Deconstruction.

That’s the answer. Well, okay. It’s a bit more complicated than that. But, before we get to that, let’s cover some important details to know about how to write a college essay about yourself.

When you look at blogs online, you’ll often come across a lot of advice and recommendations on how to write about yourself. They usually come along the lines of “be yourself”, “be genuine”, and other things you’d see on a Yoga calendar.

Here are a few examples of this kind of advice.

Goingmerry.com says you need to “be vulnerable” and “show personality”; this is tip number 3 and 7 respectively. Collegevine.com says you need to, again, “be vulnerable” and “show your personality”; this time, it’s tip number 2 and 7 respectively.

These tips are rather liberating. They give us a lot of freedom. So, that’s good… right?

Well, the problem arises when you realize that these are not actionable pieces of advice. So, what does actionable advice mean?

Actionable advice is any kind of advice that has a clear path of execution. In other words, you can take… well… action. For example: getting straight A’s is not an actionable piece of advice because you can’t execute the act of getting straight A’s. But, studying for 5 hours is an actionable piece of advice because you can actually draw a clear path toward taking that action.

Now, is showing personality and being vulnerable an actionable piece of advice?

*cue Jeopardy noises*

Nope! It’s not. You can’t just “be vulnerable” or “show your personality” because that’s too tall an order to ask of a teenager or young adult! How can you be vulnerable without even knowing what it’s like to open up to others? How can you show your personality when you don’t even know yourself very well? You can’t. That’s what makes advice like this difficult to actually apply in practice.

This is also why you can’t just write about yourself in the college essay. You may think to yourself, “Oh boy, time to open up and write about cool stuff about me!” only to find yourself stuck in the mindset of, “Why am I staring at a blank page for 2 hours? Shouldn’t this be easy?”

Thus, you can’t know how to write a college essay about yourself without first knowing about yourself.

This article does not serve to berate or criticize the authors or the organizations in question with impunity. Instead, we’re just trying to address a problem that arises if you are trying to learn how to write a college essay about yourself. Online guides and consultants often put the cart before the horse by giving advice without also addressing that students must first understand themselves before writing about themselves. Besides, why write about something you don’t know about?

That brings us to a bit of a problem. If you can’t write a college essay about yourself without also knowing enough about yourself, what on Earth do you do? How can you possibly know everything about yourself and proceed to articulate that in an essay before the application deadline?

Well, that’s the magic. You don’t need to know EVERYTHING about yourself. You just need to deconstruct yourself. Deconstruct enough about your character, personality, and psyche to have sufficient content to write about.

The goal of this guide is to show you how to write a college essay about yourself by covering everything you need to know in three sections. First, we’ll cover and discuss what deconstruction is. Next, we’ll cover how to use deconstruction when coming up with things to say about yourself. Lastly, we’ll show you a college essay example about yourself using deconstruction.

Table of Contents

1. What on Earth is Deconstruction?
2. How to Deconstruct and Analyze Yourself for the College Essay
   • Write a List of Meaningful Life Experiences That Incite Strong Emotion
   • Analyze the Patterns and Connect the Dots to Unearth Undiscovered Behaviors
   • Use These Unearthed Behaviors to Infer a New Understanding About Yourself
   • Apply This New Understanding About Yourself to the Essay
3. College Essay Example About Yourself

What on Earth is Deconstruction?

So, if you’re a literature nerd, you probably know of the other “Deconstruction”. You may also know of Deconstruction in your Social Sciences or Psych classes.

We’re not going to be using those definitions today. Instead, we’ll be keeping things strictly in the context of the college admissions process.

The term deconstruction means to analyze topics at an atomized level. This helps students understand their background and topics on a deeper level. They help reveal themes and motifs which may otherwise go unnoticed when writing the application essay.

This is especially important for those who want to write a college essay about themselves, as they’ll need to learn more about themselves on a deeper level before they can write anything of substance.

When we work with our clients, we often brainstorm with them prior to doing any kind of writing or editing. This gives us the chance to deconstruct some of the principles and themes of our client’s essays; thus, it gives up more content to work with when helping them write essays that are more personal and transparent.

So, how can you apply deconstruction to your brainstorming process? More importantly, how can you do this to improve your essays?

How to Deconstruct and Analyze Yourself for the College Essay

This section is separated into five sections. They will cover the individual steps you need to take to deconstruct and analyze yourself when writing college essays.

