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Kickstart Your Summertime Essay Brainstorming

The Princeton Review

It’s helpful to think about your application essays the summer before you apply to college.

Fall of senior year is a busy time. It’s often tough to carve out the time and space needed for inspiration to strike while dealing with classwork, applications, and senior-year events. And you don’t want to write an essay about which you feel blah just because you didn’t have the time to come up with a better approach.

Fortunately, it’s easy to get an early start on your essay. The prompts colleges use, on their applications and supplemental forms, change little each year. Additionally, the Common Application typically releases its essay prompts early, ahead of that year’s application. (Click here to check out the prompts for the 2013–2014 Common App.)

However, all of the time in world won’t seem like enough if you’re feeling uninspired. To help with that, the New York Times recently paired several of its own stories with each of the Common App’s ’13 –’14 essay prompts. (Click here to check them out.) These pieces can help you to think about the different ways in which you might tell your story. They can also help you to get focused on storytelling rather than the fact that you’re writing an application essay.

For more resources from The Princeton Review, visit their website: http://www.princetonreview.com/

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