college essay about time travel

Essay on Time Travel

Students are often asked to write an essay on Time Travel in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Time Travel

What is time travel.

Time travel means moving back or forward in time. It’s like skipping chapters in a book. Instead of reading in order, you jump to the past or future. Imagine going back to see dinosaurs or forward to meet robots. It’s a popular idea in stories and movies.

Time Machines

In stories, people use time machines to travel in time. These machines can be anything from cars to watches. The idea is to control time as easily as turning a page in a book. But in real life, we can’t do this yet.

Why Time Travel Fascinates Us

Time travel excites us because it offers endless possibilities. We could fix mistakes or see what the future holds. It’s about exploring unknowns and asking “what if?” This curiosity makes time travel a captivating concept for all ages.

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250 Words Essay on Time Travel

What is time travel.

Time travel is the idea of being able to move forward or backward in time. It’s a popular concept in science fiction stories, but is it actually possible?

Is time travel possible?

We don’t know for sure if time travel is possible. Some scientists believe that it might be possible, but others think that it’s impossible. There are a lot of different theories about how time travel might work, but none of them have been proven.

How would time travel work?

There are a lot of different ideas about how time travel might work. One idea is that it might be possible to travel through a wormhole. A wormhole is a kind of shortcut through space-time. If you could find a wormhole, you could use it to travel to another time.

Would time travel be dangerous?

Time travel could be very dangerous. If you traveled to the past, you could accidentally change something that would have a big impact on the future. You could also end up in a time where you don’t know anyone or anything.

Time travel is a fascinating idea, but it’s important to remember that it’s just a theory. We don’t know for sure if it’s possible, and we don’t know how it would work. Even if it is possible, it would be very dangerous.

500 Words Essay on Time Travel

Time travel is a concept that has captured the imagination of humans for centuries. It is the idea of being able to move through time, either forward or backward, to a different point in history. While time travel remains a theoretical concept, it has been a popular theme in science fiction books, movies, and TV shows.

Theories of Time Travel

The grandfather paradox.

One of the biggest challenges to the idea of time travel is the grandfather paradox. This paradox states that if someone were to travel back in time and kill their own grandfather, it would create a logical contradiction. If the grandfather is killed, then the person who traveled back in time would never have been born. However, if the person was never born, then they would not have been able to travel back in time to kill their grandfather in the first place.

The Possibility of Time Travel

Despite the challenges, some scientists believe that time travel might be possible. They argue that the laws of physics do not explicitly rule out the possibility of time travel. However, they also admit that it is very unlikely that time travel will ever be possible for humans.

The Implications of Time Travel

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Time Travel: Is It Possible? Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Time is one of the most unique and uninvestigated phenomena in our world. Its unclear nature and peoples inability to manage it attracted our attention and created a solid basis for vigorous debates related to the interference in its structure. The brightest minds have been trying to answer this question and formulate the main regularities related to this process for years. Besides, the rapid evolution of science and technologies renewed interest in this topic and gave rise to vigorous debates around the possibility or impossibility of time travels. Nevertheless, at the moment, there is still no consensus as perspectives on the issue differ. The discovery of wormholes also preconditioned the undying interest in the topic. Thus, there are several modern theories that could be explored to prove either the possibility or impossibility of time travels.

When delving into the topic, it is crucial to understand the essence of time and its nature. One obviously knows the fact that it is one of the most powerful forces in the world. It could be defined as a continuous process of existence and numerous events that might occur in succession from the past through the present to the future. As comes from the definition, there are three states which are the past, present, and future. This subdivision contributes to the appearance of the debates related to the negotiation of the time barrier and moving in time from the past to the future and on the contrary, from the future to the past. The complexity of the problem gave rise to numerous speculations about the creation of the machine that could allow a person to move from one timeline to another.

However, the rise of spacefaring triggered the new wave of debates related to this sphere. Numerous scientists consider spaceships to be a sort of time machine that could be used to travel through time. When a person undergoes a serious acceleration, turns around, and comes back to earth, he/she might experience a time travel. In this regard, any spaceship that is able to reach a significant speed close to the light velocity could become a space machine. From this very perspective, every time machine has to travel through space. Additionally, the discovery of wormholes also provides numerous opportunities for travels through a higher-dimensional hyperspace (Tegmark 6).

In other words, we could speak about the existence of some alternative reality that might provide us with an opportunity to move in time and reach the needed destination point. This idea also correlates to the many-worlds interpretation of the universe. It means that there are numerous alternative worlds with similar histories and events that occurred during certain periods of time. If to accept this idea, we could state that a wormhole transfers us from our world to another, similar to ours but going through another timeline. Under these conditions, time travels become possible with the proviso that humanity will be able to build a spaceship that could experience a journey of this sort and understand the nature of wormholes. One realizes the fact that this task should be considered more than complex; however, the possibility to achieve this goal remains.

Additionally, the question of time travels comes close with the idea of time paradoxes that are expected to result in the collapse of the universe or some other significant problems. Besides, time paradox might appear when a time traveler interferes with the course of history and alters some events that conditioned the way the modern world looks. Moreover, this rude intervention is also suggested as one of the main reasons why time travels are impossible and time paradoxes serve as the guaranty that it will never happen.

Moreover, if to analyze the issue of time travels in terms of the single self-consistent timeline framework, it is possible to accept the possibility of the creation of a time machine that will move us to different eras. This theory states that if there is a certain event that might cause a time paradox that could change the history or the past, the probability of this event is zero and a time traveler is not able to create the time paradox. This theory becomes the key factor that preconditions the possibility of time travels and provides us with an opportunity to cogitate about the way we could explore the dimension of time. Besides, if to integrate the ideas of the multiverse and self-consistent timeline, we could obtain a solid basis for the further exploration of the given issue. For instance, in accordance with the first theory, using a spaceship and a wormhole we could move to some alternative universe where our alter-ego could be met.

However, we could easily communicate with him/her, exchange thoughts, feelings, emotions, and even give recommendations related to the future. These actions will not result in the appearance of the time paradox because of several reasons. Firsts, considering the fact that it is one of the dimensions that belong to the model of the multiverse, events that occur here are not necessarily the same as in our world and the future of this person will not alter because of our interference (Tegmark 4). Moreover, in accordance with the theory of a single self-consistent timeline, this meeting and its consequences could not be dangerous as it has already occurred. We could even kill our alter-ego, and this action will not have a significant impact on our own future. Resting on these theories, it is possible to assume the existence of at least theoretical possibility to create a time machine and travel through time. Hence, one should realize the fact that humanity does not possess technologies that might provide us with this very opportunity at the moment. The nature of wormholes remains unclear, and there is no spaceship that will be able to survive under the extreme conditions that are expected to be found in the heart of this unique phenomenon.

Altogether, the issue of time travels remains a topical question that gives rise to numerous debates. The evolution of science and significant progress in the exploration of space made this aspect especially exciting as these factors contributed to the appearance of the theoretical possibility to use a spaceship and a wormhole to move to another dimension and time. The undying interest to this question also conditioned the appearance of the many-world interpretation of our universe and the model of the multiverse that comprises all dimensions. Moreover, the single self-consistent timeline framework could also be used to support the idea of time travels and guarantee that it will not result in the appearance of numerous time paradoxes.

Works Cited

Tegmark, Max. The Multiverse Hierarchy . Edited by Bernard Carr, Cambridge University Press, 2007.

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21 Stellar Common App Essay Examples to Inspire Your College Essay

What’s covered:, what makes a good common app essay, is your common app essay strong enough.

When you begin writing your Common App essay, having an example to look at can help you understand how to effectively write your college essay so that it stands apart from others. 

These Common App essay examples demonstrate a strong writing ability and answer the prompt in a way that shows admissions officers something unique about the student. Once you’ve read some examples and are ready to get started, read our step-by-step guide for how to write a strong Common App essay.  

Please note: Looking at examples of real essays students have submitted to colleges can be very beneficial to get inspiration for your essays. You should never copy or plagiarize from these examples when writing your own essays. Colleges can tell when an essay isn’t genuine and will not view students favorably if they plagiarized. 

Read our Common App essay breakdown to get a comprehensive overview of this year’s supplemental prompts.

It’s Personal

The point of the Common App essay is to humanize yourself to a college admissions committee. The ultimate goal is to get them to choose you over someone else! You will have a better chance of achieving this goal if the admissions committee feels personally connected to you or invested in your story. When writing your Common App essay, you should explore your feelings, worldview, values, desires, and anything else that makes you uniquely you.

It’s Not Cliché

It is pretty easy to resort to clichés in college essays. This should be actively avoided! CollegeVine has identified the immigrant’s journey, sports injuries, and overcoming a challenging course as cliché topics . If you write about one of these topics, you have to work harder to stand out, so working with a more nuanced topic is often safer and easier.

It’s Well-Done

Colleges want good writers. They want students who can articulate their thoughts clearly and concisely (and creatively!). You should be writing and rewriting your essays, perfecting them as you go. Of course, make sure that your grammar and spelling are impeccable, but also put in time crafting your tone and finding your voice. This will also make your essay more personal and will make your reader feel more connected to you!

It’s Cohesive

Compelling Common App essays tell a cohesive story. Cohesion is primarily achieved through effective introductions and conclusions , which often contribute to the establishment of a clear theme or topic. Make sure that it is clear what you are getting at, but also don’t explicitly state what you are getting at—a successful essay speaks for itself.

Common App Essay Examples

Here are the current Common App prompts. Click the links to jump to the examples for a specific prompt, or keep reading to review the examples for all the prompts.

Prompt #1 :  Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.

Prompt #2 :  The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?

Prompt #3 :  Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea. What prompted your thinking? What was the outcome?

Prompt #4 : Reflect on something that someone has done for you that has made you happy or thankful in a surprising way. How has this gratitude affected or motivated you? (NOTE: We only have an example for the old prompt #4 about solving a problem, not this current one)

Prompt #5 :  Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others.

Prompt #6 :  Describe a topic, idea, or concept you find so engaging that it makes you lose all track of time. Why does it captivate you? What or who do you turn to when you want to learn more?

Prompt #7 :  Share an essay on any topic of your choice. It can be one you’ve already written, one that responds to a different prompt, or one of your own design.

Note: Names have been changed to protect the identity of the author and subjects.

Prompt #1: Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.

Prompt #1, example #1.

The room was silent except for the thoughts racing through my head. I led a spade from my hand and my opponent paused for a second, then played a heart. The numbers ran through my mind as I tried to consider every combination, calculating my next move. Finally, I played the ace of spades from the dummy and the rest of my clubs, securing the contract and 620 points when my partner ruffed at trick five. Next board.

It was the final of the 2015 United States Bridge Federation Under-26 Women’s Championship. The winning team would be selected to represent the United States in the world championship and my team was still in the running.

Contract bridge is a strategic and stochastic card game. Players from around the world gather at local clubs, regional events, and, in this case, national tournaments.

Going into the tournament, my team was excited; all the hours we had put into the game, from the lengthy midnight Skype sessions spent discussing boards to the coffee shop meetings spent memorizing conventions together, were about to pay off.

Halfway through, our spirits were still high, as we were only down by fourteen international match points which, out of the final total of about four hundred points, was virtually nothing and it was very feasible to catch up. Our excitement was short-lived, however, as sixty boards later, we found that we had lost the match and would not be chosen as the national team.

Initially, we were devastated. We had come so close and it seemed as if all the hours we had devoted to training had been utterly wasted. Yet as our team spent some time together reflecting upon the results, we gradually realized that the true value that we had gained wasn’t only the prospect of winning the national title, but also the time we had spent together exploring our shared passion. I chatted with the winning team and even befriended a few of them who offered us encouragement and advice.

Throughout my bridge career, although I’ve gained a respectable amount of masterpoints and awards, I’ve realized that the real reward comes from the extraordinary people I have met. I don’t need to travel cross-country to learn; every time I sit down at a table whether it be during a simple club game, a regional tournament or a national event, I find I’m always learning. 

I nod at the pair that’s always yelling at each other. They teach me the importance of sportsmanship and forgiveness.

I greet the legally blind man who can defeat most of the seeing players. He reminds me not to make excuses.

I chat with the friendly, elderly couple who, at ages ninety and ninety-two, have just gotten married two weeks ago. They teach me that it’s never too late to start anything.

I talk to the boy who’s attending Harvard and the girl who forewent college to start her own company. They show me that there is more than one path to success.

I congratulate the little kid running to his dad, excited to have won his very first masterpoints. He reminds me of the thrill of every first time and to never stop trying new things.

Just as much as I have benefitted from these life lessons, I aspire to give back to my bridge community as much as it has given me. I aspire to teach people how to play this complicated yet equally as exciting game. I aspire to never stop improving myself, both at and away from the bridge table.

Bridge has given me my roots and dared me to dream. What started as merely a hobby has become a community, a passion, a part of my identity. I aspire to live selflessly and help others reach their goals. I seek to take risks, embrace all results, even failure, and live unfettered from my own doubt.

This student draws readers in with a strong introduction. The essay starts ambiguous—“I led with a spade”—then intrigues readers by gradually revealing more information and details. This makes the reader want to keep reading (which is super important!) As the writer continues, there is a rather abrupt tone shift from suspenseful to explanatory with statements like “It was the final of the 2015 United States Bridge Federation Under-26 Women’s Championship” and “Contract bridge is a strategic and stochastic card game.” If you plan to start with an imagery-heavy, emotional, suspenseful, or dramatic introduction, you will need to transition to the content of your essay in a way that does not feel abrupt. 

You will often hear that essays need to “show, not tell.” This essay actually does both. First, the student tells readers the importance of bridge, saying “we gradually realized that the true value that we had gained wasn’t only the prospect of winning the national title, but also the time we had spent together exploring our shared passion” and “I’ve realized that the real reward comes from the extraordinary people I have met.” Then, the student shows the lessons they have learned from bridge through a series of parallel sentences: “I nod… sportsmanship and forgiveness” “I greet… not to make excuses” “I chat… it’s never too late to start anything” and so on. This latter strategy is much more effective than the former and is watered down because the student has already told us what we are supposed to get out of these sentences. Remember that your readers are intelligent and can draw their own conclusions. Avoid summarizing the moral of your story for them!

Overall, this essay is interesting and answers the prompt. We learn the importance of bridge to this student. The student has a solid grasp of language, a high-level vocabulary, and a valuable message, though they would be better off if they avoided summarizing their point and created more seamless transitions. 

Prompt #1, Example #2

Growing up, I always wanted to eat, play, visit, watch, and be it all: sloppy joes and spaetzle, Beanie Babies and Steiff, Cape Cod and the Baltic Sea, football and fussball, American and German.

My American parents relocated our young family to Berlin when I was three years old. My exposure to America was limited to holidays spent stateside and awfully dubbed Disney Channel broadcasts. As the few memories I had of living in the US faded, my affinity for Germany grew. I began to identify as “Germerican,” an ideal marriage of the two cultures. As a child, I viewed my biculturalism as a blessing. I possessed a native fluency in “Denglisch” and my family’s Halloween parties were legendary at a time when the holiday was just starting to gain popularity outside of the American Sector.

Insidiously, the magic I once felt in loving two homes was replaced by a deep-­rooted sense of rootlessness. I stopped feeling American when, while discussing World War II with my grandmother, I said “the US won.” She corrected me, insisting I use “we” when referring to the US’s actions. Before then, I hadn’t realized how directly people associated themselves with their countries. I stopped feeling German during the World Cup when my friends labeled me a “bandwagon fan” for rooting for Germany. Until that moment, my cheers had felt sincere. I wasn’t part of the “we” who won World Wars or World Cups. Caught in a twilight of foreign and familiar, I felt emotionally and psychologically disconnected from the two cultures most familiar to me.

After moving from Berlin to New York at age fifteen, my feelings of cultural homelessness thrived in my new environment. Looking and sounding American furthered my feelings of dislocation. Border patrol agents, teachers, classmates, neighbors, and relatives all “welcomed me home” to a land they could not understand was foreign to me. Americans confused me as I relied on Urban Dictionary to understand my peers, the Pledge of Allegiance seemed nationalistic, and the only thing familiar about Fahrenheit was the German after whom it was named. Too German for America and too American for Germany, I felt alienated from both. I wanted desperately to be a member of one, if not both, cultures.

During my first weeks in Scarsdale, I spent my free time googling “Berlin Family Seeks Teen” and “New Americans in Scarsdale.” The latter search proved most fruitful: I discovered Horizons, a nonprofit that empowers resettled refugees, or “New Americans,” to thrive. I started volunteering with Horizon’s children’s programs, playing with and tutoring young refugees.

It was there that I met Emily, a twelve­-year-­old Iraqi girl who lived next to Horizons. In between games and snacks, Emily would ask me questions about American life, touching on everything from Halloween to President Obama. Gradually, my confidence in my American identity grew as I recognized my ability to answer most of her questions. American culture was no longer completely foreign to me. I found myself especially qualified to work with young refugees; my experience growing up in a country other than that of my parents’ was similar enough to that of the refugee children Horizons served that I could empathize with them and offer advice. Together, we worked through conflicting allegiances, homesickness, and stretched belonging.

Forging a special, personal bond with young refugees proved a cathartic outlet for my insecurities as it taught me to value my past. My transculturalism allowed me to help young refugees integrate into American life, and, in doing so, I was able to adjust myself. Now, I have an appreciation of myself that I never felt before. “Home” isn’t the digits in a passport or ZIP code but a sense of contentedness. By helping a young refugee find comfort, happiness, and home in America, I was finally able to find those same things for myself.

Due to their endearing (and creative) use of language—with early phrases like “sloppy joes and spaetzle” as well as  “Germerican” and “Denglisch”—readers are inclined to like this writer from the get-go. Though the essay shifts from this lighthearted introduction to more serious subject matter around the third paragraph, the shift is not abrupt or jarring. This is because the student invites readers to feel the transition with them through their inclusion of various anecdotes that inspired their “feelings of cultural homelessness.” And our journey does not end there—we go back to America with the student and see how their former struggles become strengths.

Ultimately, this essay is successful due to its satisfying ending. Because readers experience the student’s struggles with them, we also feel the resolution. The conclusion of this essay is a prime example of the “Same, but Different” technique described in our article on How to End Your College Essay . As the student describes how, in the end, their complicated cultural identity still exists but transitions to a source of strength, readers are left feeling happy for the student. This means that they have formed a connection with the student, which is the ultimate goal!

Prompt #1, Example #3

“1…2…3…4 pirouettes ! New record!” My friends cheered as I landed my turns. Pleased with my progress, I gazed down at my worn-out pointe shoes. The sweltering blisters, numbing ice-baths, and draining late-night practices did not seem so bad after all. Next goal: five turns.

For as long as I can remember, ballet, in all its finesse and glamor, had kept me driven day to day. As a child, the lithe ballerinas, donning ethereal costumes as they floated across the stage, were my motivation. While others admired Messi and Adele, I idolized Carlos Acosta, principal dancer of the Royal Ballet. 

As I devoted more time and energy towards my craft, I became obsessed with improving my technique. I would stretch for hours after class, forcing my leg one inch higher in an effort to mirror the Dance Magazine cover girls . I injured my feet and ruined pair after pair of pointe shoes, turning on wood, cement, and even grass to improve my balance as I spun. At competitions, the dancers with the 180-degree leg extensions, endless turns, and soaring leaps—the ones who received “Bravos!” from the roaring audience—further pushed me to refine my skills and perfect my form. I believed that, with enough determination, I would one day attain their level of perfection. Reaching the quadruple- pirouette milestone only intensified my desire to accomplish even more. 

My efforts seemed to have come to fruition two summers ago when I was accepted to dance with Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet at their renowned New York City summer intensive. I walked into my first session eager to learn from distinguished ballet masters and worldly dancers, already anticipating my improvement. Yet, as I danced alongside the accomplished ballerinas, I felt out of place. Despite their clean technique and professional training, they did not aim for glorious leg extensions or prodigious leaps. When they performed their turn combinations, most of them only executed two turns as I attempted four. 

“Dancers, double- pirouettes only.” 

Taken aback and confused, I wondered why our teacher expected so little from us. The other ballerinas seemed content, gracing the studio with their simple movements. 