Specifically, these steps will help you understand yourself to prepare yourself for writing your college essay about yourself.

This kind of brainstorming takes time. It cannot be rushed.

Write a List of Meaningful Life Experiences That Incite Strong Emotion

More often than not, we remember experiences and moments in life because they left a meaningful impact on us. The reason we forget them is either because there was no more emotional profoundness to extract from it or there is no longer anything to learn from the experience.

When writing your college essay about yourself, start by making a list of meaningful life experiences that incite strong emotions in you. List out what these emotions are. These can be positive, negative, surprising, and even funny if you would like.

Collecting a list of the meaningful life experiences that happened to incite strong emotional responses in you is likely to also help you target the experiences that were most influential to you. More often than not, your emotions will have something to say about the experience. Your resentment and anger over your father’s unfair treatment may reveal an intrinsic desire for justice between men and women. Or, your grieving for the passing of a close friend may show you’re still struggling to accept the sudden change in life dynamics.

These are, of course, broad brush strokes.

In the next section, we’re going to cover what to do next once you’ve listed out the emotions you feel from your experiences.

Analyze the Patterns and Connect the Dots to Unearth Undiscovered Behaviors

Once you’ve made a list of experiences that were profound to you plus the emotions associated with each one, it’s time to put your psychoanalysis caps on and roll up your sleeves. This is going to take quite a while, potentially be quite difficult, and require a lot of patience.

The next step after making your list of experiences and your emotional responses to them is to analyze them. Specifically, you’ll need to find themes, motifs, and significant patterns. This comes in the form of articulating abstract concepts out of the experiences you’ve had.

Start by looking at the emotions you associate with a life experience. Then, make observations of what kinds of similarities, commonalities, parallels, and overall themes you can infer based on the experience alone.

For example. You may notice that your early life has always followed a patriarchal mode of being. This was not forced upon you; but, you remember since you were young always looking for ways to both prove and become more masculine throughout your life. This hypermasculinity may contradict the hyper-feminine environment you grew up in, as you had 3 sisters and an overbearing and overprotective mother.

Notice that the experiences you have alone don’t exist in a vacuum. If you hold noticed you experienced a lot of negative emotion growing up despite a seemingly normal upbringing or you experienced a lot of dread and anxiety despite your gifted and talented status, you may realize through deeper introspection that there are underlying themes and motifs that lurk beneath the surface.

Use these new underlying concepts to build a new understanding of yourself. We’ll show you an example of this in the next section.

Use These Unearthed Behaviors to Infer a New Understanding About Yourself

Alright, let’s look at an example of how this would look so far.

1. Meaningful Experience: The first time I noticed my father was angry was when he yelled at both my mother and sister about a late car payment. The details were foggy. But, all I remember is hearing how explosive his anger was. It added a lot of unpredictability and instability to the environment. I also remember shutting myself away from the family and staying in my room for a long time after that. My relationship with my family and my father is very healthy now; nonetheless, I noticed this memory stayed with me for a long time despite being very much over it.
2. The Emotional Response: When I look back at it, I notice that I am actually unusually angry. I normally would be very scared and fearful about the situation, as anyone would. However, when I look back at my experience, I am strangely full of wrath despite having been disempowered and cowering in fear as a child. I don’t really know why, but noticing how angry my father has fueled an anger in me as well. I don’t feel weak, I feel strong; but, it’s a negative kind of strength. I feel like I want to prevent him from getting angry.
3. Patterns of Themes and Motifs: I like to think of myself as a peace lover. I am a tree hugger and an animal rights activist. I love pale, pastel colors and I identify with “comfy” aesthetics on my personal blog and social media account. This manifests further in my style of clothing, interests, art style, and even the way I carry out my conversations with people. Whenever negative emotion manifests itself in a group setting, I do what I can to smooth the waters and calm people down. This may actually be a covert way that I suppress anger. After seeing my father’s anger, I decided to be the exact opposite of that and do everything I can to suppress anger when it manifests in others.

Okay, let’s review.

In order to write a college essay about yourself, you need to write about a significant experience you’ve endured. Next, write the emotions you feel. Then, find patterns or themes that seem to echo across other experiences in your life.

