your admissions essay does not come off as capitalizing off of death. Thus, approach your essay from a position of empathy. Make sure you write your essay and edit with a delicate touch. Scan through the text multiple times to ensure that it does not have the possibility of being misinterpreted negatively.
If you need help, consider getting a professional college essay editor.
An Example of a College Essay About Death.
“Fire. Fire.
Sirens. Blue. Red. White.
“How many fingers am I holding up? Can you move your… something?”
It’s hard to remember what even happened. In some ways, I believe my mind blocked off a lot of what happened that day. All I remember at the time was my brother passed away. There was chaos. There were police. There was a fire. My family was devestated. Fire. There was fire.
I seldom remember much of it at all. My family doesn’t talk about it. They don’t talk much at all anymore.
Everyone talks of the pain of death –how it sows mayhem wheresoever it touches. In truth, I don’t know what to feel. Death just… came. It happened. Then, things just coalesced into itself like some ambiguous blur of stuffs and things and sortas and whatever abstract adjectives could congregate into the word salad of ambiguity. That’s what it is. Ambiguity. It just feels so, so unreal.
But, one thing did feel real.
No, it felt beyond real. It wasn’t real; instead, it was like it was beyond truth. Or, it was meta-real.
One day, I took a book from the local library and sat under a tree to read. But, my mind wasn’t really on the book. I just stared at it with blank eyes, as if expecting something to happen. And something did happen. I saw a squirrel.
It looked at me from afar. Its little, stubby black nose twitched. Its tail curled.
I just looked at it, and it looked back.
He came closer.
I said nothing.
Again, closer.
Jumping closer. Again, and again. He’s very close.
Then, he stopped. He grabbed a nut a little ways to my right and started to twist it in his hands and gnaw at it, entering the center of the nut. From there, he just sat gnawing away at a nut. He was my only company. Me. A book. Him. A nut.
I cried.
He was alerted and glanced a quick look at me, but it didn’t matter. I cried. I cried a lot. I couldn’t stop crying. Why was I crying? Why didn’t it stop? In that moment, I started to feel an overwhelming sense of grief and joy and anger and regret and yearning and laughter. It was as if I learned all the colors of the rainbow again. Everything felt so foreign: the grass beneath my feet, the tree giving me shade, the vast view past the library overlooking the rest of the city. Why? Why was I feeling so much?
I sometimes still wonder what happened. I’ve accomplished much in my life and I’ve learned to pick myself up by the boostraps. But, this is the most unusual journey of self-development I’ve ever exeprienced. Like some abstract dream, I lost someone close to me, forgot all that happened, saw a squirrel, and had a transcendant religious experience that opened my emotions again. It was this death, this abstract dream, this encounter with a squirrel, that I think allowed me to become me again.
How? I’m not sure. There’s many things I’m still unsure of. What happened? Will my family truly recover? Why am I suddenly better? Was that squirrel my brother?
But, I know one thing for sure. I can be me again.”
Example College Essay About Death
Key Tips When Writing Your College Essay About Death.
1. Be Careful With Your Language
The problem with the death topic for college essays is just how careful you need to be. As we’ve mentioned before, death is a double-edged sword. It’s strong; but, it’s also dangerous if you’re not careful.
For those without the right writing process, it’s easy to make mistakes in the language and come off as insensitive. More importantly, you don’t want to sound like you’re capitalizing on the death for your own advantage.
Additionally, writing the essay poorly may come off as insensitive in relation to the death.
Now, this isn’t to say readers will make sweeping conclusions about you. Admissions officers try to do their best to look at your essay from a perspective of empathy and understanding. Nonetheless, it helps to try to be as careful as possible to ensure no misinterpretations occur.
2. Honesty is the Best Policy
This is an important one.
When writing about death in your college essay, lying will easily send you to the rejection pile. Remember that the admissions process is also a measurement of character. If readers see you’re willing to bend the truth, they can’t trust anything you say.
Even if you think you can get away with lying, admissions officers can often see through it. Trust us. It’s nearly impossible to write an essay disingenuously and get away with it. AOs have worked on this process for years. They’re not stupid!
Sometimes, the hard part about being honest is just how awkward telling the truth is!
In this case, you need to be in touch with how you feel. By truly connecting to your emotions honestly, you’ll have an easier time opening up.
3. Don’t Forget: The College Essay is About You
One of the things people forget about writing about death in their college essays is the main point. Because death is such a heavy topic, it would seem more appropriate to make the main topic about death itself. However, remember that the admissions essay section serves only one purpose: to measure a student’s fit in an institution.
Thus, even with a traumatic topic like death, you can’t forget the main idea: your contribution to the campus. Of course, you don’t have to be too literal with your essay. You can still be subtle and make the inference of how you would fit in the school.
Take the example essay we made, for instance.
“I sometimes still wonder what happened. I’ve accomplished much in my life and I’ve learned to pick myself up by the boostraps. But, this is the most unusual journey of self-development I’ve ever exeprienced. Like some abstract dream, I lost someone close to me, forgot all that happened, saw a squirrel, and had a transcendant religious experience that opened my emotions again. It was this death, this abstract dream, this encounter with a squirrel, that I think allowed me to become me again.
How? I’m not sure. There’s many things I’m still unsure of. What happened? Will my family truly recover? Why am I suddenly better? Was that squirrel my brother?
But, I know one thing for sure.
I can be me again.”
Excerpt From Example of College Essay About Death
Notice how this essay does not make a very direct statement on how the student is a great candidate. Instead, they showed death disconnected them from their emotions. This simple instance helped them learn how to feel and experience emotions once more.
This experience shows admissions officers you’re more closely connected to your emotions, bringing a positive experience to campus.
4. Topics Like These Require Triple Checking
Double-check your work. Then, when you’ve done that, check it once more.
This goes for all essays. But, you truly want to check your work more often than you think. In addition, you should not be checking every other second. Instead, between your essays, give yourself some time and check your work after you’ve waited a few days. This can help you avoid tunnel vision when editing your work. Tunnel vision happens when you look at the writing for too long and become accustomed to what you’ve written. You’ll become used to your own writing and it becomes difficult to see mistakes that you normally would catch.
Don’t forget to have someone help you with editing and revising your essays. Having a second pair of eyes can help you find mistakes. More importantly, you’ll discover unique ways of rephrasing your story to stand out from the rest of the competition.
Conclusion.
In short, writing about death in your college essay is not a bad idea. It can demonstrate some qualities about you that would be much more impactful. In addition, it’s a great way to help stand out amongst other applicants. However, executing this method properly requires careful consideration and conscientious editing. That’s why it’s a good idea to hire expert college admissions editors with years of experience. Our experts can help you navigate an otherwise confusing essay-writing process to strengthen your chances. Don’t take unnecessary risks and put your years of academic performance to waste, and have our editors help out!