How to write the community essay

What counts as a community

• Obvious ones: a team, a club, a congregation, a neighborhood, a cultural group.
• Less obvious ones: the regulars at a library, a group chat that builds things, coworkers on a weekend shift, an online forum, your siblings.
• Communities of interest: people who restore old bikes, translate fan fiction or keep bees.
• A smaller, specific community usually makes a better essay than a huge one. "My town" is harder to write well than "the 6 a.m. swim lane".

What readers look for

• Your role: what you actually do, give or change in the group.
• Reciprocity: what the community gave you, and what you give back.
• Openness: how you deal with people who are different from you inside it.
• Transfer: some sense of how you would show up in a college community.

A structure that fits

1. 1Open inside the community: a scene, a ritual or a detail that only members would know.
2. 2Show your place in it through one specific action or responsibility.
3. 3Reflect on what it has taught you about being part of a group, in your own terms.
4. 4Close with a short look forward. Keep it about you, not about the college's brochure.

Mistakes to avoid

• Describing the community at length while you barely appear in it.
• Listing every community you belong to instead of going deep on one.
• Claiming leadership you cannot show with a concrete example.
• Repeating the story from your personal essay.

An illustration

Illustration, about an invented student: a junior who works Saturday mornings at a hardware store writes about the retired contractors who come in to argue about the right way to fix things. Her role is small and specific: she started writing their advice on index cards for customers. The essay is not about the store. It is about how she listens, what she learned from people forty years older, and why she likes being the one who connects them to people who need help.

Questions