In this example brainstorming session, the client covers how her experience with her father incites unusual feelings of resentment and anger. She finds it odd that her experience makes her feel angry rather than sad and upset. Later, she connects this with her anger at other people’s rage. She tries to suppress and prevent other people from being angry, ironically; this is all under the guise of optimism and love, but she doesn’t know it.

Now, it’s a matter of applying this principle to the essay.

Apply This New Understanding About Yourself to the Essay

So far, you’ve done the following.

You’ve targeted an experience that you found was profound.

You identified what kind of emotion you associate with it.

And, you found the patterns of themes and motifs from your experience.

We want to preface by saying that this newfound understanding doesn’t have to be some kind of prophetic, transcendent experience. Not everyone has a profound psychoanalytical level of introspection that can be applied to their college essays. And, ultimately, that’s fine!

Now, if you’ve made it this far, it’s time to write about what you’ve learned about yourself in the essay. When writing the college essay about yourself, you will now have a much deeper understanding of who you are. Make sure to describe this in a manner such that those who don’t understand what you’ve gone through would understand.

This means using the power of imagery and descriptions. Diversify your sentence structure. Don’t be afraid of using unique language and words to describe exactly what you were feeling. Get creative. Profound experiences with a deep level of introspection and understanding demand profound writing. So, don’t be afraid to experiment.

Let’s look at an example of a deconstructed experience written in the college essay below.

College Essay Example About Yourself

On Peace and Wrath and Sorrow and Escape and Acceptance

“I don’t want much in life. But, I know for certain that I don’t want to be THAT.

It’s a mantra. It’s a pathology. It’s an oath, a prayer, or a plea in the dark. Some people have experienced it. All women know it. No one understands it. By no one I mean some people. Some people: some distant stranger from across the world who by happenstance of misfortune experienced the same abstract and indescribable feeling I have but cannot articulate it.

Some know it. But, they don’t know how to describe it. But, they know, someone out there knows exactly how they feel.

In my case, I experienced this feeling when I was in sixth grade.

I returned home from school and noticecd that my father was angry. It was about car payments and… something. I couldn’t articulate it: I was only a child at the time. All I knew was that he was filled with wrath. It over took him. His voice overtook him. And, thus, fear overtook me. I soon found myself in the corner of the room with the door locked just waiting for my father to stop shouting.

He did. In fact, I never heard him raise his voice ever again. He, my mother, and my sister led quite normal lives since then. Since then, I’ve worn comfy clothing, hugged trees, stayed positive, and always thought myself a positivity type who always stopped all the negative emotion in my circle of friends.

And then, I overcame that fear, and that makes me a strong individual. I will parallel this strength when I enter university.

Except, this is not what happened.

Instead, I felt anger. Why? Why would I feel anger? It seems incomprehensibe! In such a situation of disempowerment, what else should someone feel but saddness, sorrow, and sinking? But, I didn’t. There’s neither rhyme nor reason as to why. Just anger.

Why? The very word “anger” seems contradictory to someone who self identifies as a tree hugger who eats vegan. It’s the polar opposite of someone who advocates for animal rights and wishes everyone could just ‘get along’. Yet, every so often, in a sudden outburst of arbitrary randomness, my mind would remember what my father had done. I’m not angry at him, or the car, or anyone. I just feel… angry.

It wasn’t until I did more introspection into my psyche that I discovered what kind of person I am. I realized when I looked back at my experinces with others, I always suppress and choke out any oppportunity for friends and peers to express anger. I even suppressed my own anger. I shroud it behind pastel colors and trees and rabbits and vegan lovey-dovey comfort food. For the longest time I’ve been suffocating a very human, very natural part of me. It’s ironic, that to suppress anger, I’ve used the most violent means to do: suffocation and self oppression.

To overcome anger, I had to have a healthy relationship with myself. It meant no more suppression. It meant no more toxic positivity. It meant recognizing for once in my life that I too could be angry and others can feel wrath. What did the protestors at BLM marches feel? What did teachers advocating for better pay and working conditions feel? Are they not entitled to their wrath as much as I? It’s a natural response. And, through this, I can become fully me.“

College Essay Example About Yourself

If you are still wondering how to write a college essay about yourself that stands out amongst the rest of the competition, don’t worry. A lot of other students are struggling to write about themselves in their college essays. We would most recommend that you seek help from a college admissions essay editor and professional advisor. Our expertise has helped countless students write about difficult and complex topics, and we’ve managed to help them get accepted into top universities.