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How to Write a Standout Impact Essay | College Essay Advisors
The Impact Essay is a supplemental essay type that mines for information about your involvement in a community and how you have created lasting positive change—both within that community and yourself. It is an opportunity to talk about past contributions as well as future goals, which can be an insightful window into your values, priorities, and aspirations.
Read on to learn all about Impact Essay, including prompt examples, research strategies, writing tips, and mistakes to avoid!
The Impact Essay vs. The Community Essay
The Impact Essay is a close cousin of the Community Essay, and sometimes, prompts combine elements of the two. However, the Impact Essay differs from the Community Essay in that it is less focused on how you belong and more on how you contribute through service or outreach. Let’s take a look at some prompt examples…
Impact Essay Prompt Examples
Not every prompt included in this essay category will explicitly use the word “impact,” but reading through them, you’ll notice what they all have in common: an emphasis on how you have left a mark and/or plan to leave a mark on a community. Let’s take a look at some examples:
St. Augustine states that well-being is “not concerned with myself alone, but with my neighbor’s good as well.” How have you advocated for equity and justice in your communities?
Labor leader and civil rights activist Dolores Huerta recommended a life of purpose. “We must use our lives to make the world a better place to live, not just to acquire things,” she said. “That is what we are put on the earth for.” In what ways do you hope to make—or are you already making—an impact? Why? How?
Northwestern Prompt Option:
Painting “The Rock” is a tradition at Northwestern that invites all forms of expression—students promote campus events or extracurricular groups, support social or activist causes, show their Wildcat spirit (what we call “Purple Pride”), celebrate their culture, and more. What would you paint on The Rock, and why?Clark Prompt Option: At Clark, we are a force for change. We work together to improve the lives of others and the future of our planet. Share a story of how you’ve worked with others to make a positive impact. (250 words)
Princeton Prompt: Princeton has a longstanding commitment to understanding our responsibility to society through service and civic engagement. How does your own story intersect with these ideals? (250 words or fewer)
Key terms like “justice,” “service,” and “culture” signal the importance of uplifting others. Your response to an Impact Essay prompt can be large-scale, like organizing fossil fuel protests in your city, or more small-scale, like planting trees in the wake of wildfires with your baseball team. The two things to keep in mind are collaboration and change; whatever you choose to write about, make sure it outlines how you worked with others and how that made a positive impact.
Note that, while you are being asked to talk about yourself, you are meant to use your story as a springboard to discussing advocacy and outreach, often in the context of collaboration. As poet John Donne famously wrote, “No man is an island,” and in answering an Impact Essay prompt, your job is to speak to connection with your local or global community.
For example, in the Northwestern prompt about what you would paint on The Rock, keep in mind that what you choose isn’t just about your individual passions and strengths but what you think deserves to be shared in a public forum. Do you want to send a message to the campus community about deforestation? Are you looking to rally students to join you in a peaceful protest? Let’s say you are answering the Princeton prompt that asks you to reflect on how your story intersects with the ideas of service and civic engagement. In this example, it will be important to give information about your background and experiences while devoting equal space to reflecting on your outward public involvement.
What Constitutes Making an Impact
One of the most common questions students have is some variation of “what counts as making an impact?” The answer is: more things than you likely realize.
Here are some types of scenarios you could address in your Impact Essay(s):
- Volunteering (unboxing at the food pantry, tutoring middle schoolers, cleaning up the trailhead, helping the elderly with technology)
- Leadership (assistant coaching Little League, stage managing a Shakespeare production at summer theater camp)
- Activism (organizing protests, seeking petition signatures at a farmer’s market)
- Family (picking up younger siblings every day after school and helping with their homework, running a food truck with parents on weekends)
- Public Safety Outreach (organizing a bicycle awareness campaign, promoting vaccinations)
- Performing Arts (coordinating a photography project with at-risk youth, participating in a monthly slam poetry event at neighborhood coffee shop)
If you feel like you’re making an impact, no matter how small, it counts. Don’t overthink it!
Key Elements of a Strong Impact Essay
To write an Impact Essay that stands out from the pack, we recommend being as authentic and as specific as possible. That detail about the sequins you hand-sewed on thirty children’s costumes for a non-profit theater can really make your story shine (sparkle, even) and pull a reader in.
It’s also in your best interest to take time to reflect and articulate what your experience(s) has meant to you. Has it made you feel like you have a place in the world? That your sense of belonging comes from making a difference? Has it introduced you to new people, ideas, or languages? Has it impacted the way you understand systemic inequities and increased your desire to address them? Remember: this essay is about not only what you’ve accomplished, but also who you are and what you care about.
Finally, the best Impact Essays often connect back to the school in question. It never hurts to spend a little time on your top college’s website (the About/Mission Statement pages, to be specific) to find out more about the place you hope to call home for the next four years. If you can connect your demonstrated desire to make an impact to the college’s mission, culture, and/or values, all the better.
How to Write an Impact Essay
You’re going to write your Impact Essay just like you do any of your other admissions essays, through a mixture of brainstorming, drafting, and revising. Begin by paying careful attention to the language of the prompt to see how it distinguishes itself from a Community Essay, which is more focused on membership than impact. To generate ideas during the freewriting process, think about specific ways you have contributed to a community as well as how you have worked alongside others to effect positive change. If a question asks you to talk about how you have made the world a better place, you might start with the particulars of meaningful local involvement. “The world” is often abstract and unwieldy; your city or town, and the people in it, are specific and appreciable.
Common Mistakes to Avoid in Impact Essays
The most common mistakes we see students make in Impact Essays are:
- Taking an insincere or cliché tone. Make sure that you aren’t using people as props to sing your praises (“I thought I was helping them, but really, they helped me”).
- Focusing too much on describing the work as opposed to reflecting on the experience. Assume your reader knows that you are given hammers and nails to build houses for Habitat for Humanity. What they don’t know is how the experience led you to want to study city planning in an effort to ensure greater equity in neighborhoods.
- Repeating Information from your Activities List. There is bound to be a little overlap, but the goal is to expand in the Impact Essay to reveal brand new information (or a new angle) to admissions officers.
How CEA Can Help You Craft Your Impact Essay
We at College Essay Advisors have been guiding students one-on-one through the Impact Essay writing process for school-specific supplements for over twenty years. We take a holistic approach to these essays, considering each student’s application package as a whole while helping them identify how they have made a positive impact on a community that is important to them.
Our Advisors accommodate each student’s scheduling needs to virtually brainstorm, draft, and revise winning Impact Essays. It’s incredibly important to us that each student’s voice is preserved, and we pride ourselves in helping students write successful essays that differentiate them from similarly qualified applicants. For more information, submit a contact form and/or review our one-on-one advising services.
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– CEA Student, Northwestern, Class of 2025
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– CEA Parent, Princeton University, Class of 2027
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