As I grew closer with my Moscow roommates, I gradually learned that their training emphasized the history of the art form instead of stylistic tricks. Rather than show off their physical ability, their performances aimed to convey a story, one that embodied the rich culture of ballet and captured both the legacy of the dancers before them and their own artistry. As I observed my friends more intently in repertoire class, I felt the pain of the grief-stricken white swan from Swan Lake , the sass of the flirtatious Kitri from Don Quijote, and I gradually saw what I had overlooked before. My definition of talent had been molded by crowd-pleasing elements—whirring pirouettes , gravity-defying leaps, and mind-blowing leg extensions. This mindset slowly stripped me from the roots of my passion and my personal connection with ballet. 

With the Bolshoi, I learned to step back and explore the meaning behind each step and the people behind the scenes. Ballet carries history in its movements, from the societal values of the era to each choreographer’s unique flair. As I uncovered the messages behind each pirouette, kick, and jump, my appreciation for ballet grew beyond my obsession with raw athleticism and developed into a love for the art form’s emotive abilities in bridging the dancers with the audience. My journey as an artist has allowed me to see how technical execution is only the means to a greater understanding between dancer and spectator, between storyteller and listener. The elegance and complexity of ballet does not revolve around astonishing stunts but rather the evocative strength and artistry manifested in the dancer, in me. It is the combination of sentiments, history, tradition, and passion that has allowed ballet and its lessons of human connection to become my lifestyle both on and off stage.

The primary strength of this essay is the honesty and authenticity of the student’s writing. It is purposefully reflective. Intentional language creates a clear character arc that begins with an eager young ballerina and ends with the student reflecting on their past. 

Readers are easily able to picture the passion and intensity of the young dancer through the writer’s engagement with words like “obsessed,” “forcing,” and “ruined” in the second paragraph. Then, we see how intensity becomes pride as they “wondered why our teacher expected so little from us.” And ultimately, we see the writer humbled as they are exposed to the deeper meaning behind what they have worked so hard for. This arc is outstanding, and the student’s musings about ballet in the concl usion position them as vulnerable and reflective (and thus, appealing to admissions officers!)

The main weakness of this essay (though this is a stellar essay) is its formulaic beginning. While dialogue can be an effective tool for starting your essay, this student’s introduction feels a bit stilted as the dialogue does not match the overall reflective tone of the essay. Perhaps, in place of “Next goal: five turns,” the student could have posed a question or foreshadowed the growth they ultimately describe.

Prompt #1, Example #4

My paintbrush dragged a flurry of acrylic, the rich colors attaching to each groove in my canvas’s texture. The feeling was euphoric.

From a young age, painting has been my solace. Between the stress of my packed high school days filled with classes and extracurriculars, the glide of my paintbrush was my emotional outlet.

I opened a fresh canvas and began. The amalgamation of assorted colors in my palette melded harmoniously: dark and light, cool and warm, brilliant and dull. They conjoined, forming shades and surfaces sharp, smooth, and ridged. The textures of my paint strokes — powdery, glossy, jagged — gave my painting a tone, as if it had a voice of its own, sometimes shrieking, sometimes whispering.

Rough indigo blue. The repetitive upward pulls of my brush formed layers on my canvas. Staring into the deep blue, I felt transported to the bottom of the pool I swim in daily. I looked upward to see a layer of dense water between myself and the person I aspire to be, an ideal blurred by filmy ripples. Rough blue encapsulates my amorphous, conflicting identity, catalyzed by words spewed by my peers about my “oily hair” and “smelly food”. They caused my ever present disdain toward cultural assemblies; the lehenga I wore felt burdensome. My identity quivers like the indigo storm I painted — a duel between my self-deprecating, validation-seeking self, and the proud self I desire to be. My haphazard paint strokes released my internal turbulence.

Smooth orange-hued green. I laid the color in melodious strokes, forming my figure. The warmer green transitions from the rough blue — while they share elements, they also diverge. My firm brushstrokes felt like the way I felt on my first day as a media intern at KBOO, my local volunteer-driven radio station, committed to the voices of the marginalized. As a naturally introverted speaker, I was forced out of my comfort zone when tasked with documenting a KBOO art exhibition for social media, speaking with hosts to share their diverse, underrepresented backgrounds and inspirations. A rhythmic green strength soon shoved me past internal blue turbulence. My communication skills which were built by two years of Speech and Debate unleashed — I recognized that making a social change through media required amplifying unique voices and perspectives, both my own and others. The powerful green strokes that fill my canvas entrench my growth.

Bright, voluminous coral, hinted with magenta and yellow. I dabbed the color over my figure, giving my painting dimension. The paint, speckled, added depth on every inch it coated. As I moved the color in random but purposeful movements, the vitality ushered into my painting brought a smile across my face. It reminded me of the encounters I had with my cubicle-mate in my sophomore year academic autism research internship, seemingly insignificant moments in my lifelong journey that, in retrospect, wove unique threads into my tapestry. The kindness she brought into work inspired my compassion, while her stories of struggling with ADHD in the workplace bolstered my empathy towards different experiences. Our conversations added blobs of a nonuniform bright color in my painting, binding a new perspective in me.

I added in my final strokes, each contributing an element to my piece. As I scanned my canvas, I observed these elements. Detail added nuance into smaller pictures; they embodied complexities within color, texture, and hue, each individually delivering a narrative. But together, they formed a piece of art— art that could be interpreted as a whole or broken apart but still delivering as a means of communication.

I find beauty in media because of this. I can adapt a complex narrative to be deliverable, each component telling a story. Appreciating these nuances — the light, dark, smooth, and rough — has cultivated my growth mindset. My life-long painting never finishes. It is ever-expanding, absorbing the novel textures and colors I encounter daily.

This essay is distinct from others due to its melodic, lyrical form. This is primarily achieved because the student’s form follows the movements of the paintbrush that they use to scaffold their essay. As readers, we simply flow through the essay, occasionally picking up bits of information about its creator. Without even realizing it, by the end of the essay, admissions officers will know that this student is a swimmer, was in Speech and Debate, is Indian, and has had multiple internships.

A major strength of this essay is the command of language that the student demonstrates. This essay was not simply written, it was crafted. Universities are, of course, interested in the talents, goals, and interests of applicants, but an essay being well-written can be equally important. Writing skills are important because your reader will not learn about your talents, goals, and interests if they aren’t engaged in your essay, but they are also important because admissions officers know that being able to articulate your thoughts is important for success in all future careers.

While this essay is well-written, there are a few moments where it falls out of the flow and feels more like a student advertising their successes. For example, the phrases “media intern at KBOO” and “autism research internship” work better on a resume than they do in this essay. Admissions officers have a copy of your resume and can check your internship experiences after reading your essay! If you are going to use a unique writing style or narrative form, lean into it; don’t try to hybridize it with the standard college essay form. Your boldness will be attractive to admissions officers.

Readers are easily able to picture the passion and intensity of the young dancer through the writer’s engagement with words like “obsessed,” “forcing,” and “ruined” in the second paragraph. Then, we see how intensity becomes pride as they “wondered why our teacher expected so little from us.” And ultimately, we see the writer humbled as they are exposed to the deeper meaning behind what they have worked so hard for. This arc is outstanding, and the student’s musings about ballet in the conclusion position them as vulnerable and reflective (and thus, appealing to admissions officers!)

Prompt #2: The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?

Prompt #2, example #1.

“You ruined my life!” After months of quiet anger, my brother finally confronted me. To my shame, I had been appallingly ignorant of his pain.

Despite being twins, Max and I are profoundly different. Having intellectual interests from a young age that, well, interested very few of my peers, I often felt out of step in comparison with my highly-social brother. Everything appeared to come effortlessly for Max and, while we share an extremely tight bond, his frequent time away with friends left me feeling more and more alone as we grew older.

When my parents learned about The Green Academy, we hoped it would be an opportunity for me to find not only an academically challenging environment, but also – perhaps more importantly – a community. This meant transferring the family from Drumfield to Kingston. And while there was concern about Max, we all believed that given his sociable nature, moving would be far less impactful on him than staying put might be on me.

As it turned out, Green Academy was everything I’d hoped for. I was ecstatic to discover a group of students with whom I shared interests and could truly engage. Preoccupied with new friends and a rigorous course load, I failed to notice that the tables had turned. Max, lost in the fray and grappling with how to make connections in his enormous new high school, had become withdrawn and lonely. It took me until Christmas time – and a massive argument – to recognize how difficult the transition had been for my brother, let alone that he blamed me for it.

Through my own journey of searching for academic peers, in addition to coming out as gay when I was 12, I had developed deep empathy for those who had trouble fitting in. It was a pain I knew well and could easily relate to. Yet after Max’s outburst, my first response was to protest that our parents – not I – had chosen to move us here. In my heart, though, I knew that regardless of who had made the decision, we ended up in Kingston for my benefit. I was ashamed that, while I saw myself as genuinely compassionate, I had been oblivious to the heartache of the person closest to me. I could no longer ignore it – and I didn’t want to.

We stayed up half the night talking, and the conversation took an unexpected turn. Max opened up and shared that it wasn’t just about the move. He told me how challenging school had always been for him, due to his dyslexia, and that the ever-present comparison to me had only deepened his pain.

We had been in parallel battles the whole time and, yet, I only saw that Max was in distress once he experienced problems with which I directly identified. I’d long thought Max had it so easy – all because he had friends. The truth was, he didn’t need to experience my personal brand of sorrow in order for me to relate – he had felt plenty of his own.

My failure to recognize Max’s suffering brought home for me the profound universality and diversity of personal struggle; everyone has insecurities, everyone has woes, and everyone – most certainly – has pain. I am acutely grateful for the conversations he and I shared around all of this, because I believe our relationship has been fundamentally strengthened by a deeper understanding of one another. Further, this experience has reinforced the value of constantly striving for deeper sensitivity to the hidden struggles of those around me. I won’t make the mistake again of assuming that the surface of someone’s life reflects their underlying story.

Here is a prime example that you don’t have to have fabulous imagery or flowery prose to write a successful Common App essay. You just have to be clear and say something that matters. This essay is simple and beautiful. It almost feels like having a conversation with a friend and learning that they are an even better person than you already thought they were.

Through this narrative, readers learn a lot about the writer—where they’re from, what their family life is like, what their challenges were as a kid, and even their sexuality. We also learn a lot about their values—notably, the value they place on awareness, improvement, and consideration of others. Though they never explicitly state it (which is great because it is still crystal clear!), this student’s ending of “I won’t make the mistake again of assuming that the surface of someone’s life reflects their underlying story” shows that they are constantly striving for improvement and finding lessons anywhere they can get them in life.

The only part of this essay that could use a bit of work is the introduction. A short introduction can be effective, but this short first paragraph feels thrown in at the last minute and like it is missing its second half. If you are keeping your introduction short, make it matter.

Prompt #2, Example #2

Was I no longer the beloved daughter of nature, whisperer of trees? Knee-high rubber boots, camouflage, bug spray—I wore the garb and perfume of a proud wild woman, yet there I was, hunched over the pathetic pile of stubborn sticks, utterly stumped, on the verge of tears. As a child, I had considered myself a kind of rustic princess, a cradler of spiders and centipedes, who was serenaded by mourning doves and chickadees, who could glide through tick-infested meadows and emerge Lyme-free. I knew the cracks of the earth like the scars on my own rough palms. Yet here I was, ten years later, incapable of performing the most fundamental outdoor task: I could not, for the life of me, start a fire. 

Furiously I rubbed the twigs together—rubbed and rubbed until shreds of skin flaked from my fingers. No smoke. The twigs were too young, too sticky-green; I tossed them away with a shower of curses, and began tearing through the underbrush in search of a more flammable collection. My efforts were fruitless. Livid, I bit a rejected twig, determined to prove that the forest had spurned me, offering only young, wet bones that would never burn. But the wood cracked like carrots between my teeth—old, brittle, and bitter. Roaring and nursing my aching palms, I retreated to the tent, where I sulked and awaited the jeers of my family. 

Rattling their empty worm cans and reeking of fat fish, my brother and cousins swaggered into the campsite. Immediately, they noticed the minor stick massacre by the fire pit and called to me, their deep voices already sharp with contempt. 

“Where’s the fire, Princess Clara?” they taunted. “Having some trouble?” They prodded me with the ends of the chewed branches and, with a few effortless scrapes of wood on rock, sparked a red and roaring flame. My face burned long after I left the fire pit. The camp stank of salmon and shame. 

In the tent, I pondered my failure. Was I so dainty? Was I that incapable? I thought of my hands, how calloused and capable they had been, how tender and smooth they had become. It had been years since I’d kneaded mud between my fingers; instead of scaling a white pine, I’d practiced scales on my piano, my hands softening into those of a musician—fleshy and sensitive. And I’d gotten glasses, having grown horrifically nearsighted; long nights of dim lighting and thick books had done this. I couldn’t remember the last time I had lain down on a hill, barefaced, and seen the stars without having to squint. Crawling along the edge of the tent, a spider confirmed my transformation—he disgusted me, and I felt an overwhelming urge to squash him. 

Yet, I realized I hadn’t really changed—I had only shifted perspective. I still eagerly explored new worlds, but through poems and prose rather than pastures and puddles. I’d grown to prefer the boom of a bass over that of a bullfrog, learned to coax a different kind of fire from wood, having developed a burn for writing rhymes and scrawling hypotheses. 

That night, I stayed up late with my journal and wrote about the spider I had decided not to kill. I had tolerated him just barely, only shrieking when he jumped—it helped to watch him decorate the corners of the tent with his delicate webs, knowing that he couldn’t start fires, either. When the night grew cold and the embers died, my words still smoked—my hands burned from all that scrawling—and even when I fell asleep, the ideas kept sparking—I was on fire, always on fire.

This Common App essay is well-written. The student is showing the admissions officers their ability to articulate their points beautifully and creatively. It starts with vivid images like that of the “rustic princess, a cradler of spiders and centipedes, who was serenaded by mourning doves and chickadees, who could glide through tick-infested meadows and emerge Lyme-free.” And because the prose is flowery, the writer can get away with metaphors like “I knew the cracks of the earth like the scars on my own rough palms” that might sound cheesy without the clear command of the English language that the writer quickly establishes.

In addition to being well-written, this essay is thematically cohesive. It begins with the simple introduction “Fire!” and ends with the following image: “When the night grew cold and the embers died, my words still smoked—my hands burned from all that scrawling—and even when I fell asleep, the ideas kept sparking—I was on fire, always on fire.” This full-circle approach leaves readers satisfied and impressed.

While dialogue often comes off as cliche or trite, this student effectively incorporates their family members saying “Where’s the fire, Princess Clara?” This is achieved through the apt use of the verb “taunted” to characterize the questioning and through the question’s thematic connection to the earlier image of the student as a rustic princess. Similarly, rhetorical questions can feel randomly placed in essays, but this student’s inclusion of the questions “Was I so dainty?” and “Was I that incapable?” feels perfectly justified after they establish that they were pondering their failure.

Quite simply, this essay shows how quality writing can make a simple story outstandingly compelling.

Prompt #2, Example #3

The muffled voices behind thin walls heralded trouble.

They were fighting about money.

It wasn’t the first time this had happened and it wasn’t going to be the last. It was one of those countless nights I had to spend curled up under the blanket while pretending to be asleep. My father had been unemployed for five years now, and my mother, a local kindergarten teacher, was struggling to support the family alone. Our situation was bleak: Savings had run out and my parents could no longer hide our lack of money from me. To make matters worse, I was a few weeks away from starting high school, which would inevitably lead to college, yet another financial stressor for my family.

The argument didn’t sound like it would end soon.

“Why did you spend money on that?” my mother said, with an elongated sigh.

“I had to,” my father said, decidedly.

Every fight over the years had left me in despair and the idea of going through another fight daunted me. I had looked forward to my teen years all my life, an age that allows, for the first time, more responsibility. Indeed, after this fateful night, after my fourteenth birthday, I felt a mounting responsibility to help my family, and started brainstorming.

Always being fascinated by computers, I spent my childhood burying myself under computer cabinets, experimenting with computer parts. Naturally, I wondered if my skills in this area might be marketable.

The next morning, my friend, Naba, mentioned that her computer wasn’t working. A tuk-tuk ride later, and I was at her doorstep, and her mother was leading me to her room. I was off to work: I began examining her computer, like a surgeon carefully manages his scalpels and tools. A proper diagnosis was not far from reach, as I realized a broken pin in her computer’s SATA slot. After an hour of work, and a short trip to the hardware store, I successfully fixed the computer. To my pleasant surprise, Naba’s mother drew out two fresh 500 Rupee notes. One covered the cost of the parts I bought and the other was a token of appreciation. Bidding her goodbye, I went straight back home and put one of the 500 Rupee notes inside my family’s “savings-jar.”

Later that day, I devised a plan. I told my friends to spread the word that I was available to fix computers. At first, I got only one or two calls per week. I would pick up the computer from my client’s home, fix it quickly, and return it, thus earning myself a commission. While I couldn’t market my services at a competitive price, because I wasn’t able to buy the parts wholesale, I compensated by providing convenience. All my clients had to do was call me once and the rest was taken care of. Thus, my business had the best customer service in town.

At the beginning of my junior year, after two years of expanding my business through various avenues, I started buying computer parts from hardware suppliers in bulk at a cheaper rate. My business grew exponentially after that. 

Before long, I was my town’s go-to tech person. In this journey throughout high school, I started realizing that I had to create my own opportunities and not just curl up under a blanket, seeking only comfort, as I used to. Interacting with people from all walks of life became my forte and a sense of work ethic developed in me. My business required me to be an all-rounder– have the technical skills, be an easily approachable person, and manage cash flow. Slowly becoming better at this, I even managed to sway admins of a local institution to outsource their computer hardware purchases and repairs through me. As my business upsized throughout the years, I went from being helpless to autonomous – the teenager I always aspired to be.

This essay truly feels like a story—almost making you forget you are reading a college essay. The student’s voice is strong throughout the entire essay and they are able to give us insight into their thoughts, feelings, and motivations at every step of the story. Letting the reader into personal challenges like financial struggles can be daunting in a college essay, but the way this student used that setback to establish an emotional ethos to their narrative was well done.

Because the essay is essentially just telling a story, there’s a very natural flow that makes it enjoyable and easy to read. The student establishes the conflict at the beginning, then describes their solution and how they implemented it, and finally concludes with the lessons they took away from this experience. Transitions at the beginning of paragraphs effortlessly show the passage of time and how the student has progressed through the story.

Another reason this essay is so successful is because of the abundance of details. The reader truly feels like they are hiding in the room with the student as their parents yell because of the inclusion of quotes from the argument. We understand the precision and care they have for fixing computers because of the allusion to a surgeon with their scalpel. Not only does this imagery make the story more enticing, it also helps the reader gain a deeper appreciation for the type of person this student is and the adversity they have overcome.

If there were one thing this essay could do to improve, it would be to include a resolution to the conflict from the beginning. The student tells us how this business helped them grow as a person, but we don’t ever get to find out if they were able to lessen the financial burden on their parents or if they continued to struggle despite the student working hard. It doesn’t have to be a happy ending, but it would be nice to return to the conflict and acknowledge the effect they had on it, especially since this prompt is all about facing challenges.

Prompt #3: Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea. What prompted your thinking? What was the outcome?

Prompt #3, example #1.

When I was younger, I was adamant that no two foods on my plate touch. As a result, I often used a second plate to prevent such an atrocity. In many ways, I learned to separate different things this way from my older brothers, Nate and Rob. Growing up, I idolized both of them. Nate was a performer, and I insisted on arriving early to his shows to secure front row seats, refusing to budge during intermission for fear of missing anything. Rob was a three-sport athlete, and I attended his games religiously, waving worn-out foam cougar paws and cheering until my voice was hoarse. My brothers were my role models. However, while each was talented, neither was interested in the other’s passion. To me, they represented two contrasting ideals of what I could become: artist or athlete. I believed I had to choose.

And for a long time, I chose athlete. I played soccer, basketball, and lacrosse and viewed myself exclusively as an athlete, believing the arts were not for me. I conveniently overlooked that since the age of five, I had been composing stories for my family for Christmas, gifts that were as much for me as them, as I loved writing. So when in tenth grade, I had the option of taking a creative writing class, I was faced with a question: could I be an athlete and a writer? After much debate, I enrolled in the class, feeling both apprehensive and excited. When I arrived on the first day of school, my teacher, Ms. Jenkins, asked us to write down our expectations for the class. After a few minutes, eraser shavings stubbornly sunbathing on my now-smudged paper, I finally wrote, “I do not expect to become a published writer from this class. I just want this to be a place where I can write freely.”

Although the purpose of the class never changed for me, on the third “submission day,” – our time to submit writing to upcoming contests and literary magazines – I faced a predicament. For the first two submission days, I had passed the time editing earlier pieces, eventually (pretty quickly) resorting to screen snake when hopelessness made the words look like hieroglyphics. I must not have been as subtle as I thought, as on the third of these days, Ms. Jenkins approached me. After shifting from excuse to excuse as to why I did not submit my writing, I finally recognized the real reason I had withheld my work: I was scared. I did not want to be different, and I did not want to challenge not only others’ perceptions of me, but also my own. I yielded to Ms. Jenkin’s pleas and sent one of my pieces to an upcoming contest.

By the time the letter came, I had already forgotten about the contest. When the flimsy white envelope arrived in the mail, I was shocked and ecstatic to learn that I had received 2nd place in a nationwide writing competition. The next morning, however, I discovered Ms. Jenkins would make an announcement to the whole school exposing me as a poet. I decided to own this identity and embrace my friends’ jokes and playful digs, and over time, they have learned to accept and respect this part of me. I have since seen more boys at my school identifying themselves as writers or artists.

I no longer see myself as an athlete and a poet independently, but rather I see these two aspects forming a single inseparable identity – me. Despite their apparent differences, these two disciplines are quite similar, as each requires creativity and devotion. I am still a poet when I am lacing up my cleats for soccer practice and still an athlete when I am building metaphors in the back of my mind – and I have realized ice cream and gummy bears taste pretty good together.

This essay is cohesive as it centers around the theme of identity and the ability for two identities to coexist simultaneously (an interesting theme!). It uses the Full Circle ending strategy as it starts with a metaphor about food touching and ends with “I have realized ice cream and gummy bears taste pretty good together.”

The main issue with this essay is that it could come off as cliché, which could be irritating for admissions officers. The story described is notably similar to High School Musical (“I decided to own this identity and embrace my friends’ jokes and playful digs, and over time, they have learned to accept and respect this part of me”) and feels slightly overstated. 

At times, this essay is also confusing. In the first paragraph, it feels like the narrative is actually going to be about separating your food (and is somehow going to relate to the older brothers?). It is not entirely clear that this is a metaphor. Also, when the writer references the third submission day and then works backward to explain what a submission day is and that there are multiple throughout the semester, the timeline gets unnecessarily confusing. Reworking the way this paragraph unfolded would have been more compelling and less distracting.

Overall, this essay was interesting but could have been more polished to be more effective.

Prompt #3, Example #2

I walked into my middle school English class, and noticed a stranger behind my teacher’s desk. “Hello,” she said. “Today I will be your substitute teacher.” I groaned internally. “Let me start off by calling roll. Ally?” “Here!” exclaimed Ally. “Jack?” “Here.” “Rachel?” “Here.” “Freddie?” “Present.” And then– “…?” The awkward pause was my cue. “It’s Jasina,” I started. “You can just call me Jas. Here.” “Oh, Jasina. That’s unique.” The word “unique” made me cringe. I slumped back in my seat. The substitute continued calling roll, and class continued as if nothing had happened. Nothing had happened. Just a typical moment in a middle school, but I hated every second of it.

My name is not impossible to pronounce. It appears challenging initially, but once you hear it, “Jas-een-a”, then you can manage it. My nickname, Jas (pronounced “Jazz”), is what most people call me anyway, so I don’t have to deal with mispronunciation often. I am thankful that my parents named me Jasina (a Hebrew name), but whenever someone hears my name for the first time, they comment, and I assume they’re making assumptions about me. “Wow, Jas is a cool name.” She must be pretty cool.“I’ve never heard the name Jasina before.” She must be from somewhere exotic. “Jas, like Jazz?” She must be musical and artsy. None of these assumptions are bad, but they all add up to the same thing: She must be unique. 

When I was little, these sentiments felt more like commands than assumptions. I thought I had to be the most unique child of all time, which was a daunting task, but I tried. I was the only kid in the second grade to color the sun red. I knew it was really yellow, but you could always tell which drawings were mine. During snack time, we could choose between apple juice and grape juice. I liked apple juice more, but if everyone else was choosing apple, then I had to choose grape. This was how I lived my life, and it was exhausting. I tried to continue this habit into middle school, but it backfired. When everyone became obsessed with things like skinny jeans and Justin Bieber and blue mascara (that was a weird trend), my resistance of the norm made me socially awkward. I couldn’t talk to people about anything because we had nothing in common. I was too different. 

After 8th grade, I moved to Georgia, and I was dreading being the odd one out among kids who had grown up together. Then I discovered that my freshman year would be Cambridge High School’s inaugural year. Since there were students coming in from 5 different schools, there was no real sense of “normal”. I panicked. If there was no normal, then how could I be unique? That’s when I realized that I had spent so much energy going against the grain that I had no idea what my true interests were or what I really cared about. 

It was time to find out. I stopped concentrating on what everyone else was doing and started to focus on myself. I joined the basketball team, I performed in the school musical, and I enrolled in Chorus, all of which were firsts for me. I took art classes, joined clubs, and did whatever I thought would make me happy. And it paid off. I was no longer socially awkward. In fact, because I was involved in so many unrelated activities, I was socially flexible. My friends and I had things in common, but there was no one who could say that I was exactly like anyone else. I had finally become my own person.

My father named me Jasina because he wanted my nickname to be “Jazz.” According to Webster, “jazz” is “music characterized by syncopated rhythms, improvisation, and deliberate distortions of pitch.” Basically, jazz is music that is off-beat and unpredictable. It cannot be strictly defined. 

That sounds about right. 

Right off the bat, this essay starts extremely strong. The description of attendance in a class with ample quotes, awkward pauses, and the student’s internal dialogue immediately puts us in the middle of the action and establishes a lot of sympathy for this student before we’ve learned anything else. 

The strength of this essay continues into the second paragraph where the use of quotes, italics, and interjections from the student continues. All of these literary tools help the student express her voice and allow the reader to understand what this student goes through on a daily basis. Rather than just telling the reader people make assumptions about her name, she shows us what these assumptions look and sound like, and exactly how they make her feel.

The essay further shows us how the student approached her name by providing concrete examples of times she’s been intentionally unique throughout her life. Describing her drawing red suns and choosing grape juice bring her personality to life and allow her to express her deviance from the “norm” in a much more engaging and visual way than simply telling the reader she would go against the grain to be different on purpose.

One part of the essay that was a bit weaker than the others was the paragraph about her in high school. Although it was still well written and did a nice job of demonstrating how she got involved in multiple groups to find her new identity, it lacked the same level of showing employed in previous paragraphs. It would have been nice to see what “socially flexible” means either through a conversation she had with her friends or an example of a time she combined her interests from different groups in a way that was uniquely her.

The essay finishes off how it started: extremely strong. Taking a step back to fully explain the origin of her name neatly brings together everything mentioned in this essay. This ending is especially successful because she never explicitly states that her personality aligns with the definition of jazz. Instead, she relies on the points she has made throughout the essay to stick in the reader’s memory so they are able to draw the connection themselves, making for a much more satisfying ending for the reader.

Prompt #4 (OLD PROMPT; NOT THE CURRENT PROMPT): Describe a problem you’ve solved or a problem you’d like to solve. It can be an intellectual challenge, a research query, an ethical dilemma – anything that is of personal importance, no matter the scale. Explain its significance to you and what steps you took or could be taken to identify a solution.

Prompt #4, example #1.

“Advanced females ages 13 to 14 please proceed to staging with your coaches at this time.” 

Skittering around the room, eyes wide and pleading, I frantically explained my situation to nearby coaches. The seconds ticked away in my head; every polite refusal increased my desperation. 

Despair weighed me down. I sank to my knees as a stream of competitors, coaches, and officials flowed around me. My dojang had no coach, and the tournament rules prohibited me from competing without one. 

Although I wanted to remain strong, doubts began to cloud my mind. I could not help wondering: what was the point of perfecting my skills if I would never even compete? The other members of my team, who had found coaches minutes earlier, attempted to comfort me, but I barely heard their words. They couldn’t understand my despair at being left on the outside, and I never wanted them to understand. 

Since my first lesson 12 years ago, the members of my dojang have become family. I have watched them grow up, finding my own happiness in theirs. Together, we have honed our kicks, blocks, and strikes. We have pushed one another to aim higher and become better martial artists. Although my dojang had searched for a reliable coach for years, we had not found one. When we attended competitions in the past, my teammates and I had always gotten lucky and found a sympathetic coach. Now, I knew this practice was unsustainable. It would devastate me to see the other members of my dojang in my situation, unable to compete and losing hope as a result. My dojang needed a coach, and I decided it was up to me to find one. 

I first approached the adults in the dojang – both instructors and members’ parents. However, these attempts only reacquainted me with polite refusals. Everyone I asked told me they couldn’t devote multiple weekends per year to competitions. I soon realized that I would have become the coach myself. 

At first, the inner workings of tournaments were a mystery to me. To prepare myself for success as a coach, I spent the next year as an official and took coaching classes on the side. I learned everything from motivational strategies to technical, behind-the-scenes components of Taekwondo competitions. Though I emerged with new knowledge and confidence in my capabilities, others did not share this faith. 

Parents threw me disbelieving looks when they learned that their children’s coach was only a child herself. My self-confidence was my armor, deflecting their surly glances. Every armor is penetrable, however, and as the relentless barrage of doubts pounded my resilience, it began to wear down. I grew unsure of my own abilities. 

Despite the attack, I refused to give up. When I saw the shining eyes of the youngest students preparing for their first competition, I knew I couldn’t let them down. To quit would be to set them up to be barred from competing like I was. The knowledge that I could solve my dojang’s longtime problem motivated me to overcome my apprehension. 

Now that my dojang flourishes at competitions, the attacks on me have weakened, but not ended. I may never win the approval of every parent; at times, I am still tormented by doubts, but I find solace in the fact that members of my dojang now only worry about competing to the best of their abilities. 

Now, as I arrive at a tournament with my students, I close my eyes and remember the past. I visualize the frantic search for a coach and the chaos amongst my teammates as we competed with one another to find coaches before the staging calls for our respective divisions. I open my eyes to the exact opposite scene. Lacking a coach hurt my ability to compete, but I am proud to know that no member of my dojang will have to face that problem again.

This essay is great because it has a strong introduction and a strong conclusion. The introduction is notably suspenseful and draws readers into the story. Because we know it is a college essay, we can assume that the student is one of the competitors, but at the same time, this introduction feels intentionally ambiguous as if the writer could be a competitor, a coach, a sibling of a competitor, or anyone else in the situation.

As we continue reading the essay, we learn that the writer is, in fact, the competitor. Readers also learn a lot about the student’s values as we hear their thoughts: “I knew I couldn’t let them down. To quit would be to set them up to be barred from competing like I was.” Ultimately, the conflict and inner and outer turmoil is resolved through the “Same, but Different” ending technique as the student places themself in the same environment that we saw in the intro, but experiencing it differently due to their actions throughout the narrative. This is a very compelling strategy!

The main weakness of this essay is that it is slightly confusing at times—how the other students found coaches feels unintentionally under-explained (a simple phrase like “through pleading and attracting sympathy” in the fourth paragraph could have served the writer well) and a dojang is never defined. Additionally, the turn of the essay or “volta” could’ve packed a bigger punch. It is put quite simply with “I soon realized that I would have become the coach myself.” A more suspenseful reveal could’ve served the author well because more drama did come later.

Prompt #5: Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others.

Prompt #5, example #1.

Tears streamed down my face and my mind was paralyzed with fear. Sirens blared, but the silent panic in my own head was deafening. I was muted by shock. A few hours earlier, I had anticipated a vacation in Washington, D.C., but unexpectedly, I was rushing to the hospital behind an ambulance carrying my mother. As a fourteen-year-old from a single mother household, without a driver’s license, and seven hours from home, I was distraught over the prospect of losing the only parent I had. My fear turned into action as I made some of the bravest decisions of my life. 

Three blood transfusions later, my mother’s condition was stable, but we were still states away from home, so I coordinated with my mother’s doctors in North Carolina to schedule the emergency operation that would save her life. Throughout her surgery, I anxiously awaited any word from her surgeon, but each time I asked, I was told that there had been another complication or delay. Relying on my faith and positive attitude, I remained optimistic that my mother would survive and that I could embrace new responsibilities.

My mother had been a source of strength for me, and now I would be strong for her through her long recovery ahead. As I started high school, everyone thought the crisis was over, but it had really just started to impact my life. My mother was often fatigued, so I assumed more responsibility, juggling family duties, school, athletics, and work. I made countless trips to the neighborhood pharmacy, cooked dinner, biked to the grocery store, supported my concerned sister, and provided the loving care my mother needed to recover. I didn’t know I was capable of such maturity and resourcefulness until it was called upon. Each day was a stage in my gradual transformation from dependence to relative independence.

Throughout my mother’s health crisis, I matured by learning to put others’ needs before my own. As I worried about my mother’s health, I took nothing for granted, cherished what I had, and used my daily activities as motivation to move forward. I now take ownership over small decisions such as scheduling daily appointments and managing my time but also over major decisions involving my future, including the college admissions process. Although I have become more independent, my mother and I are inseparably close, and the realization that I almost lost her affects me daily. Each morning, I wake up ten minutes early simply to eat breakfast with my mother and spend time with her before our busy days begin. I am aware of how quickly life can change. My mother remains a guiding force in my life, but the feeling of empowerment I discovered within myself is the ultimate form of my independence. Though I thought the summer before my freshman year would be a transition from middle school to high school, it was a transformation from childhood to adulthood.

This essay feels real and tells readers a lot about the writer. To start at the beginning, the intro is 10/10. It has drama, it has emotions, and it has the reader wanting more.

And, when you keep going, you get to learn a lot about a very resilient and mature student. Through sentences like “I made countless trips to the neighborhood pharmacy, cooked dinner, biked to the grocery store, supported my concerned sister, and provided the loving care my mother needed to recover” and “Relying on my faith and positive attitude, I remained optimistic that my mother would survive and that I could embrace new responsibilities,” the reader shows us that they are aware of their resilience and maturity, but are not arrogant about it. It is simply a fact that they have proven!

Sometimes writing about adversity can feel exploitative or oddly braggy. This student backs up everything they say with anecdotes that prove and show their strength and resilience, rather than just claiming their strengths. When I read this essay, I want to cheer for its writer! And I want to be able to continue cheering for them (perhaps, if I were an admissions officer, that would make me want them at my school!).

Prompt #5, Example #2

Armed with a red pen, I slowly walked across the room to a small, isolated table with pink stools. Swinging her legs, my young student beamed and giggled at me, slamming her pencil bag on the table and bending over to pick up one of her toys. Natalie always brought some new toy with her to lessons—toys which I would sternly take away from her and place under the table until she finished her work. At the tutoring center where I work, a strict emphasis on discipline leaves no room for paper crowns or rubber chickens. 

Today, she had with her a large stuffed eagle from a museum. As she pulled out her papers, I slid the eagle to the other side of the table. She looked eagerly around, attempting to chat with other students as I impatiently called her attention to her papers. “I should name my eagle,” she chimed, waving her pencil in the air. I cringed—there was no wondering why Natalie always had to sit by herself. She was the antithesis of my academic values, and undoubtedly the greatest adversary of my teaching style.  

As the lesson progressed, Natalie became more fitful; she refused to release her feathered friend, and kept addressing the bird for help with difficult problems. We both grew increasingly more frustrated. Determined to tame this wryly, wiggling student, I stood my ground, set on converting this disobedient child to my calm, measured ways of study.  

As time slowly crept by, I noticed that despite Natalie’s cheerful tone and bright smile, the stuffed eagle was troublesomely quiet and stern-faced. Much like myself. Both the eagle and I were getting nowhere in this lesson—so we hatched a quick plan. Lifting the eagle up in the air, I started reading in my best impersonation of an eagle, squawking my way through a spelling packet. The result provided a sense of instant gratification I never knew I needed. She sang out every letter, clapped her hands at every page, and followed along with the eagle, stopping at every few letters to declare that “E is for eagle” and pet her teacher fondly on the beak.  

Despite my ostensibly dissatisfied attitude toward my students, I did not join the tutoring center simply to earn money. I had always aspired to help others achieve their fullest potential. As a young adult, I felt that it was time for me to step out of the role of a pupil and into the influential role of a teacher, naively believing that I had the maturity and skill to adapt to any situation and help these students reach their highest achievements academically. For the most part, the role of a stern-faced, strict instructor helped me get by in the workplace, and while my students never truly looked happy, I felt that it was part of the process of conditioning a child to learn. 

Ironically, my transition to adulthood was the result of a stuffed animal. It was indisputable that I always had the skill to instruct others; the only thing needed to instruct someone is knowledge of the subject. However, it was only upon being introduced to a stuffed bird in which I realized that students receive the most help not from instructors, but teachers. While almost anyone can learn material and spit it back out for someone, it takes the maturity and passion of a teacher not only to help students improve in their students, but also to motivate them and develop them into better citizens. From my young pupil and her little bird, I have undergone a change in attitude which reflects a growth in maturity and ability to improve the lives of others that I hope to implement in my future role as a student, activist, and physician. My newfound maturity taught me that the letter “e” stands for many things: empathy, experience, enthusiasm, and eagle.

In this essay, the student effectively explores their values (and how they learned them!) then identifies these values through a reflective conclusion. While the writer humbly recognizes the initial faults in their teaching style, they do not position their initial discipline or rigidity as mean or poorly intentioned—simply ineffective. This is important because, when you are discussing a transition like this, you don’t want admissions officers to think of you as having been a bad person. 

My favorite part about this essay is its subtlety. The major shift in the essay comes through the simple sentence “The result provided a sense of instant gratification I never knew I needed.” The facts of this narrative are not too complicated. Simply put, the writer was strict then learned that it’s sometimes more effective not to be strict. The complexity of this narrative comes through reflection. Notably, through the ending, the student identifies their values (which they hadn’t given a name to before): “it takes the maturity and passion of a teacher not only to help students improve in their students, but also to motivate them and develop them into better citizens.” 

The final sentence of this essay ties things up very nicely. Readers are left satisfied with the essay and convinced that its writer is a kind human with a large capacity for reflection and consideration. That is a great image to paint of yourself!

Prompt #5, Example #3

When it’s quiet, I can still hear the Friday night gossip and giggles of my friends. It’s a stark contrast from the environment I’ve known all my life, my home. My family has always been one to keep to themselves; introverts with a hard-working mentality—my father especially. He spent most of his time at work and growing up without him around, I came to be at peace with the fact that I’d probably never really get to know him. The thought didn’t bother me at the time because I felt that we were very different. He was stoic and traditional; I was trying to figure out who I was and explore my interests. His disapproval of the American music I listened to and my penchant for wearing hand-me-downs made me see him as someone who wanted to restrain my individuality. That explains why I relied heavily on my friends throughout middle and high school; they liked me for who I was. I figured I would get lonely without my friends during quarantine, but these last few months stuck at home gave me the time to make a new friend: my father. 

It was June. I had the habit of sleeping with my windows open so I wouldn’t need to set an alarm; the warmth of the sun and the sounds of the neighborhood children playing outside would wake me. One morning, however, it was not the chirping of birds or the laughter of children I awoke to, but the shrill of a saw. Through the window screen, on the grass below, my father stood cutting planks of wood. I was confused but didn’t question him—what he did with his time was none of my business. It was not until the next day, when I was attempting to work on a sculpture for an art class, that the sounds of hammering and drills became too much to ignore. Seeking answers, I trudged across my backyard towards the corner he was in. On that day, all there was to see was the foundation of what he was building; a shed. My intrigue was replaced with awe; I was impressed by the precision of his craft. Sharp corners, leveled and sturdy, I could imagine what it would look like when the walls were up and the inside filled with the tools he had spread around the yard. 

Throughout the week, when I was trying to finish my sculpture for art class—thinking about its shape and composition—I could not help but think of my father. Art has always been a creative outlet for me, an opportunity to express myself at home. For my dad, his craftsmanship was his art. I realized we were not as different as I had thought; he was an artist like me. My glue and paper were his wood and nails.

That summer, I tried to spend more time with my dad than I have in all my 18 years of life. Waking up earlier than usual so we could have our morning coffees together and pretending to like his favorite band so he’d talk to me about it, I took advantage of every opportunity I had to speak with him. In getting to know him, I’ve recognized that I get my artistry from him. 

Reflecting on past relationships, I feel I am now more open to reconnecting with people I’ve perhaps misjudged. In reconciling, I’ve realized I held some bitterness towards him all these years, and in letting that go, my heart is lighter. Our reunion has changed my perspective; instead of vilifying him for spending so much time at work, I can appreciate how hard he works to provide for our family. When I hear him tinkering away at another home project, I can smile and look forward to asking him about it later.

This is an outstanding example of the great things that can be articulated through a reflective essay. As we read the essay, we are simply thinking alongside its author—thinking about their past relationship with their father, about their time in quarantine, about aspects of themselves they think could use attention and growth. 

While we reflect, we are also centered by the student’s anecdote about the sculpture and the shed during quarantine. By centering us in real-time, the student keeps us engaged in the reflection.

The main strength here is the maturity we see on the part of its writer. The student doesn’t say “and I realized my father was the best dad in the world;” they say “and I realized my father didn’t have to be the best dad in the world for me to give him a chance.” Lots of students show themselves as motivated, curious, or compassionate in their college essays, but a reflective essay that ends with a discussion of resentment and forgiveness shows true maturity.

Prompt #5, Example #4

As a wide-eyed, naive seven-year-old, I watched my grandmother’s rough, wrinkled hands pull and knead mercilessly at white dough until the countertop was dusted in flour. She steamed small buns in bamboo baskets, and a light sweetness lingered in the air. Although the mantou looked delicious, their papery, flat taste was always an unpleasant surprise. My grandmother scolded me for failing to finish even one, and when I complained about the lack of flavor she would simply say that I would find it as I grew older. How did my adult relatives seem to enjoy this Taiwanese culinary delight while I found it so plain?

During my journey to discover the essence of mantou, I began to see myself the same way I saw the steamed bun. I believed that my writing would never evolve beyond a hobby and that my quiet nature crippled my ambitions. Ultimately, I thought I had little to offer the world. In middle school, it was easy for me to hide behind the large personalities of my friends, blending into the background and keeping my thoughts company. Although writing had become my emotional outlet, no matter how well I wrote essays, poetry, or fiction, I could not stand out in a sea of talented students. When I finally gained the confidence to submit my poetry to literary journals but was promptly rejected, I stepped back from my work to begin reading from Whitman to Dickinson, Li-Young Lee to Ocean Vuong. It was then that I realized I had been holding back a crucial ingredient–my distinct voice. 

Over time, my taste buds began to mature, as did I. Mantou can be flavored with pork and eggplant, sweetened in condensed milk, and moistened or dried by the steam’s temperature. After I ate the mantou with each of these factors in mind, I noticed its environment enhanced a delicately woven strand of sweetness beneath the taste of side dishes: the sugar I had often watched my grandmother sift into the flour. The taste was nearly untraceable, but once I grasped it I could truly begin to cherish mantou. In the same way the taste had been lost to me for years, my writer’s voice had struggled to shine through because of my self-doubt and fear of vulnerability.

As I acquired a taste for mantou, I also began to strengthen my voice through my surrounding environment. With the support of my parents, peer poets, and the guidance of Amy Tan and the Brontё sisters, I worked tirelessly to uncover my voice: a subtle strand of sweetness. Once I stopped trying to fit into a publishing material mold and infused my uninhibited passion for my Taiwanese heritage into my writing, my poem was published in a literary journal. I wrote about the blatant racism Asians endured during coronavirus, and the editor of Skipping Stones Magazine was touched by both my poem and my heartfelt letter. I opened up about being ridiculed for bringing Asian food to school at Youth Leadership Forum, providing support to younger Asian-American students who reached out with the relief of finding someone they could relate to. I embraced writing as a way to convey my struggle with cultural identity. I joined the school’s creative writing club and read my pieces in front of an audience, honing my voice into one that flourishes out loud as well.

Now, I write and speak unapologetically, falling in love with a voice that I never knew I had. It inspires passion within my communities and imparts tenacity to Asian-American youth, rooting itself deeply into everything I write. Today, my grandmother would say that I have finally unearthed the taste of mantou as I savor every bite with a newfound appreciation. I can imagine her hands shaping the dough that has become my voice, and I am eager to share it with the world.

This essay is structurally-sound, with the student’s journey learning to savor mantou and their journey trying to find their voice serving as outstanding parallels. Additionally, as they describe the journey to find a voice in their writing, they definitely show off their voice! The clear introduction provides a great image and draws us in with an intriguing question. Additionally, their little inserts like “a strand of sweetness” and “falling in love with a voice that I never knew I had” work very well.

When the student describes their first published poem, however, their writing gets a little more stilted. This is a common error students make when writing about their achievements. If this student is writing about the craft that goes into writing, we should hear the details of the craft that went into the poem, instead of simply learning that they “opened up about being ridiculed for bringing Asian food to school at Youth Leadership Forum.” This is interesting information but would be stronger if it were supplemented by descriptions of the voice they created, comparisons to the styles of other poets, and analysis of their stylistic choices. This would make the essay feel more cohesive, centering entirely around concepts of voice and style.

Prompt #6: Describe a topic, idea, or concept you find so engaging that it makes you lose all track of time. Why does it captivate you? What or who do you turn to when you want to learn more?

Note: We don’t have a stellar example for this prompt, so instead, we’re sharing a couple examples that need improvement, and what can be done to make the essays more engaging. 

Prompt #6, Example #1

What factors shape the depth and allure of a literary character? This is the exact question I asked myself as my eyes riveted on the white pages covered with little black letters.

I was reading my old novels. I’ve written three novels and many short stories. Each of them repetitively portrayed the hero as intelligent and funny, and the antagonists as cold and manipulative. I came to the appalling realization that my characters were flat, neither exciting nor original. They just didn’t stand out! 

As Oscar Wilde said, ‘Vice and virtue are to the artist material to an art.’ Their mixing makes a novel addictive because its plot is rich with turnarounds and its characters more engaging. In his famous work The Picture of Dorian Gray , Wilde deconstructs the psyche of his characters. He brilliantly plays with the protagonist’s youthful appearance and the decaying portrait to build a truly unique idiosyncratic identity. The persona of Dorian Gray is so complicated a psychologist could analyze it for hours on end!

Inspired by this character, It was my turn to explore good and evil into characters to make my stories more enthralling. I skillfully played with vice and virtue, separating, merging them… My latest novel is the fruit of this exercise. I chose to set it in 20th century London. Its opium dens and exclusive salons; middle-class workers, peasants and politicians breathed the same newly industrialized air; modernity in Blackfriars bridge and tradition in St Paul’s Cathedral; all of these contrasts set the perfect environment for my characters to grow. Following Laclos’ Valmont, Maupassant’s Georges Duroy and Duffy’s Myra Hindley, I played with those contrasts to present an intricate character, truly creative – unlike my previous ones. Insanity, religion, depravity and love are merged into each character, reflecting Edwardian London. As I reflected on my work, I realized vice and virtue altogether made them more human and credible. These characters stood out, they were interesting, I even wanted to know more about them! 

After rewriting, erasing, typing, and thinking countless times, I realized writing is a unique exercise. Nothing is definite when you are holding a fountain pen, hearing its screeching sound on the white paper and watching the ebony ink forming letters. When I wasn’t too happy about a change I made in my story, I simply erased and rewrote it. Everything I imagined could happen: white pages are the only place the mouse eats the cat or the world is taken by a zombie attack! 

This exact exercise of diversifying my characters satisfied my relentless curiosity. Asking myself ‘how could this character be if she had lost her parents in a maritime tragedy?’ allowed me to view the world from different perspectives (some very dissimilar to my own) and considering how each character would react to different situations brought them to life. As I was writing, I was aiming to change the usual narratives I had previously traversed. I loved experimenting with countless personality traits in my characters – minutes flowing, my hand dancing on the paper as my mind was singing words coming alive….

There were times where my hand just stopped writing and my mind stopped raging. I tried thinking differently, changing a character’s background, the story, the setting. I was inspired by Zola, A.Carter, Fitzgerald, the Brontë sisters… I could observe the different reactions of their characters, and reflect on mine theoretically. But it was only part one of the work: I then had to write, sometimes aimlessly, sometimes frantically, always leading to fresh ideas – I was exploring the practical, trying, erasing and rewriting. Both theory and practice are required to gain intellectual independence and experience, in writing and more globally: before I can change a character, I have to understand it. Before we can change the world, we have to understand it.

The main strength of this essay is the authenticity of the topic the student chose. They aren’t making anything up or stretching the truth. Writing is something that captivates them, and that captivation shines through—particularly through their fourth paragraph (where they geek out over specific plots and characters) and their fifth paragraph (where they joyfully describe how writing has no limitations). Admissions officers want to see this passion and intensity in applicants! The fact that this student has already written three novels also shows dedication and is impressive.

The main weakness of this essay is its structure. Ironically, it is not super captivating. The essay would have been more compelling if the student utilized a “anecdote – answer – reflection” structure. This student’s current introduction involves a reflective question, citations about their past writing experience, then their thoughts on Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray. Instead, this student could’ve provided one cohesive (and powerful!) image of them being frustrated with their own writing then being inspired by Dorian Gray. This would look something like:

“I stayed up three nights in a row studying my own writing—bored by my own writing. The only thing more painful than seeing failure in the fruits of your labor is not seeing a path for improvement. I had written three novels and numerous short stories, and all I could come up with was funny and intelligent heroes going up against cold and manipulative villains. What kind of writer was so consistently cliche? On the third night, I wandered over to my bookshelf. Mrs. Dalloway caught my eye (it has such a beautiful cover). I flipped through. Then, I grabbed Giovanni’s Room . I was so obsessed with my shortcomings that I couldn’t even focus long enough to see what these authors were doing right. I picked up The Picture of Dorian Gray and decided to just start reading. By the end of the night, I was captivated.”

An introduction like this would flow nicely into the student describing their experience with Dorian Gray then, because of that experience, describing how they have altered their approach to writing. The conclusion of this essay would then be this student’s time for reflection. Instead of repeating content about their passion—“I then had to write, sometimes aimlessly, sometimes frantically” and “I was exploring the practical, trying, erasing and rewriting”—, the student could dedicate their conclusion to reflecting on the reasons that writing is so captivating or the ways that (until the day they die) writers will always be perfecting their craft.

This essay is a great example of how important it is to pick a topic that truly excites you. It also illustrates how important it is to effectively structure that excitement.

Prompt #6, Example #2

Astonished by the crashing sound of waves in my ear, I was convinced this magical shell actually held the sound of the big blue sea — my six-year-old self was heartbroken when I couldn’t take the thirty-dollar artificial shell from SeaWorld’s gift shop . It distinctly reminded me of the awestruck feeling I had when I witnessed the churning waves of a windy night by the ocean the previous weekend; I lost track of time gazing at the distant moonlit border dividing our world from the ever-growing black void. Turning to my mom, I inquired curiously, “Can we go to the place where the water ends one day?”

She explained to me I could never reach the end of the ocean because the harsh line I had seen was actually an illusion called the horizon —  there was no material end to the ocean. For a mind as young as mine was, the idea of infinity was incomprehensible. As my infatuation with the ocean continued to grow, I finally understood that regardless of how far I travel, the horizon is unattainable because it’s not a physical limit. This idea is why the ocean captivates me — no matter how much you discover, there is always more to explore. 

Learning about and exploring the ocean provided an escape from one reality into another; though we are on the same planet, it’s an entirely separate world. Through elementary and middle school, I devoted vast amounts of my free time to learning about simpler concepts like a dolphin’s ability to echolocate and coral reef ecosystems. I rented countless documentaries and constantly checked out books from my local library — my all-time favorite was an episode of the television series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey titled “The Lost Worlds of Planet Earth.” This episode remained memorable because it was centered around the impacts of fossil fuels on marine animals; it was the first time I’d learned about the impending crisis we are faced with due to the human mistreatment of our planet.

Prior to viewing that episode, I relied on the ocean as an outlet — I fueled all of my emotions into studying marine organisms. Once I learned of its grave future, I delved into the world of environmental activism. This path was much more disheartening than studying echolocation — inevitable death due to climate change took a toll on my mental health. I attended two climate strikes in November of my sophomore year. Following the strikes, I joined Sunrise Movement Sacramento, a youth-led climate justice organization advocating for the Green New Deal. While analyzing legislation and organizing protests were significant takeaways from my experience with climate activism, they were not the most important. I became an organizer because of my love for the ocean and I remain an organizer because of my passion for dissolving the disproportionalities marginalized groups face due to the sacrificing of people’s livelihood for the sake of profit. The more I learned about our modern society, the more hopeless I grew that I could see any significant change within my lifetime.

However, this hopelessness comes in waves; every day, I remind myself of the moment I discovered the horizon. Or the moment I first dove into the beautiful waters of the Hawaiian coast and immediately was surrounded by breathtaking seas of magnificent creatures and coral gardens — life felt ethereal and beautiful. I remind myself that like the ocean, the vast majority of the universe has yet to be discovered; that distant border holds infinite opportunity to learn. In a universe as vast as ours, and life as rare as ours, individuals still choose to prioritize avarice over our planet. Despite this grave individualism, the ocean reminds me every day there is hope in the fight for a better world. Though I will never discover every inch of the ocean’s floor, I will forever envision and reach for new horizons.

Sometimes the path to a great essay is taking something normal and using it to show admissions officers who you are and what you value—that is precisely this student’s approach! Finding the ocean fascinating is not unique to this student. Tons of kids (and adults, too!) are obsessed with the ocean. What this student does is take things a step further as they explain their curiosity about the ocean in relation to their pain about the destruction of the environment. This capacity for reflection is great!

This student shows a good control of language through their thematic centering on ocean and horizons that carries through their essay—with ”this hopelessness comes in waves” and “I will forever envision and reach for new horizons.” The details provided throughout are also effective at keeping readers engaged—things like “ my six-year-old self was heartbroken when I couldn’t take the thirty-dollar artificial shell from SeaWorld’s gift shop” and “ my all-time favorite was an episode of the television series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey titled “The Lost Worlds of Planet Earth.”

The main weakness of this essay is the lack of reflection when the student discusses environmental activism. There’s reflection on the student’s connection to the ocean and horizons at the beginning and at the end, but when the student discusses activism, the tone shifts from focusing on their internal thoughts to their external actions. Remember, a lot of students write about environmental activism, but not a lot of students write about an emotional connection to the ocean as an impetus for environmental activism. This student would stand out more to admissions officers if they had dug into questions of what the ocean means to them (and says about them) in the paragraphs beginning “Learning about and exploring the ocean…” and “Prior to viewing that episode.”

Prompt #7: Share an essay on any topic of your choice. It can be one you’ve already written, one that responds to a different prompt, or one of your own design.

Prompt #7, example #1.

Scalding hot water cascades over me, crashing to the ground in a familiar, soothing rhythm. Steam rises to the ceiling as dried sweat and soap suds swirl down the drain. The water hisses as it hits my skin, far above the safe temperature for a shower. The pressure is perfect on my tired muscles, easing the aches and bruises from a rough bout of sparring and the tension from a long, stressful day. The noise from my overactive mind dies away, fading into music, lyrics floating through my head. Black streaks stripe the inside of my left arm, remnants of the penned reminders of homework, money owed and forms due. 

It lacks the same dynamism and controlled intensity of sparring on the mat at taekwondo or the warm tenderness of a tight hug from my father, but it’s still a cocoon of safety as the water washes away the day’s burdens. As long as the hot water is running, the rest of the world ceases to exist, shrinking to me, myself and I. The shower curtain closes me off from the hectic world spinning around me. 

Much like the baths of Blanche DuBois, my hot showers are a means of cleansing and purifying (though I’m mostly just ridding myself of the germs from children at work sneezing on me). In the midst of a hot shower, there is no impending exam to study for, no newspaper deadline to meet, no paycheck to deposit. It is simply complete and utter peace, a safe haven. The steam clears my mind even as it clouds my mirror. 

Creativity thrives in the tub, breathing life into tales of dragons and warrior princesses that evolve only in my head, never making their way to paper but appeasing the childlike dreamer and wannabe author in me all the same. That one calculus problem that has seemed unsolvable since second period clicks into place as I realize the obvious solution. The perfect concluding sentence to my literary analysis essay writes itself (causing me to abruptly end my shower in a mad dash to the computer before I forget it entirely).  

Ever since I was old enough to start taking showers unaided, I began hogging all the hot water in the house, a source of great frustration to my parents. Many of my early showers were rudely cut short by an unholy banging on the bathroom door and an order to “stop wasting water and come eat dinner before it gets cold.” After a decade of trudging up the stairs every evening to put an end to my water-wasting, my parents finally gave in, leaving me to my (expensive) showers. I imagine someday, when paying the water bill is in my hands, my showers will be shorter, but today is not that day (nor, hopefully, will the next four years be that day). 

Showers are better than any ibuprofen, the perfect panacea for life’s daily ailments. Headaches magically disappear as long as the water runs, though they typically return in full force afterward. The runny nose and itchy eyes courtesy of summertime allergies recede. Showers alleviate even the stomachache from a guacamole-induced lack of self-control. 

Honestly though, the best part about a hot shower is neither its medicinal abilities nor its blissful temporary isolation or even the heavenly warmth seeped deep into my bones. The best part is that these little moments of pure, uninhibited contentedness are a daily occurrence. No matter how stressful the day, showers ensure I always have something to look forward to. They are small moments, true, but important nonetheless, because it is the little things in life that matter; the big moments are too rare, too fleeting to make anyone truly happy. Wherever I am in the world, whatever fate chooses to throw at me, I know I can always find my peace at the end of the day behind the shower curtain.

This essay is relatable yet personal! The writer makes themself supremely human through discussing the universal subject of showering. That being said, an essay about showering could easily turn boring while still being relatable. This writer keeps its relatable moments interesting and fun through vivid descriptions of common feelings including “causing me to abruptly end my shower in a mad dash to the computer before I forget it entirely” and “the stomachache from a guacamole-induced lack of self-control.”

While describing a universal feeling, this student also cleverly and intentionally mentions small facts about their life through simple phrases like “I’m mostly just ridding myself of the germs from children at work sneezing on me” and “the childlike dreamer and wannabe author in me.” To put it simply, though we are talking about a shower, we learn about so much more!

And, at the end, the student lets us know that that is exactly why they love showers. Showers are more than meets the eye! With this insightful and reflective ending (“the big moments are too rare, too fleeting to make anyone truly happy”), readers learn about this student’s capacity for reflection, which is an important capacity as you enter college.

The one major error that this writer commits is that of using a trite transition. The inclusion of “Honestly though” at the beginning of this student’s ending detracts from what they are trying to say and sticks out in their writing.

Prompt #7, Example #2

Steam whooshed from the pot as I unveiled my newest creation: duck-peppercorn-chestnut dumplings. The spicy, hearty aroma swirled into the kitchen, mingling with the smell of fresh dough. Grinning, I grabbed a plump dumpling with chopsticks, blew carefully, and fed it into the waiting mouth of my little sister. Her eyes widening, she vigorously nodded and held up five stubby fingers. I did a little happy dance in celebration and pulled my notebook out of my apron pocket. Duck-peppercorn-chestnut: five stars.

In my household, dumplings are a far cry from the classic pork and cabbage. Our menu boasts everything from the savory lamb-bamboo shoot-watercress to the sweet and crispy apple-cinnamon-date. A few years ago, my sister claimed she was sick of eating the same flavors over and over. Refusing to let her disavow our family staple, I took her complaint as a challenge to make the tastiest and most unconventional dumplings to satisfy her. With her as my taste tester and Mum in charge of dough, I spent months experimenting with dozens of odd ingredient combinations. 

During those days spent covered in flour, my dumplings often reminded me of myself—a hybrid of ingredients that don’t usually go together. I am the product of three distinct worlds: the suburbs of Boston, the rural Chinese village of [location removed], and the coastal city of [location removed]. At school, I am both the STEM nerd with lightning-fast mental math and the artistic plant mom obsessed with funky earrings. I love all that is elegant, from Chinese calligraphy to the rolling notes of the Gourd flute, yet I can be very not elegant, like when my sister and I make homemade slime. When I’m on the streets, marching for women’s rights and climate action, I’m loud, bellowing from the bottom of my gut. In the painting studio, though, I don’t speak unless spoken to, and hours can slip by like minutes. I’m loud and quiet. Elegant and messy. Nerdy and artistic. Suburban, rustic, and metropolitan.

While I’m full of odd combinations, they are only seemingly contradictory. Just as barbeque pork and pineapple can combine beautifully in a dumpling wrapper, different facets of my identity also converge. After my tenth-grade summer, when I spent six weeks studying design at art school and another three researching the brain at Harvard Med, I began asking myself: What if I mixed art and neuroscience together? That fall, I collaborated with my school’s art museum for an independent research project, exploring two questions: How are aesthetic experiences processed in the brain? And how can neuroscience help museums design exhibits that maximize visitor engagement? I combed through studies with results from tightly controlled experiments, and I spent days gathering my own qualitative data by observing museum visitors and asking them questions. With the help of my artistic skills, I could identify the visual and spatial elements of the exhibits that best held visitors’ attention. 

By synergizing two of the ingredients that make me who I am—art and neuroscience—I realized I shouldn’t see the different sides of myself as separate. I learned to instead seek the intersections between aspects of my identity. Since then, I have mixed art with activism to voice my opinions nonverbally, created Spotify playlists with both Chinese and western pop, and written flute compositions using music theory and math. In the future, by continuing to combine my interests, I want to find my niche in the world. I can make a positive impact on society without having to choose just one passion. As of now, my dream is to be a neuroscientist who designs art therapy treatments for mental health patients. Who knows though? Maybe my calling is to be a dim sum chef who teaches pottery on the side. I don’t know where I’ll go, but one thing’s for sure—being a standard pork and cabbage dumpling is definitely not my style.

This essay is outstanding because the student seems likable and authentic. With the first image of the student’s little sister vigorously nodding and holding up “five stubby fingers,” we find ourselves intrigued by the student’s daily life. They additionally show the importance of family, culture, and creativity in their life—these are great things to highlight in your essay!

After the introduction, the student uses their weird dumpling anecdote to transition to a discussion of their unique intersections. This is achieved smoothly because weirdness/uniqueness is the focus of both of these topics. Additionally, the comparison is not awkward because dumplings are used as more than just a transition, but rather are the through-line of the essay—the student weaves in little phrases like “Just as barbeque pork and pineapple can combine beautifully in a dumpling wrapper,” “By synergizing two of the ingredients that make me who I am,” and “being a standard pork and cabbage dumpling is definitely not my style.” This gives the essay its cohesive feel.

Authenticity comes through in this essay as the student recognizes that they don’t know what the future holds. They just know what kind of a person they are—a passionate one! 

One change that would improve this student’s essay would be focusing on fewer intersections in their third and last paragraph. The student mentions STEM, music, family activities, activism, and painting, which makes it feel like a distraction in middle of the essay. Focus on the most important things you want to show admissions officers—you can sit at intersections, but you can’t be interested in everything.

Prompt #7, Example #3

“Everyone follow me!” I smiled at five wide-eyed skaters before pushing off into a spiral. I glanced behind me hopefully, only to see my students standing frozen like statues, the fear in their eyes as clear as the ice they swayed on. “Come on!” I said encouragingly, but the only response I elicited was the slow shake of their heads. My first day as a Learn-to-Skate coach was not going as planned. 

But amid my frustration, I was struck by how much my students reminded me of myself as a young skater. At seven, I had been fascinated by Olympic performers who executed thrilling high jumps and dizzying spins with apparent ease, and I dreamed to one day do the same. My first few months on skates, however, sent these hopes crashing down: my attempts at slaloms and toe-loops were shadowed by a stubborn fear of falling, which even the helmet, elbow pads, and two pairs of mittens I had armed myself with couldn’t mitigate. Nonetheless, my coach remained unfailingly optimistic, motivating me through my worst spills and teaching me to find opportunities in failures. With his encouragement, I learned to push aside my fears and attack each jump with calm and confidence; it’s the hope that I can help others do the same that now inspires me to coach. 

I remember the day a frustrated staff member directed Oliver, a particularly hesitant young skater, toward me, hoping that my patience and steady encouragement might help him improve. Having stood in Oliver’s skates not much earlier myself, I completely empathized with his worries but also saw within him the potential to overcome his fears and succeed. 

To alleviate his anxiety, I held Oliver’s hand as we inched around the rink, cheering him on at every turn. I soon found though, that this only increased his fear of gliding on his own, so I changed my approach, making lessons as exciting as possible in hopes that he would catch the skating bug and take off. In the weeks that followed, we held relay races, played “freeze-skate” and “ice-potato”, and raced through obstacle courses; gradually, with each slip and subsequent success, his fear began to abate. I watched Oliver’s eyes widen in excitement with every skill he learned, and not long after, he earned his first skating badge. Together we celebrated this milestone, his ecstasy fueling my excitement and his pride mirroring my own. At that moment, I was both teacher and student, his progress instilling in me the importance of patience and a positive attitude. 

It’s been more than ten years since I bundled up and stepped onto the ice for the first time. Since then, my tolerance for the cold has remained stubbornly low, but the rest of me has certainly changed. In sharing my passion for skating, I have found a wonderful community of eager athletes, loving parents, and dedicated coaches from whom I have learned invaluable lessons and wisdom. My fellow staffers have been with me, both as friends and colleagues, and the relationships I’ve formed have given me far more poise, confidence, and appreciation for others. Likewise, my relationships with parents have given me an even greater gratitude for the role they play: no one goes to the rink without a parent behind the wheel! 

Since that first lesson, I have mentored dozens of children, and over the years, witnessed tentative steps transform into powerful glides and tears give way to delighted grins. What I have shared with my students has been among the greatest joys of my life, something I will cherish forever. It’s funny: when I began skating, what pushed me through the early morning practices was the prospect of winning an Olympic medal. Now, what excites me is the chance to work with my students, to help them grow, and to give back to the sport that has brought me so much happiness. 

A major strength of this essay comes in its narrative organization. When reading this first paragraph, we feel for the young skaters and understand their fear—skating sounds scary! Then, because the writer sets us up to feel this empathy, the transition to the second paragraph where the student describes their empathy for the young skaters is particularly powerful. It’s like we are all in it together! The student’s empathy for the young skaters also serves as an outstanding, seamless transition to the applicant discussing their personal journey with skating: “I was struck by how much my students reminded me of myself as a young skater.”

This essay positions the applicant as a grounded and caring individual. They are caring towards the young skaters—changing their teaching style to try to help the young skaters and feeling the young skaters’ emotions with them—but they are also appreciative to those who helped them as they reference their fellow staffers and parents. This shows great maturity—a favorable quality in the eyes of an admissions officer.

At the end of the essay, we know a lot about this student and are convinced that they would be a good addition to a college campus!

Prompt #7, Example #4

Flipping past dozens of colorful entries in my journal, I arrive at the final blank sheet. I press my pen lightly to the page, barely scratching its surface to create a series of loops stringing together into sentences. Emotions spill out, and with their release, I feel lightness in my chest. The stream of thoughts slows as I reach the bottom of the page, and I gently close the cover of the worn book: another journal finished.

I add the journal to the stack of eleven books on my nightstand. Struck by the bittersweet sensation of closing a chapter of my life, I grab the notebook at the bottom of the pile to reminisce.

“I want to make a flying mushen to fly in space and your in it” – October 2008

Pulling back the cover of my first Tinkerbell-themed diary, the prompt “My Hopes and Dreams” captures my attention. Though “machine” is misspelled in my scribbled response, I see the beginnings of my past obsession with outer space. At the age of five, I tore through novels about the solar system, experimented with rockets built from plastic straws, and rented Space Shuttle films from Blockbuster to satisfy my curiosities. While I chased down answers to questions as limitless as the universe, I fell in love with learning. Eight journals later, the same relentless curiosity brought me to an airplane descending on San Francisco Bay.

“I wish I had infinite sunsets” – July 2019

I reach for the charcoal notepad near the top of the pile and open to the first page: my flight to the Stanford Pre-Collegiate Summer Institutes. While I was excited to explore bioengineering, anxiety twisted in my stomach as I imagined my destination, unsure of whether I could overcome my shyness and connect with others.

With each new conversation, the sweat on my palms became less noticeable, and I met students from 23 different countries. Many of the moments where I challenged myself socially revolved around the third story deck of the Jerry house. A strange medley of English, Arabic, and Mandarin filled the summer air as my friends and I gathered there every evening, and dialogues at sunset soon became moments of bliss. In our conversations about cultural differences, the possibility of an afterlife, and the plausibility of far-fetched conspiracy theories, I learned to voice my opinion. As I was introduced to different viewpoints, these moments challenged my understanding of the world around me. In my final entries from California, I find excitement to learn from others and increased confidence, a tool that would later allow me to impact my community.

“The beauty in a tower of cans” – June 2020

Returning my gaze to the stack of journals, I stretch to take the floral-patterned book sitting on top. I flip through, eventually finding the beginnings of the organization I created during the outbreak of COVID-19. Since then, Door-to-Door Deliveries has woven its way through my entries and into reality, allowing me to aid high-risk populations through free grocery delivery.

With the confidence I gained the summer before, I took action when seeing others in need rather than letting my shyness hold me back. I reached out to local churches and senior centers to spread word of our services and interacted with customers through our website and social media pages. To further expand our impact, we held two food drives, and I mustered the courage to ask for donations door-to-door. In a tower of canned donations, I saw the value of reaching out to help others and realized my own potential to impact the world around me.

I delicately close the journal in my hands, smiling softly as the memories reappear, one after another. Reaching under my bed, I pull out a fresh notebook and open to its first sheet. I lightly press my pen to the page, “And so begins the next chapter…”

The structuring of this essay makes it easy and enjoyable to read. The student effectively organizes their various life experiences around their tower of journals, which centers the reader and makes the different stories easy to follow. Additionally, the student engages quotes from their journals—and unique formatting of the quotes—to signal that they are moving in time and show us which memory we should follow them to.

Thematically, the student uses the idea of shyness to connect the different memories they draw out of their journals. As the student describes their experiences overcoming shyness at the Stanford Pre-Collegiate Summer Institutes and Door-to-Door Deliveries, this essay can be read as an Overcoming Obstacles essay.

At the end of this essay, readers are fully convinced that this student is dedicated (they have committed to journaling every day), thoughtful (journaling is a thoughtful process and, in the essay, the student reflects thoughtfully on the past), and motivated (they flew across the country for a summer program and started a business). These are definitely qualities admissions officers are looking for in applicants!

Prompt #7, Example #5

“We’re ready for take-off!” 

The tires hit the tarmac and began to accelerate, and I just realized what I had signed up for. For 24 hours straight, I strapped myself into a broken-down SUV whereas others chose the luxury of soaring through the skies for a mere two hours. Especially with my motion sickness and driving anxiety, I would call myself crazy too.

To say I have always remained in my comfort zone is an understatement. Did I always order chicken fingers and fries at a restaurant? Yup! Sounds like me. Did I always create a color-coded itinerary just for a day trip? Guilty as charged. Did I always carry a first-aid kit at all times? Of course! I would make even an ambulance look unprepared. And yet here I was, choosing 1,000 miles of misery from Las Vegas to Seattle despite every bone in my body telling me not to.

The sunlight blinded my eyes and a wave of nausea swept over me. Was it too late to say I forgot my calculator? It was only ten minutes in, and I was certain that the trip was going to be a disaster. I simply hoped that our pre-drive prayer was not stuck in God’s voicemail box. 

All of a sudden, I noticed brightly colored rocks in the distance, ones I had been dying to see for years. Their fluorescence popped amongst the magnificent winding hills as the sunset became romantic in hue. The desert glistened with mirages of deep blue water unlike anything I had ever seen. Nevada was home, but home always seemed to be just desert and casinos. For once, I looked forward to endless desert outside my window rather than a sea of clouds.

I never realized how little I discovered of the world beyond home. For years I complained about how there was nothing to do or discover outside. Not once did I set out to prove myself wrong. Instead, I chose a daily routine of homework at the kitchen table and late-night TV. However, as summer vacation ended, I decided to set my stubbornness aside and finally give this drive back home a chance. Little did I know that it would turn out to be my favorite trip of all time. 

As we drove along, the world chose to prove me wrong when I discovered Heaven on Earth along Shasta Lake. I stood out of the sunroof, surrounded by lush green mountains and fog. I extended my arms out and felt a sense of flight that no plane could ever take me on. As the water vapor kissed my face, I floated into a dreamland I never wanted to leave. I didn’t have to go to great lengths to discover the beauty of the world; it was right in front of me.  From this moment on, comfort and convenience would no longer be my best friends. Rather than only looking for famous travel destinations or following carefully mapped-out routes, I would let curiosity lead the way. 

Since then, my daily life has been anything but routine. I’m proud to boast of my family’s homemade kombucha attempts, of flights purchased and taken in one day, and of a home flooded with knick-knacks from thrifting trips. Every day I set out to try something new, see a different perspective, and go beyond normal. Whether it is by trying a new recipe using taro, making a risky fashion choice with wide-legged pants, or listening to a new music genre in Spanish, I always act with curiosity first.

Over the years, I have devoted my time towards learning Swedish, building computers, and swimming. Although my accent is horrid, some computers almost broke, and even a starfish would outswim me, I continue to enjoy activities I once criticized. For me, there is no enjoyment without some risk. Nobody I know is a kazoo-playing, boogie-board loving, boba connoisseur like me.

This essay is an Overcoming Challenges story that centers around a single anecdote. The structure works nicely as the student describes what they were like before their road trip, what happened on the road trip, and what they were like after. 

The most major improvement that this essay needs is better-communicated authenticity. At the beginning, it feels a bit gimmicky. The student describes their preparedness, particularly the fact that they always carry a first aid kit, and it’s not super believable. Then, when they write “Was it too late to say I forgot my calculator?” it feels like we are in a sitcom and the student is that funny obsessive kid. Sitcom characters don’t feel real and you want to make yourself appear profoundly real.

On a similar note, the narrative arc of this essay isn’t entirely believable. The student describes a large personality and value shift but doesn’t describe any struggles that accompany the shift. A quick shift like that is far from easy. On the other hand, if the immediacy of the shift was easy, they could write about moments after their shift in mindset when they have felt troubled by residual desires to stay in their comfort zone, instead of writing “I always act with curiosity first.”

The greatest strength of this essay is the paragraphs beginning “I never realized how little…” and “As we drove along…” The fixation on comfort seems much more believable when it involves “homework at the kitchen table and late-night TV.” The descriptions of the drive provide beautiful, evocative imagery. And it’s topped off with some nice reflection! Digging into this great portion of the essay would make this an even stronger essay!

Want to see more examples? Check out this post with 16 strong essay examples from top schools , including common supplemental essay questions.

At selective schools, your essays account for around 25% of your admissions decision. That’s more than grades (20%) and test scores (15%), and almost as much as extracurriculars (30%). Why is this? Most students applying to top schools will have stellar academics and extracurriculars. Your essays are your chance to stand out and humanize your application.

That’s why it’s vital that your essays are engaging, and present you as someone who would enrich the campus community.

Before submitting your application, you should have someone else review your essays. It’s even better if that person doesn’t know you personally, as they can best tell whether your personality shines through your essay. 

That’s why we created our free Peer Essay Review tool , where you can get a free review of your essay from another student. You can also improve your own writing skills by reviewing other students’ essays. 

If you want a college admissions expert to review your essay, advisors on CollegeVine have helped students refine their writing and submit successful applications to top schools. Find the right advisor for you to improve your chances of getting into your dream school!

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Time Travel

There is an extensive literature on time travel in both philosophy and physics. Part of the great interest of the topic stems from the fact that reasons have been given both for thinking that time travel is physically possible—and for thinking that it is logically impossible! This entry deals primarily with philosophical issues; issues related to the physics of time travel are covered in the separate entries on time travel and modern physics and time machines . We begin with the definitional question: what is time travel? We then turn to the major objection to the possibility of backwards time travel: the Grandfather paradox. Next, issues concerning causation are discussed—and then, issues in the metaphysics of time and change. We end with a discussion of the question why, if backwards time travel will ever occur, we have not been visited by time travellers from the future.

1.1 Time Discrepancy

1.2 changing the past, 2.1 can and cannot, 2.2 improbable coincidences, 2.3 inexplicable occurrences, 3.1 backwards causation, 3.2 causal loops, 4.1 time travel and time, 4.2 time travel and change, 5. where are the time travellers, other internet resources, related entries, 1. what is time travel.

There is a number of rather different scenarios which would seem, intuitively, to count as ‘time travel’—and a number of scenarios which, while sharing certain features with some of the time travel cases, seem nevertheless not to count as genuine time travel: [ 1 ]

Time travel Doctor . Doctor Who steps into a machine in 2024. Observers outside the machine see it disappear. Inside the machine, time seems to Doctor Who to pass for ten minutes. Observers in 1984 (or 3072) see the machine appear out of nowhere. Doctor Who steps out. [ 2 ] Leap . The time traveller takes hold of a special device (or steps into a machine) and suddenly disappears; she appears at an earlier (or later) time. Unlike in Doctor , the time traveller experiences no lapse of time between her departure and arrival: from her point of view, she instantaneously appears at the destination time. [ 3 ] Putnam . Oscar Smith steps into a machine in 2024. From his point of view, things proceed much as in Doctor : time seems to Oscar Smith to pass for a while; then he steps out in 1984. For observers outside the machine, things proceed differently. Observers of Oscar’s arrival in the past see a time machine suddenly appear out of nowhere and immediately divide into two copies of itself: Oscar Smith steps out of one; and (through the window) they see inside the other something that looks just like what they would see if a film of Oscar Smith were played backwards (his hair gets shorter; food comes out of his mouth and goes back into his lunch box in a pristine, uneaten state; etc.). Observers of Oscar’s departure from the future do not simply see his time machine disappear after he gets into it: they see it collide with the apparently backwards-running machine just described, in such a way that both are simultaneously annihilated. [ 4 ] Gödel . The time traveller steps into an ordinary rocket ship (not a special time machine) and flies off on a certain course. At no point does she disappear (as in Leap ) or ‘turn back in time’ (as in Putnam )—yet thanks to the overall structure of spacetime (as conceived in the General Theory of Relativity), the traveller arrives at a point in the past (or future) of her departure. (Compare the way in which someone can travel continuously westwards, and arrive to the east of her departure point, thanks to the overall curved structure of the surface of the earth.) [ 5 ] Einstein . The time traveller steps into an ordinary rocket ship and flies off at high speed on a round trip. When he returns to Earth, thanks to certain effects predicted by the Special Theory of Relativity, only a very small amount of time has elapsed for him—he has aged only a few months—while a great deal of time has passed on Earth: it is now hundreds of years in the future of his time of departure. [ 6 ] Not time travel Sleep . One is very tired, and falls into a deep sleep. When one awakes twelve hours later, it seems from one’s own point of view that hardly any time has passed. Coma . One is in a coma for a number of years and then awakes, at which point it seems from one’s own point of view that hardly any time has passed. Cryogenics . One is cryogenically frozen for hundreds of years. Upon being woken, it seems from one’s own point of view that hardly any time has passed. Virtual . One enters a highly realistic, interactive virtual reality simulator in which some past era has been recreated down to the finest detail. Crystal . One looks into a crystal ball and sees what happened at some past time, or will happen at some future time. (Imagine that the crystal ball really works—like a closed-circuit security monitor, except that the vision genuinely comes from some past or future time. Even so, the person looking at the crystal ball is not thereby a time traveller.) Waiting . One enters one’s closet and stays there for seven hours. When one emerges, one has ‘arrived’ seven hours in the future of one’s ‘departure’. Dateline . One departs at 8pm on Monday, flies for fourteen hours, and arrives at 10pm on Monday.

A satisfactory definition of time travel would, at least, need to classify the cases in the right way. There might be some surprises—perhaps, on the best definition of ‘time travel’, Cryogenics turns out to be time travel after all—but it should certainly be the case, for example, that Gödel counts as time travel and that Sleep and Waiting do not. [ 7 ]

In fact there is no entirely satisfactory definition of ‘time travel’ in the literature. The most popular definition is the one given by Lewis (1976, 145–6):

What is time travel? Inevitably, it involves a discrepancy between time and time. Any traveller departs and then arrives at his destination; the time elapsed from departure to arrival…is the duration of the journey. But if he is a time traveller, the separation in time between departure and arrival does not equal the duration of his journey.…How can it be that the same two events, his departure and his arrival, are separated by two unequal amounts of time?…I reply by distinguishing time itself, external time as I shall also call it, from the personal time of a particular time traveller: roughly, that which is measured by his wristwatch. His journey takes an hour of his personal time, let us say…But the arrival is more than an hour after the departure in external time, if he travels toward the future; or the arrival is before the departure in external time…if he travels toward the past.

This correctly excludes Waiting —where the length of the ‘journey’ precisely matches the separation between ‘arrival’ and ‘departure’—and Crystal , where there is no journey at all—and it includes Doctor . It has trouble with Gödel , however—because when the overall structure of spacetime is as twisted as it is in the sort of case Gödel imagined, the notion of external time (“time itself”) loses its grip.

Another definition of time travel that one sometimes encounters in the literature (Arntzenius, 2006, 602) (Smeenk and Wüthrich, 2011, 5, 26) equates time travel with the existence of CTC’s: closed timelike curves. A curve in this context is a line in spacetime; it is timelike if it could represent the career of a material object; and it is closed if it returns to its starting point (i.e. in spacetime—not merely in space). This now includes Gödel —but it excludes Einstein .

The lack of an adequate definition of ‘time travel’ does not matter for our purposes here. [ 8 ] It suffices that we have clear cases of (what would count as) time travel—and that these cases give rise to all the problems that we shall wish to discuss.

Some authors (in philosophy, physics and science fiction) consider ‘time travel’ scenarios in which there are two temporal dimensions (e.g. Meiland (1974)), and others consider scenarios in which there are multiple ‘parallel’ universes—each one with its own four-dimensional spacetime (e.g. Deutsch and Lockwood (1994)). There is a question whether travelling to another version of 2001 (i.e. not the very same version one experienced in the past)—a version at a different point on the second time dimension, or in a different parallel universe—is really time travel, or whether it is more akin to Virtual . In any case, this kind of scenario does not give rise to many of the problems thrown up by the idea of travelling to the very same past one experienced in one’s younger days. It is these problems that form the primary focus of the present entry, and so we shall not have much to say about other kinds of ‘time travel’ scenario in what follows.

One objection to the possibility of time travel flows directly from attempts to define it in anything like Lewis’s way. The worry is that because time travel involves “a discrepancy between time and time”, time travel scenarios are simply incoherent. The time traveller traverses thirty years in one year; she is 51 years old 21 years after her birth; she dies at the age of 100, 200 years before her birth; and so on. The objection is that these are straightforward contradictions: the basic description of what time travel involves is inconsistent; therefore time travel is logically impossible. [ 9 ]

There must be something wrong with this objection, because it would show Einstein to be logically impossible—whereas this sort of future-directed time travel has actually been observed (albeit on a much smaller scale—but that does not affect the present point) (Hafele and Keating, 1972b,a). The most common response to the objection is that there is no contradiction because the interval of time traversed by the time traveller and the duration of her journey are measured with respect to different frames of reference: there is thus no reason why they should coincide. A similar point applies to the discrepancy between the time elapsed since the time traveller’s birth and her age upon arrival. There is no more of a contradiction here than in the fact that Melbourne is both 800 kilometres away from Sydney—along the main highway—and 1200 kilometres away—along the coast road. [ 10 ]

Before leaving the question ‘What is time travel?’ we should note the crucial distinction between changing the past and participating in (aka affecting or influencing) the past. [ 11 ] In the popular imagination, backwards time travel would allow one to change the past: to right the wrongs of history, to prevent one’s younger self doing things one later regretted, and so on. In a model with a single past, however, this idea is incoherent: the very description of the case involves a contradiction (e.g. the time traveller burns all her diaries at midnight on her fortieth birthday in 1976, and does not burn all her diaries at midnight on her fortieth birthday in 1976). It is not as if there are two versions of the past: the original one, without the time traveller present, and then a second version, with the time traveller playing a role. There is just one past—and two perspectives on it: the perspective of the younger self, and the perspective of the older time travelling self. If these perspectives are inconsistent (e.g. an event occurs in one but not the other) then the time travel scenario is incoherent.

This means that time travellers can do less than we might have hoped: they cannot right the wrongs of history; they cannot even stir a speck of dust on a certain day in the past if, on that day, the speck was in fact unmoved. But this does not mean that time travellers must be entirely powerless in the past: while they cannot do anything that did not actually happen, they can (in principle) do anything that did happen. Time travellers cannot change the past: they cannot make it different from the way it was—but they can participate in it: they can be amongst the people who did make the past the way it was. [ 12 ]

What about models involving two temporal dimensions, or parallel universes—do they allow for coherent scenarios in which the past is changed? [ 13 ] There is certainly no contradiction in saying that the time traveller burns all her diaries at midnight on her fortieth birthday in 1976 in universe 1 (or at hypertime A ), and does not burn all her diaries at midnight on her fortieth birthday in 1976 in universe 2 (or at hypertime B ). The question is whether this kind of story involves changing the past in the sense originally envisaged: righting the wrongs of history, preventing subsequently regretted actions, and so on. Goddu (2003) and van Inwagen (2010) argue that it does (in the context of particular hypertime models), while Smith (1997, 365–6; 2015) argues that it does not: that it involves avoiding the past—leaving it untouched while travelling to a different version of the past in which things proceed differently.

2. The Grandfather Paradox

The most important objection to the logical possibility of backwards time travel is the so-called Grandfather paradox. This paradox has actually convinced many people that backwards time travel is impossible:

The dead giveaway that true time-travel is flatly impossible arises from the well-known “paradoxes” it entails. The classic example is “What if you go back into the past and kill your grandfather when he was still a little boy?”…So complex and hopeless are the paradoxes…that the easiest way out of the irrational chaos that results is to suppose that true time-travel is, and forever will be, impossible. (Asimov 1995 [2003, 276–7]) travel into one’s past…would seem to give rise to all sorts of logical problems, if you were able to change history. For example, what would happen if you killed your parents before you were born. It might be that one could avoid such paradoxes by some modification of the concept of free will. But this will not be necessary if what I call the chronology protection conjecture is correct: The laws of physics prevent closed timelike curves from appearing . (Hawking, 1992, 604) [ 14 ]

The paradox comes in different forms. Here’s one version:

If time travel was logically possible then the time traveller could return to the past and in a suicidal rage destroy his time machine before it was completed and murder his younger self. But if this was so a necessary condition for the time trip to have occurred at all is removed, and we should then conclude that the time trip did not occur. Hence if the time trip did occur, then it did not occur. Hence it did not occur, and it is necessary that it did not occur. To reply, as it is standardly done, that our time traveller cannot change the past in this way, is a petitio principii . Why is it that the time traveller is constrained in this way? What mysterious force stills his sudden suicidal rage? (Smith, 1985, 58)

The idea is that backwards time travel is impossible because if it occurred, time travellers would attempt to do things such as kill their younger selves (or their grandfathers etc.). We know that doing these things—indeed, changing the past in any way—is impossible. But were there time travel, there would then be nothing left to stop these things happening. If we let things get to the stage where the time traveller is facing Grandfather with a loaded weapon, then there is nothing left to prevent the impossible from occurring. So we must draw the line earlier: it must be impossible for someone to get into this situation at all; that is, backwards time travel must be impossible.

In order to defend the possibility of time travel in the face of this argument we need to show that time travel is not a sure route to doing the impossible. So, given that a time traveller has gone to the past and is facing Grandfather, what could stop her killing Grandfather? Some science fiction authors resort to the idea of chaperones or time guardians who prevent time travellers from changing the past—or to mysterious forces of logic. But it is hard to take these ideas seriously—and more importantly, it is hard to make them work in detail when we remember that changing the past is impossible. (The chaperone is acting to ensure that the past remains as it was—but the only reason it ever was that way is because of his very actions.) [ 15 ] Fortunately there is a better response—also to be found in the science fiction literature, and brought to the attention of philosophers by Lewis (1976). What would stop the time traveller doing the impossible? She would fail “for some commonplace reason”, as Lewis (1976, 150) puts it. Her gun might jam, a noise might distract her, she might slip on a banana peel, etc. Nothing more than such ordinary occurrences is required to stop the time traveller killing Grandfather. Hence backwards time travel does not entail the occurrence of impossible events—and so the above objection is defused.

A problem remains. Suppose Tim, a time-traveller, is facing his grandfather with a loaded gun. Can Tim kill Grandfather? On the one hand, yes he can. He is an excellent shot; there is no chaperone to stop him; the laws of logic will not magically stay his hand; he hates Grandfather and will not hesitate to pull the trigger; etc. On the other hand, no he can’t. To kill Grandfather would be to change the past, and no-one can do that (not to mention the fact that if Grandfather died, then Tim would not have been born). So we have a contradiction: Tim can kill Grandfather and Tim cannot kill Grandfather. Time travel thus leads to a contradiction: so it is impossible.

Note the difference between this version of the Grandfather paradox and the version considered above. In the earlier version, the contradiction happens if Tim kills Grandfather. The solution was to say that Tim can go into the past without killing Grandfather—hence time travel does not entail a contradiction. In the new version, the contradiction happens as soon as Tim gets to the past. Of course Tim does not kill Grandfather—but we still have a contradiction anyway: for he both can do it, and cannot do it. As Lewis puts it:

Could a time traveler change the past? It seems not: the events of a past moment could no more change than numbers could. Yet it seems that he would be as able as anyone to do things that would change the past if he did them. If a time traveler visiting the past both could and couldn’t do something that would change it, then there cannot possibly be such a time traveler. (Lewis, 1976, 149)

Lewis’s own solution to this problem has been widely accepted. [ 16 ] It turns on the idea that to say that something can happen is to say that its occurrence is compossible with certain facts, where context determines (more or less) which facts are the relevant ones. Tim’s killing Grandfather in 1921 is compossible with the facts about his weapon, training, state of mind, and so on. It is not compossible with further facts, such as the fact that Grandfather did not die in 1921. Thus ‘Tim can kill Grandfather’ is true in one sense (relative to one set of facts) and false in another sense (relative to another set of facts)—but there is no single sense in which it is both true and false. So there is no contradiction here—merely an equivocation.

Another response is that of Vihvelin (1996), who argues that there is no contradiction here because ‘Tim can kill Grandfather’ is simply false (i.e. contra Lewis, there is no legitimate sense in which it is true). According to Vihvelin, for ‘Tim can kill Grandfather’ to be true, there must be at least some occasions on which ‘If Tim had tried to kill Grandfather, he would or at least might have succeeded’ is true—but, Vihvelin argues, at any world remotely like ours, the latter counterfactual is always false. [ 17 ]

Return to the original version of the Grandfather paradox and Lewis’s ‘commonplace reasons’ response to it. This response engenders a new objection—due to Horwich (1987)—not to the possibility but to the probability of backwards time travel.

Think about correlated events in general. Whenever we see two things frequently occurring together, this is because one of them causes the other, or some third thing causes both. Horwich calls this the Principle of V-Correlation:

if events of type A and B are associated with one another, then either there is always a chain of events between them…or else we find an earlier event of type C that links up with A and B by two such chains of events. What we do not see is…an inverse fork—in which A and B are connected only with a characteristic subsequent event, but no preceding one. (Horwich, 1987, 97–8)

For example, suppose that two students turn up to class wearing the same outfits. That could just be a coincidence (i.e. there is no common cause, and no direct causal link between the two events). If it happens every week for the whole semester, it is possible that it is a coincidence, but this is extremely unlikely . Normally, we see this sort of extensive correlation only if either there is a common cause (e.g. both students have product endorsement deals with the same clothing company, or both slavishly copy the same influencer) or a direct causal link (e.g. one student is copying the other).

Now consider the time traveller setting off to kill her younger self. As discussed, no contradiction need ensue—this is prevented not by chaperones or mysterious forces, but by a run of ordinary occurrences in which the trigger falls off the time traveller’s gun, a gust of wind pushes her bullet off course, she slips on a banana peel, and so on. But now consider this run of ordinary occurrences. Whenever the time traveller contemplates auto-infanticide, someone nearby will drop a banana peel ready for her to slip on, or a bird will begin to fly so that it will be in the path of the time traveller’s bullet by the time she fires, and so on. In general, there will be a correlation between auto-infanticide attempts and foiling occurrences such as the presence of banana peels—and this correlation will be of the type that does not involve a direct causal connection between the correlated events or a common cause of both. But extensive correlations of this sort are, as we saw, extremely rare—so backwards time travel will happen about as often as you will see two people wear the same outfits to class every day of semester, without there being any causal connection between what one wears and what the other wears.

We can set out Horwich’s argument this way:

• If time travel were ever to occur, we should see extensive uncaused correlations.
• It is extremely unlikely that we should ever see extensive uncaused correlations.
• Therefore time travel is extremely unlikely to occur.

The conclusion is not that time travel is impossible, but that we should treat it the way we treat the possibility of, say, tossing a fair coin and getting heads one thousand times in a row. As Price (1996, 278 n.7) puts it—in the context of endorsing Horwich’s conclusion: “the hypothesis of time travel can be made to imply propositions of arbitrarily low probability. This is not a classical reductio, but it is as close as science ever gets.”

Smith (1997) attacks both premisses of Horwich’s argument. Against the first premise, he argues that backwards time travel, in itself, does not entail extensive uncaused correlations. Rather, when we look more closely, we see that time travel scenarios involving extensive uncaused correlations always build in prior coincidences which are themselves highly unlikely. Against the second premise, he argues that, from the fact that we have never seen extensive uncaused correlations, it does not follow that we never shall. This is not inductive scepticism: let us assume (contra the inductive sceptic) that in the absence of any specific reason for thinking things should be different in the future, we are entitled to assume they will continue being the same; still we cannot dismiss a specific reason for thinking the future will be a certain way simply on the basis that things have never been that way in the past. You might reassure an anxious friend that the sun will certainly rise tomorrow because it always has in the past—but you cannot similarly refute an astronomer who claims to have discovered a specific reason for thinking that the earth will stop rotating overnight.

Sider (2002, 119–20) endorses Smith’s second objection. Dowe (2003) criticises Smith’s first objection, but agrees with the second, concluding overall that time travel has not been shown to be improbable. Ismael (2003) reaches a similar conclusion. Goddu (2007) criticises Smith’s first objection to Horwich. Further contributions to the debate include Arntzenius (2006), Smeenk and Wüthrich (2011, §2.2) and Elliott (2018). For other arguments to the same conclusion as Horwich’s—that time travel is improbable—see Ney (2000) and Effingham (2020).

Return again to the original version of the Grandfather paradox and Lewis’s ‘commonplace reasons’ response to it. This response engenders a further objection. The autoinfanticidal time traveller is attempting to do something impossible (render herself permanently dead from an age younger than her age at the time of the attempts). Suppose we accept that she will not succeed and that what will stop her is a succession of commonplace occurrences. The previous objection was that such a succession is improbable . The new objection is that the exclusion of the time traveler from successfully committing auto-infanticide is mysteriously inexplicable . The worry is as follows. Each particular event that foils the time traveller is explicable in a perfectly ordinary way; but the inevitable combination of these events amounts to a ring-fencing of the forbidden zone of autoinfanticide—and this ring-fencing is mystifying. It’s like a grand conspiracy to stop the time traveler from doing what she wants to do—and yet there are no conspirators: no time lords, no magical forces of logic. This is profoundly perplexing. Riggs (1997, 52) writes: “Lewis’s account may do for a once only attempt, but is untenable as a general explanation of Tim’s continual lack of success if he keeps on trying.” Ismael (2003, 308) writes: “Considered individually, there will be nothing anomalous in the explanations…It is almost irresistible to suppose, however, that there is something anomalous in the cases considered collectively, i.e., in our unfailing lack of success.” See also Gorovitz (1964, 366–7), Horwich (1987, 119–21) and Carroll (2010, 86).

There have been two different kinds of defense of time travel against the objection that it involves mysteriously inexplicable occurrences. Baron and Colyvan (2016, 70) agree with the objectors that a purely causal explanation of failure—e.g. Tim fails to kill Grandfather because first he slips on a banana peel, then his gun jams, and so on—is insufficient. However they argue that, in addition, Lewis offers a non-causal—a logical —explanation of failure: “What explains Tim’s failure to kill his grandfather, then, is something about logic; specifically: Tim fails to kill his grandfather because the law of non-contradiction holds.” Smith (2017) argues that the appearance of inexplicability is illusory. There are no scenarios satisfying the description ‘a time traveller commits autoinfanticide’ (or changes the past in any other way) because the description is self-contradictory (e.g. it involves the time traveller permanently dying at 20 and also being alive at 40). So whatever happens it will not be ‘that’. There is literally no way for the time traveller not to fail. Hence there is no need for—or even possibility of—a substantive explanation of why failure invariably occurs, and such failure is not perplexing.

3. Causation

Backwards time travel scenarios give rise to interesting issues concerning causation. In this section we examine two such issues.

Earlier we distinguished changing the past and affecting the past, and argued that while the former is impossible, backwards time travel need involve only the latter. Affecting the past would be an example of backwards causation (i.e. causation where the effect precedes its cause)—and it has been argued that this too is impossible, or at least problematic. [ 18 ] The classic argument against backwards causation is the bilking argument . [ 19 ] Faced with the claim that some event A causes an earlier event B , the proponent of the bilking objection recommends an attempt to decorrelate A and B —that is, to bring about A in cases in which B has not occurred, and to prevent A in cases in which B has occurred. If the attempt is successful, then B often occurs despite the subsequent nonoccurrence of A , and A often occurs without B occurring, and so A cannot be the cause of B . If, on the other hand, the attempt is unsuccessful—if, that is, A cannot be prevented when B has occurred, nor brought about when B has not occurred—then, it is argued, it must be B that is the cause of A , rather than vice versa.

The bilking procedure requires repeated manipulation of event A . Thus, it cannot get under way in cases in which A is either unrepeatable or unmanipulable. Furthermore, the procedure requires us to know whether or not B has occurred, prior to manipulating A —and thus, it cannot get under way in cases in which it cannot be known whether or not B has occurred until after the occurrence or nonoccurrence of A (Dummett, 1964). These three loopholes allow room for many claims of backwards causation that cannot be touched by the bilking argument, because the bilking procedure cannot be performed at all. But what about those cases in which it can be performed? If the procedure succeeds—that is, A and B are decorrelated—then the claim that A causes B is refuted, or at least weakened (depending upon the details of the case). But if the bilking attempt fails, it does not follow that it must be B that is the cause of A , rather than vice versa. Depending upon the situation, that B causes A might become a viable alternative to the hypothesis that A causes B —but there is no reason to think that this alternative must always be the superior one. For example, suppose that I see a photo of you in a paper dated well before your birth, accompanied by a report of your arrival from the future. I now try to bilk your upcoming time trip—but I slip on a banana peel while rushing to push you away from your time machine, my time travel horror stories only inspire you further, and so on. Or again, suppose that I know that you were not in Sydney yesterday. I now try to get you to go there in your time machine—but first I am struck by lightning, then I fall down a manhole, and so on. What does all this prove? Surely not that your arrival in the past causes your departure from the future. Depending upon the details of the case, it seems that we might well be entitled to describe it as involving backwards time travel and backwards causation. At least, if we are not so entitled, this must be because of other facts about the case: it would not follow simply from the repeated coincidental failures of my bilking attempts.

Backwards time travel would apparently allow for the possibility of causal loops, in which things come from nowhere. The things in question might be objects—imagine a time traveller who steals a time machine from the local museum in order to make his time trip and then donates the time machine to the same museum at the end of the trip (i.e. in the past). In this case the machine itself is never built by anyone—it simply exists. The things in question might be information—imagine a time traveller who explains the theory behind time travel to her younger self: theory that she herself knows only because it was explained to her in her youth by her time travelling older self. The things in question might be actions. Imagine a time traveller who visits his younger self. When he encounters his younger self, he suddenly has a vivid memory of being punched on the nose by a strange visitor. He realises that this is that very encounter—and resignedly proceeds to punch his younger self. Why did he do it? Because he knew that it would happen and so felt that he had to do it—but he only knew it would happen because he in fact did it. [ 20 ]

One might think that causal loops are impossible—and hence that insofar as backwards time travel entails such loops, it too is impossible. [ 21 ] There are two issues to consider here. First, does backwards time travel entail causal loops? Lewis (1976, 148) raises the question whether there must be causal loops whenever there is backwards causation; in response to the question, he says simply “I am not sure.” Mellor (1998, 131) appears to claim a positive answer to the question. [ 22 ] Hanley (2004, 130) defends a negative answer by telling a time travel story in which there is backwards time travel and backwards causation, but no causal loops. [ 23 ] Monton (2009) criticises Hanley’s counterexample, but also defends a negative answer via different counterexamples. Effingham (2020) too argues for a negative answer.

Second, are causal loops impossible, or in some other way objectionable? One objection is that causal loops are inexplicable . There have been two main kinds of response to this objection. One is to agree but deny that this is a problem. Lewis (1976, 149) accepts that a loop (as a whole) would be inexplicable—but thinks that this inexplicability (like that of the Big Bang or the decay of a tritium atom) is merely strange, not impossible. In a similar vein, Meyer (2012, 263) argues that if someone asked for an explanation of a loop (as a whole), “the blame would fall on the person asking the question, not on our inability to answer it.” The second kind of response (Hanley, 2004, §5) is to deny that (all) causal loops are inexplicable. A second objection to causal loops, due to Mellor (1998, ch.12), is that in such loops the chances of events would fail to be related to their frequencies in accordance with the law of large numbers. Berkovitz (2001) and Dowe (2001) both argue that Mellor’s objection fails to establish the impossibility of causal loops. [ 24 ] Effingham (2020) considers—and rebuts—some additional objections to the possibility of causal loops.

4. Time and Change

Gödel (1949a [1990a])—in which Gödel presents models of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity in which there exist CTC’s—can well be regarded as initiating the modern academic literature on time travel, in both philosophy and physics. In a companion paper, Gödel discusses the significance of his results for more general issues in the philosophy of time (Gödel 1949b [1990b]). For the succeeding half century, the time travel literature focussed predominantly on objections to the possibility (or probability) of time travel. More recently, however, there has been renewed interest in the connections between time travel and more general issues in the metaphysics of time and change. We examine some of these in the present section. [ 25 ]

The first thing that we need to do is set up the various metaphysical positions whose relationships with time travel will then be discussed. Consider two metaphysical questions:

• Are the past, present and future equally real?
• Is there an objective flow or passage of time, and an objective now?

We can label some views on the first question as follows. Eternalism is the view that past and future times, objects and events are just as real as the present time and present events and objects. Nowism is the view that only the present time and present events and objects exist. Now-and-then-ism is the view that the past and present exist but the future does not. We can also label some views on the second question. The A-theory answers in the affirmative: the flow of time and division of events into past (before now), present (now) and future (after now) are objective features of reality (as opposed to mere features of our experience). Furthermore, they are linked: the objective flow of time arises from the movement, through time, of the objective now (from the past towards the future). The B-theory answers in the negative: while we certainly experience now as special, and time as flowing, the B-theory denies that what is going on here is that we are detecting objective features of reality in a way that corresponds transparently to how those features are in themselves. The flow of time and the now are not objective features of reality; they are merely features of our experience. By combining answers to our first and second questions we arrive at positions on the metaphysics of time such as: [ 26 ]

• the block universe view: eternalism + B-theory
• the moving spotlight view: eternalism + A-theory
• the presentist view: nowism + A-theory
• the growing block view: now-and-then-ism + A-theory.

So much for positions on time itself. Now for some views on temporal objects: objects that exist in (and, in general, change over) time. Three-dimensionalism is the view that persons, tables and other temporal objects are three-dimensional entities. On this view, what you see in the mirror is a whole person. [ 27 ] Tomorrow, when you look again, you will see the whole person again. On this view, persons and other temporal objects are wholly present at every time at which they exist. Four-dimensionalism is the view that persons, tables and other temporal objects are four-dimensional entities, extending through three dimensions of space and one dimension of time. On this view, what you see in the mirror is not a whole person: it is just a three-dimensional temporal part of a person. Tomorrow, when you look again, you will see a different such temporal part. Say that an object persists through time if it is around at some time and still around at a later time. Three- and four-dimensionalists agree that (some) objects persist, but they differ over how objects persist. According to three-dimensionalists, objects persist by enduring : an object persists from t 1 to t 2 by being wholly present at t 1 and t 2 and every instant in between. According to four-dimensionalists, objects persist by perduring : an object persists from t 1 to t 2 by having temporal parts at t 1 and t 2 and every instant in between. Perduring can be usefully compared with being extended in space: a road extends from Melbourne to Sydney not by being wholly located at every point in between, but by having a spatial part at every point in between.

It is natural to combine three-dimensionalism with presentism and four-dimensionalism with the block universe view—but other combinations of views are certainly possible.

Gödel (1949b [1990b]) argues from the possibility of time travel (more precisely, from the existence of solutions to the field equations of General Relativity in which there exist CTC’s) to the B-theory: that is, to the conclusion that there is no objective flow or passage of time and no objective now. Gödel begins by reviewing an argument from Special Relativity to the B-theory: because the notion of simultaneity becomes a relative one in Special Relativity, there is no room for the idea of an objective succession of “nows”. He then notes that this argument is disrupted in the context of General Relativity, because in models of the latter theory to date, the presence of matter does allow recovery of an objectively distinguished series of “nows”. Gödel then proposes a new model (Gödel 1949a [1990a]) in which no such recovery is possible. (This is the model that contains CTC’s.) Finally, he addresses the issue of how one can infer anything about the nonexistence of an objective flow of time in our universe from the existence of a merely possible universe in which there is no objectively distinguished series of “nows”. His main response is that while it would not be straightforwardly contradictory to suppose that the existence of an objective flow of time depends on the particular, contingent arrangement and motion of matter in the world, this would nevertheless be unsatisfactory. Responses to Gödel have been of two main kinds. Some have objected to the claim that there is no objective flow of time in his model universe (e.g. Savitt (2005); see also Savitt (1994)). Others have objected to the attempt to transfer conclusions about that model universe to our own universe (e.g. Earman (1995, 197–200); for a partial response to Earman see Belot (2005, §3.4)). [ 28 ]

Earlier we posed two questions:

Gödel’s argument is related to the second question. Let’s turn now to the first question. Godfrey-Smith (1980, 72) writes “The metaphysical picture which underlies time travel talk is that of the block universe [i.e. eternalism, in the terminology of the present entry], in which the world is conceived as extended in time as it is in space.” In his report on the Analysis problem to which Godfrey-Smith’s paper is a response, Harrison (1980, 67) replies that he would like an argument in support of this assertion. Here is an argument: [ 29 ]

A fundamental requirement for the possibility of time travel is the existence of the destination of the journey. That is, a journey into the past or the future would have to presuppose that the past or future were somehow real. (Grey, 1999, 56)

Dowe (2000, 442–5) responds that the destination does not have to exist at the time of departure: it only has to exist at the time of arrival—and this is quite compatible with non-eternalist views. And Keller and Nelson (2001, 338) argue that time travel is compatible with presentism:

There is four-dimensional [i.e. eternalist, in the terminology of the present entry] time-travel if the appropriate sorts of events occur at the appropriate sorts of times; events like people hopping into time-machines and disappearing, people reappearing with the right sorts of memories, and so on. But the presentist can have just the same patterns of events happening at just the same times. Or at least, it can be the case on the presentist model that the right sorts of events will happen, or did happen, or are happening, at the rights sorts of times. If it suffices for four-dimensionalist time-travel that Jennifer disappears in 2054 and appears in 1985 with the right sorts of memories, then why shouldn’t it suffice for presentist time-travel that Jennifer will disappear in 2054, and that she did appear in 1985 with the right sorts of memories?

Sider (2005) responds that there is still a problem reconciling presentism with time travel conceived in Lewis’s way: that conception of time travel requires that personal time is similar to external time—but presentists have trouble allowing this. Further contributions to the debate whether presentism—and other versions of the A-theory—are compatible with time travel include Monton (2003), Daniels (2012), Hall (2014) and Wasserman (2018) on the side of compatibility, and Miller (2005), Slater (2005), Miller (2008), Hales (2010) and Markosian (2020) on the side of incompatibility.

Leibniz’s Law says that if x = y (i.e. x and y are identical—one and the same entity) then x and y have exactly the same properties. There is a superficial conflict between this principle of logic and the fact that things change. If Bill is at one time thin and at another time not so—and yet it is the very same person both times—it looks as though the very same entity (Bill) both possesses and fails to possess the property of being thin. Three-dimensionalists and four-dimensionalists respond to this problem in different ways. According to the four-dimensionalist, what is thin is not Bill (who is a four-dimensional entity) but certain temporal parts of Bill; and what is not thin are other temporal parts of Bill. So there is no single entity that both possesses and fails to possess the property of being thin. Three-dimensionalists have several options. One is to deny that there are such properties as ‘thin’ (simpliciter): there are only temporally relativised properties such as ‘thin at time t ’. In that case, while Bill at t 1 and Bill at t 2 are the very same entity—Bill is wholly present at each time—there is no single property that this one entity both possesses and fails to possess: Bill possesses the property ‘thin at t 1 ’ and lacks the property ‘thin at t 2 ’. [ 30 ]

Now consider the case of a time traveller Ben who encounters his younger self at time t . Suppose that the younger self is thin and the older self not so. The four-dimensionalist can accommodate this scenario easily. Just as before, what we have are two different three-dimensional parts of the same four-dimensional entity, one of which possesses the property ‘thin’ and the other of which does not. The three-dimensionalist, however, faces a problem. Even if we relativise properties to times, we still get the contradiction that Ben possesses the property ‘thin at t ’ and also lacks that very same property. [ 31 ] There are several possible options for the three-dimensionalist here. One is to relativise properties not to external times but to personal times (Horwich, 1975, 434–5); another is to relativise properties to spatial locations as well as to times (or simply to spacetime points). Sider (2001, 101–6) criticises both options (and others besides), concluding that time travel is incompatible with three-dimensionalism. Markosian (2004) responds to Sider’s argument; [ 32 ] Miller (2006) also responds to Sider and argues for the compatibility of time travel and endurantism; Gilmore (2007) seeks to weaken the case against endurantism by constructing analogous arguments against perdurantism. Simon (2005) finds problems with Sider’s arguments, but presents different arguments for the same conclusion; Effingham and Robson (2007) and Benovsky (2011) also offer new arguments for this conclusion. For further discussion see Wasserman (2018) and Effingham (2020). [ 33 ]

We have seen arguments to the conclusions that time travel is impossible, improbable and inexplicable. Here’s an argument to the conclusion that backwards time travel simply will not occur. If backwards time travel is ever going to occur, we would already have seen the time travellers—but we have seen none such. [ 34 ] The argument is a weak one. [ 35 ] For a start, it is perhaps conceivable that time travellers have already visited the Earth [ 36 ] —but even granting that they have not, this is still compatible with the future actuality of backwards time travel. First, it may be that time travel is very expensive, difficult or dangerous—or for some other reason quite rare—and that by the time it is available, our present period of history is insufficiently high on the list of interesting destinations. Second, it may be—and indeed existing proposals in the physics literature have this feature—that backwards time travel works by creating a CTC that lies entirely in the future: in this case, backwards time travel becomes possible after the creation of the CTC, but travel to a time earlier than the time at which the CTC is created is not possible. [ 37 ]

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• Effingham, Nikk and Robson, Jon, 2007, “A mereological challenge to endurantism”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy , 85: 633–40.
• Ehring, Douglas, 1997, “Personal identity and time travel”, Philosophical Studies , 52: 427–33.
• Elliott, Katrina, 2019, “How to Know That Time Travel Is Unlikely Without Knowing Why”, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly , 100: 90–113.
• Fulmer, Gilbert, 1980, “Understanding time travel”, Southwestern Journal of Philosophy , 11: 151–6.
• Gilmore, Cody, 2007, “Time travel, coinciding objects, and persistence”, in Oxford Studies in Metaphysics , Dean W. Zimmerman, ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press, vol. 3, 177–98.
• Goddu, G.C., 2003, “Time travel and changing the past (or how to kill yourself and live to tell the tale)”, Ratio , 16: 16–32.
• –––, 2007, “Banana peels and time travel”, Dialectica , 61: 559–72.
• Gödel, Kurt, 1949a [1990a], “An example of a new type of cosmological solutions of Einstein’s field equations of gravitation”, in Kurt Gödel: Collected Works (Volume II), Solomon Feferman, et al. (eds.), New York: Oxford University Press, 190–8; originally published in Reviews of Modern Physics , 21 (1949): 447–450.
• –––, 1949b [1990b], “A remark about the relationship between relativity theory and idealistic philosophy”, in Kurt Gödel: Collected Works (Volume II), Solomon Feferman, et al. (eds.), New York: Oxford University Press, 202–7; originally published in P. Schilpp (ed.), Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist , La Salle: Open Court, 1949, 555–562.
• Godfrey-Smith, William, 1980, “Travelling in time”, Analysis , 40: 72–3.
• Gorovitz, Samuel, 1964, “Leaving the past alone”, Philosophical Review , 73: 360–71.
• Grey, William, 1999, “Troubles with time travel”, Philosophy , 74: 55–70.
• Hafele, J. C. and Keating, Richard E., 1972a, “Around-the-world atomic clocks: Observed relativistic time gains”, Science , 177: 168–70.
• –––, 1972b, “Around-the-world atomic clocks: Predicted relativistic time gains”, Science , 177: 166–8.
• Hales, Steven D., 2010, “No time travel for presentists”, Logos & Episteme , 1: 353–60.
• Hall, Thomas, 2014, “In Defense of the Compossibility of Presentism and Time Travel”, Logos & Episteme , 2: 141–59.
• Hanley, Richard, 2004, “No end in sight: Causal loops in philosophy, physics and fiction”, Synthese , 141: 123–52.
• Harrison, Jonathan, 1980, “Report on analysis ‘problem’ no. 18”, Analysis , 40: 65–9.
• Hawking, S.W., 1992, “Chronology protection conjecture”, Physical Review D , 46: 603–11.
• Holt, Dennis Charles, 1981, “Time travel: The time discrepancy paradox”, Philosophical Investigations , 4: 1–16.
• Horacek, David, 2005, “Time travel in indeterministic worlds”, Monist (Special Issue on Time Travel), 88: 423–36.
• Horwich, Paul, 1975, “On some alleged paradoxes of time travel”, Journal of Philosophy , 72: 432–44.
• –––, 1987, Asymmetries in Time: Problems in the Philosophy of Science , Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
• Ismael, J., 2003, “Closed causal loops and the bilking argument”, Synthese , 136: 305–20.
• Keller, Simon and Nelson, Michael, 2001, “Presentists should believe in time-travel”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy , 79: 333–45.
• Kiourti, Ira, 2008, “Killing baby Suzy”, Philosophical Studies , 139: 343–52.
• Le Poidevin, Robin, 2003, Travels in Four Dimensions: The Enigmas of Space and Time , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2005, “The Cheshire Cat problem and other spatial obstacles to backwards time travel”, Monist (Special Issue on Time Travel), 88: 336–52.
• Lewis, David, 1976, “The paradoxes of time travel”, American Philosophical Quarterly , 13: 145–52.
• Loss, Roberto, 2015, “How to Change the Past in One-Dimensional Time”, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly , 96: 1–11.
• Luminet, Jean-Pierre, 2011, “Time, topology, and the twin paradox”, in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Time , Craig Callender (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199298204.003.0018
• Markosian, Ned, 2004, “Two arguments from Sider’s Four-Dimensionalism ”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 68: 665–73.
• Markosian, Ned, 2020, “The Dynamic Theory of Time and Time Travel to the Past”, Disputatio , 12: 137–65.
• Maudlin, Tim, 2012, Philosophy of Physics: Space and Time , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Meiland, Jack W., 1974, “A two-dimensional passage model of time for time travel”, Philosophical Studies , 26: 153–73.
• Mellor, D.H., 1998, Real Time II , London: Routledge.
• Meyer, Ulrich, 2012, “Explaining causal loops”, Analysis , 72: 259–64.
• Miller, Kristie, 2005, “Time travel and the open future”, Disputatio , 1: 223–32.
• –––, 2006, “Travelling in time: How to wholly exist in two places at the same time”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy , 36: 309–34.
• –––, 2008, “Backwards causation, time, and the open future”, Metaphysica , 9: 173–91.
• Monton, Bradley, 2003, “Presentists can believe in closed timelike curves”, Analysis , 63: 199–202.
• –––, 2009, “Time travel without causal loops”, Philosophical Quarterly , 59: 54–67.
• Nerlich, Graham, 1981, “Can time be finite?”, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly , 62: 227–39.
• Ney, S.E., 2000, “Are grandfathers an endangered species?”, Journal of Philosophical Research , 25: 311–21.
• Price, Huw, 1996, Time’s Arrow & Archimedes’ Point: New Directions for the Physics of Time , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Putnam, Hilary, 1975, “It ain’t necessarily so”, in Mathematics, Matter and Method , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, vol. 1 of Philosophical Papers , 237–49.
• Reinganum, Marc R., 1986, “Is time travel impossible? A financial proof”, Journal of Portfolio Management , 13: 10–2.
• Riggs, Peter J., 1991, “A critique of Mellor’s argument against ‘backwards’ causation”, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science , 42: 75–86.
• –––, 1997, “The principal paradox of time travel”, Ratio , 10: 48–64.
• Savitt, Steven, 1994, “The replacement of time”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy , 74: 463–73.
• –––, 2005, “Time travel and becoming”, Monist (Special Issue on Time Travel), 88: 413–22.
• Sider, Theodore, 2001, Four-Dimensionalism: An Ontology of Persistence and Time , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• –––, 2002, “Time travel, coincidences and counterfactuals”, Philosophical Studies , 110: 115–38.
• –––, 2004, “Replies to Gallois, Hirsch and Markosian”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 68: 674–87.
• –––, 2005, “Traveling in A- and B- time”, Monist (Special Issue on Time Travel), 88: 329–35.
• Simon, Jonathan, 2005, “Is time travel a problem for the three-dimensionalist?”, Monist (Special Issue on Time Travel), 88: 353–61.
• Slater, Matthew H., 2005, “The necessity of time travel (on pain of indeterminacy)”, Monist (Special Issue on Time Travel), 88: 362–9.
• Smart, J.J.C., 1963, “Is time travel possible?”, Journal of Philosophy , 60: 237–41.
• Smeenk, Chris and Wüthrich, Christian, 2011, “Time travel and time machines”, in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Time , Craig Callender (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, online ed. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199298204.003.0021
• Smith, Joseph Wayne, 1985, “Time travel and backward causation”, Cogito , 3: 57–67.
• Smith, Nicholas J.J., 1997, “Bananas enough for time travel?”, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science , 48: 363–89.
• –––, 1998, “The problems of backward time travel”, Endeavour , 22(4): 156–8.
• –––, 2004, “Review of Robin Le Poidevin Travels in Four Dimensions: The Enigmas of Space and Time ”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy , 82: 527–30.
• –––, 2005, “Why would time travellers try to kill their younger selves?”, Monist (Special Issue on Time Travel), 88: 388–95.
• –––, 2011, “Inconsistency in the A-theory”, Philosophical Studies , 156: 231–47.
• –––, 2015, “Why time travellers (still) cannot change the past”, Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia , 71: 677–94.
• –––, 2017, “I’d do anything to change the past (but I can’t do ‘that’)”, American Philosophical Quarterly , 54: 153–68.
• van Inwagen, Peter, 2010, “Changing the past”, in Oxford Studies in Metaphysics (Volume 5), Dean W. Zimmerman (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 3–28.
• Vihvelin, Kadri, 1996, “What time travelers cannot do”, Philosophical Studies , 81: 315–30.
• Vranas, Peter B.M., 2005, “Do cry over spilt milk: Possibly you can change the past”, Monist (Special Issue on Time Travel), 88: 370–87.
• –––, 2009, “Can I kill my younger self? Time travel and the retrosuicide paradox”, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly , 90: 520–34.
• –––, 2010, “What time travelers may be able to do”, Philosophical Studies , 150: 115–21.
• Wasserman, Ryan, 2018, Paradoxes of Time Travel , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Williams, Donald C., 1951, “The myth of passage”, Journal of Philosophy , 48: 457–72.
• Wright, John, 2006, “Personal identity, fission and time travel”, Philosophia , 34: 129–42.
• Yourgrau, Palle, 1999, Gödel Meets Einstein: Time Travel in the Gödel Universe , Chicago: Open Court.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Time Travel , entry by Joel Hunter (Truckee Meadows Community College) in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy .

causation: backward | free will: divine foreknowledge and | identity: over time | location and mereology | temporal parts | time | time machines | time travel: and modern physics

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Writing a great essay about traveling is a common academic assignment. It’s a simple task if you know useful tricks to tell readers an interesting story. Find enough information and use vivid observations. Know relevant facts to convince the audience. Follow helpful guidelines to submit a perfect essay about traveling experience.

Your College Essay About Traveling: Research a Certain Place

An essay about traveling is all about a specific place you visited. Look at relevant sources and try to write something unique or different. Recreate this place in your readers’ imagination. Be specific and creative in its descriptions. Before you start writing your essay about traveling with family, conduct your research. You should read more about a given place. Learn more about its backgrounds, religion, culture, and so on. This simple strategy will boost your curiosity and reveal other sides of your destination. If you struggle with remembering all the details, it is great to create a blog while traveling where you would put all the interesting stories, remember them and use them when needed.

Writing the Best College Essay About Traveling Experience

If you’re interested in the art of travel essay writing, make sure your paper fits these basic criteria:

• Has a coherent structure and proper sections.
• Gives the audience a good grasp of relevant data.
• Meets the highest academic standards and contains clarity of expression.
• Includes counter-examples and counter-arguments if appropriate.
• Uses smooth transitions and signposting to help readers navigate your thoughts.
• Contains proper references in the required citation style.
• Offers strong claims with evidence.
• Has a catchy essay introduction with a thesis and a clear conclusion.

Writing an Essay on Traveling Experiences: Useful Tips

There are certain tips that can help you submit the best essay about your last trip. What are they?

• Use a capturing introductory section.
• Use the 1st person perspective.
• Include smooth essay transitions .
• Conclude it correctly.

The introduction plays an important role in writing a great paper. Use excellent essay hook examples to grab readers’ attention. Introduce your major argument and use a specific tone to excite the audience. Your essay on traveling is a certain narration of personal experiences. That’s why you need to use the 1st person perspective to make this story real. Including all the experiences is a mistake because some of them are boring. Use only the most interesting ideas. Include people living in the chosen area and quotes or short stories of their lives. Why use transitions? Your story must flow from its beginning to the end. Add smooth transitions to achieve this goal. Use a few interesting details to connect all the parts of your story. How to conclude an essay about traveling expenses ? You need not only to start your paper strongly but also conclude it effectively. Sum up key ideas and include a call to action. Feel free to restate a thesis to do that.

What Else You Can Do: Improve Your Essay About Traveling

To enhance your traveling essay, use these tried and tested tricks:

• Use images.
• Avoid clichés and formal language.
• Avoid assumptions.
• Specify your story.

Avoid clichés or formal language to make your piece of writing sound more natural. Be sure to use only original and meaningful descriptions and let readers understand everything with ease. Use images in your thematic essay about traveling experience because visual descriptions are an effective way to make the audience understand your story. They bring the audience closer to it. Use breathtaking pictures because they’ll stick in people’s mind for a long time. There are certain errors that many students do when completing this academic assignment. Failing to specify a story about traveling is one of them. Cover minor details to make your paper interesting. Making assumptions is another common error that students make. You need to get facts about a specific place. Assumptions only tell readers a false story. Don’t assume if you aren’t sure about details.

Key Points When Writing a College Essay About Traveling

Keep these basic points in mind when writing your essay about why traveling is important:

• Take a prompt question into account when reading relevant sources of information.
• Before you start writing a rough draft, outline what you will say, what evidence you want to use, and how you’ll structure all paragraphs.
• Use the essay introduction to state your thesis and outline major ideas.
• Include only the facts relevant to your topic because using irrelevant information won’t bring you high grades.
• Ensure that every point is clear because readers shouldn’t be puzzled over your words.
• Use plain and simple language to make strong points and avoid writing confusing or complex sentences. Verbosity will only frustrate teachers. Use a readability tool to make your writing easy-to-comprehend.
• Demonstrate your awareness of relevant materials.
• Make sure all paragraphs are in their coherent order with smooth transitions.

The above-stated secrets will help you write a brilliant essay about traveling. If you still find this task challenging, pay for an essay at StudyCrumb and get proficient help from academic writers. They will solve all of your problems easily.

Daniel Howard is an Essay Writing guru. He helps students create essays that will strike a chord with the readers.

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July 13, 2024

Why You Should Avoid Writing About Travel in College Essays

Previously Published on October 15, 2016:

We at Ivy Coach are in the business of correcting misguided topics chosen for the many college application essays , including the Personal Statement , and one of the most misguided topics we see over and over again involves writing about travel. The student who writes about an impactful travel experience, service trip, or vacation has given a death sentence to their college application. The bottom line?  Steer clear of the travel essay at all costs.  Let’s break down why this topic works against students seeking admission to a highly selective university.

Elaborate Travel Experiences Convey Wealth. Writing About Them Conveys a Lack of Perspective.

Any way you swing it, world travel requires extensive means. This is true even for foreign service trips, volunteering experiences, or returns to a country of familial origin. No matter the nobility of your purpose, or personal significance of your trip, writing about a travel experience shows admissions officers that you’ve had advantages that many others in the applicant pool haven’t had. Even if you’re able to write eloquently and persuasively about a trip you took last summer, you’ll still come across as out of touch and wealthy.

But what’s the problem with conveying wealth? We’re glad you asked! Admissions officers have a responsibility to curate socioeconomically diverse classes. Applicants who come across as wealthy are less diverse and therefore less admissible. This is not to say that wealthy students are not overrepresented at highly selective colleges and universities. The  data  bears this point out. But the difference between the wealthy students admitted to the Ivy League and the wealthy students rejected lies in one simple distinction: some downplay their wealth on the application, and others showcase it. 

Writing about travel, no matter the humility of your intentions, immediately throws your application in with all of the other wealthy, unlikable students who have made the dire mistake of highlighting their socioeconomic status. Furthermore, admissions officers aren’t typically loaded themselves. Why would they root for the student who has had access to experiences they couldn’t dream of when there are plenty of low-income students worthy of consideration. When a student boasts about a trip that costs a sixth of their annual salary, admissions officers aren’t exactly inspired to root for them.

It’s not that admissions officers don’t presume a student from a top boarding school might be wealthy, but that, on its own, doesn’t lead them to root against the applicant. However, when the applicant boasts of their travels, they motivate admissions officers to root against them.

You  Should be the Subject of Your College Essay, Not Some Place

There’s yet another problem with this caustic essay topic. It’s difficult to convey the particularities of what makes you tick, and where your passion lies, when half your essay is waxing rhapsodic about a place you were lucky enough to visit. The Italian countryside might be beautiful, but admissions officers already know this! What they don’t know is why you were inspired to start your own business. Or conduct experimental research. Or revolutionize your artistic discipline. Do you see where we’re going with this?

Your essay topic should showcase your singular admissions hook, meaning the specific pursuit that you are incredibly passionate about and will continue to carry out once on campus. Unless you’re planning on engineering a transportation device that can bring exotic locations to the doorstep of elite American campuses, your essay about your travel experiences doesn’t tell admissions officers much about how you plan to take advantage of the resources and opportunities that their university has to offer nor does it share what you’ve contributed to your local community.

Effective essay topics are framed around a singular hook that presents an applicant as likable and are filled with individual flair. Travel writing might titillate bored agoraphobics, but admissions officers are used to much more compelling — and deeply personal — fare.

How Ivy Coach Helps Students Pick the Most Effective Essay Topic

College essays are Ivy Coach ’s bread and butter. We know exactly what plays well with admission officers, and what to avoid. After all, our  team of expert consultants  is composed of former admissions officers from America’s elite universities.

If you’re interested in optimizing your child’s case for admission to a highly selective university, and helping them craft the most compelling essays possible, fill out our  complimentary consultation form , and we’ll be in touch.

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Student story: admissions essay about a past mistake, how to write a college application essay, tips for writing an effective application essay, sample college essay 1 with feedback, sample college essay 2 with feedback.

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5 Tips to Make Your College Essay Stand Out with Travel | Rustic Pathways

Expert tips to make your college essay stand out! Share unique experiences, focus on specific moments, and connect your story to college values. Traveling can enrich your narrative.

5 Tips to Make Your College Essay Stand Out with Travel

Traveling during your high school years is a fantastic way to broaden your perspective and grow and mature as a person. We’re certain of that here at Rustic Pathways!

Since travel is such a transformative experience , many students write about their adventures for their college admissions essays. This is a great idea, but it does not make you a shoo-in for your dream school any more than your test scores will.

It’s important to reflect on your time in a different state or overseas and think about how it has changed you in a unique way. Having an eye-opening travel experience is not exceptional for college admissions officers in a personal statement in and of itself. It is the specifics in your personal essay—and better yet, actions you took as a result of that experience—that will set you apart from the rest of the applicant pool in the competitive college admissions process.

Here’s how to make your college essay stand out and how to write about your travel experiences for a college essay in a unique way.

5 Tips to Help Your College Essay Standout

• Be authentic and tell your unique story to admissions officers
• Consider weaving your travel experience into a larger story
• Pick one specific moment to focus on
• Look deeper and take a different perspective
• Tailor your essay to the college

1) Be authentic and tell your unique story to admissions officers

Remember someone is going to read this college essay. Don’t be afraid to put in details that tell your unique story to the admissions committees.

What moments have helped make you special? Even if they aren’t the cliche things that you think sound good to the admissions officer, they will show your individuality

2) Consider weaving your travel experience into a larger story

How does your travel experience fit in with your larger life story ? Did it emphasize a passion or interest you already had? Look back and think about how you initially developed that passion, interest, or skill and tell that story, using your travel experience as one supporting part of it.

3) Pick one specific moment to focus on

Again and again admissions officers state that it is often the small things that are more interesting. Not only does writing about small moments show that you can find meaning beyond the big picture, but it will differentiate you. You don’t need an overly wordy essay. Just use your writing skills and focus your personal essays on a transformative moment.

4) Look deeper and take a different perspective

Take a moment to ask different questions of yourself about your trip. Think not only about how you grew personally while abroad, but consider how your actions and presence abroad are affecting the country and its people. If you took part in service, look beyond the obvious and show that you’re aware of the deeper significance or effects, positive or negative, of your efforts. Brainstorm ideas and then write multiple drafts to forge your standout essay.

Questions to ask yourself about your teen travel program

• What was the most powerful experience or moment you had on the program?
• How did your program inspire you?
• How did you change during or after your program? Was it an opinion you previously held that was changed? Your worldview? You, personally?
• What goals have you created for yourself as a result of your Rustic Pathways experience?
• What did you do on your program that was brand new for you? How did you feel doing it?
• What advice would you give someone going on a Rustic Pathways program for the first time?
• What stands out to you about Rustic Pathways?
• What have you done since you’ve been home that relates back to your Rustic Pathways experience?

5) Tailor your essay to the college

Do some research on the college’s mission, what it values, and the kind of students it seeks out and accepts. You don’t want to create a cookie-cutter essay that checks all its boxes, but you should see if there is an authentic way you can build some of those issues into your essay within the strict word limits.

Following these five tips should have you well on your way to crafting a stand-out essay. Once you’ve got a draft ready to go, read back through it and make sure it’s free from any of the following common blunders:

• Refrain from saying anything along the lines of “Rustic Pathways changed my life.”
• Be cautious of switching verb tenses. When you list different activities, make sure the verbs are all in the same 
tense.
• Do not narrate your trip day by day. Talk about specific moments, people, or themes rather than recap your program’s itinerary.
• Avoid the classic “mission trip” essay— as described by Rick Clark , Georgia Tech’s director of undergraduate admissions—a theme he’s tired of reading:“’You know, we flew down to somewhere in Central America. And we got off the plane. It was really hot. And we got on the bus, and 20 miles outside of the village, our bus broke down. But we got picked up by like a chicken truck and taken into town.And then, over the course of my time there, I went expecting to help others. But it was, in fact, me who was changed.’ And even just when you first start reading that essay, you’re like, oh, here it comes again.”

Once you’ve read back through your essay and made any necessary adjustments, you’re almost at the finish line! Print it off and read a physical copy if you haven’t already; errors jump out at you better that way. Now make a few more copies and give them to people you trust to read over, such as your parents, teachers, and high school counselors.

Take their feedback and edits into account, then read, re-read, and re-read again your completed essay. Congratulations, if you made it this far you’ve certainly put together fantastic college essays that will surely get you noticed by admissions counselors. Best of luck!

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How to Write a College Essay | A Complete Guide & Examples

The college essay can make or break your application. It’s your chance to provide personal context, communicate your values and qualities, and set yourself apart from other students.

A standout essay has a few key ingredients:

• A unique, personal topic
• A compelling, well-structured narrative
• A clear, creative writing style
• Evidence of self-reflection and insight

To achieve this, it’s crucial to give yourself enough time for brainstorming, writing, revision, and feedback.

In this comprehensive guide, we walk you through every step in the process of writing a college admissions essay.

Table of contents

Why do you need a standout essay, start organizing early, choose a unique topic, outline your essay, start with a memorable introduction, write like an artist, craft a strong conclusion, revise and receive feedback, frequently asked questions.

While most of your application lists your academic achievements, your college admissions essay is your opportunity to share who you are and why you’d be a good addition to the university.

Your college admissions essay accounts for about 25% of your application’s total weight一and may account for even more with some colleges making the SAT and ACT tests optional. The college admissions essay may be the deciding factor in your application, especially for competitive schools where most applicants have exceptional grades, test scores, and extracurriculars.

What do colleges look for in an essay?

Admissions officers want to understand your background, personality, and values to get a fuller picture of you beyond your test scores and grades. Here’s what colleges look for in an essay :

• Demonstrated values and qualities
• Vulnerability and authenticity
• Self-reflection and insight
• Creative, clear, and concise writing skills

Prevent plagiarism. Run a free check.

It’s a good idea to start organizing your college application timeline in the summer of your junior year to make your application process easier. This will give you ample time for essay brainstorming, writing, revision, and feedback.

While timelines will vary for each student, aim to spend at least 1–3 weeks brainstorming and writing your first draft and at least 2–4 weeks revising across multiple drafts. Remember to leave enough time for breaks in between each writing and editing stage.

Create an essay tracker sheet

If you’re applying to multiple schools, you will have to juggle writing several essays for each one. We recommend using an essay tracker spreadsheet to help you visualize and organize the following:

• Deadlines and number of essays needed
• Prompt overlap, allowing you to write one essay for similar prompts

You can build your own essay tracker using our free Google Sheets template.

College essay tracker template

Ideally, you should start brainstorming college essay topics the summer before your senior year. Keep in mind that it’s easier to write a standout essay with a unique topic.

If you want to write about a common essay topic, such as a sports injury or volunteer work overseas, think carefully about how you can make it unique and personal. You’ll need to demonstrate deep insight and write your story in an original way to differentiate it from similar essays.

What makes a good topic?

• Meaningful and personal to you
• Uncommon or has an unusual angle
• Reveals something different from the rest of your application

Brainstorming questions

You should do a comprehensive brainstorm before choosing your topic. Here are a few questions to get started:

• What are your top five values? What lived experiences demonstrate these values?
• What adjectives would your friends and family use to describe you?
• What challenges or failures have you faced and overcome? What lessons did you learn from them?
• What makes you different from your classmates?
• What are some objects that represent your identity, your community, your relationships, your passions, or your goals?
• Whom do you admire most? Why?
• What three people have significantly impacted your life? How did they influence you?

How to identify your topic

Here are two strategies for identifying a topic that demonstrates your values:

• Start with your qualities : First, identify positive qualities about yourself; then, brainstorm stories that demonstrate these qualities.
• Start with a story : Brainstorm a list of memorable life moments; then, identify a value shown in each story.

After choosing your topic, organize your ideas in an essay outline , which will help keep you focused while writing. Unlike a five-paragraph academic essay, there’s no set structure for a college admissions essay. You can take a more creative approach, using storytelling techniques to shape your essay.

Two common approaches are to structure your essay as a series of vignettes or as a single narrative.

Vignettes structure

The vignette, or montage, structure weaves together several stories united by a common theme. Each story should demonstrate one of your values or qualities and conclude with an insight or future outlook.

This structure gives the admissions officer glimpses into your personality, background, and identity, and shows how your qualities appear in different areas of your life.

Topic: Museum with a “five senses” exhibit of my experiences

• Introduction: Tour guide introduces my museum and my “Making Sense of My Heritage” exhibit
• Story: Racial discrimination with my eyes
• Lesson: Using my writing to document truth
• Story: Broadway musical interests
• Lesson: Finding my voice
• Story: Smells from family dinner table
• Lesson: Appreciating home and family
• Story: Washing dishes
• Lesson: Finding moments of peace in busy schedule
• Story: Biking with Ava
• Lesson: Finding pleasure in job well done
• Conclusion: Tour guide concludes tour, invites guest to come back for “fall College Collection,” featuring my search for identity and learning.

Single story structure

The single story, or narrative, structure uses a chronological narrative to show a student’s character development over time. Some narrative essays detail moments in a relatively brief event, while others narrate a longer journey spanning months or years.

Single story essays are effective if you have overcome a significant challenge or want to demonstrate personal development.

Topic: Sports injury helps me learn to be a better student and person

• Situation: Football injury
• Challenge: Friends distant, teachers don’t know how to help, football is gone for me
• Turning point: Starting to like learning in Ms. Brady’s history class; meeting Christina and her friends
• My reactions: Reading poetry; finding shared interest in poetry with Christina; spending more time studying and with people different from me
• Insight: They taught me compassion and opened my eyes to a different lifestyle; even though I still can’t play football, I’m starting a new game

Brainstorm creative insights or story arcs

Regardless of your essay’s structure, try to craft a surprising story arc or original insights, especially if you’re writing about a common topic.

Never exaggerate or fabricate facts about yourself to seem interesting. However, try finding connections in your life that deviate from cliché storylines and lessons.

Admissions officers read thousands of essays each year, and they typically spend only a few minutes reading each one. To get your message across, your introduction , or hook, needs to grab the reader’s attention and compel them to read more..

Avoid starting your introduction with a famous quote, cliché, or reference to the essay itself (“While I sat down to write this essay…”).

While you can sometimes use dialogue or a meaningful quotation from a close family member or friend, make sure it encapsulates your essay’s overall theme.

Find an original, creative way of starting your essay using the following two methods.

Option 1: Start with an intriguing hook

Begin your essay with an unexpected statement to pique the reader’s curiosity and compel them to carefully read your essay. A mysterious introduction disarms the reader’s expectations and introduces questions that can only be answered by reading more.

Option 2: Start with vivid imagery

Illustrate a clear, detailed image to immediately transport your reader into your memory. You can start in the middle of an important scene or describe an object that conveys your essay’s theme.

A college application essay allows you to be creative in your style and tone. As you draft your essay, try to use interesting language to enliven your story and stand out .

Show, don’t tell

“Tell” in writing means to simply state a fact: “I am a basketball player.” “ Show ” in writing means to use details, examples, and vivid imagery to help the reader easily visualize your memory: “My heart races as I set up to shoot一two seconds, one second一and score a three-pointer!”

First, reflect on every detail of a specific image or scene to recall the most memorable aspects.

• What are the most prominent images?
• Are there any particular sounds, smells, or tastes associated with this memory?
• What emotion or physical feeling did you have at that time?

Be vulnerable to create an emotional response

You don’t have to share a huge secret or traumatic story, but you should dig deep to express your honest feelings, thoughts, and experiences to evoke an emotional response. Showing vulnerability demonstrates humility and maturity. However, don’t exaggerate to gain sympathy.

Use appropriate style and tone

Make sure your essay has the right style and tone by following these guidelines:

• Use a conversational yet respectful tone: less formal than academic writing, but more formal than texting your friends.
• Prioritize using “I” statements to highlight your perspective.
• Write within your vocabulary range to maintain an authentic voice.
• Write concisely, and use the active voice to keep a fast pace.
• Follow grammar rules (unless you have valid stylistic reasons for breaking them).

You should end your college essay with a deep insight or creative ending to leave the reader with a strong final impression. Your college admissions essay should avoid the following:

• Summarizing what you already wrote
• Stating your hope of being accepted to the school
• Mentioning character traits that should have been illustrated in the essay, such as “I’m a hard worker”

Here are two strategies to craft a strong conclusion.

Option 1: Full circle, sandwich structure

The full circle, or sandwich, structure concludes the essay with an image, idea, or story mentioned in the introduction. This strategy gives the reader a strong sense of closure.

In the example below, the essay concludes by returning to the “museum” metaphor that the writer opened with.

Option 2: Revealing your insight

You can use the conclusion to show the insight you gained as a result of the experiences you’ve described. Revealing your main message at the end creates suspense and keeps the takeaway at the forefront of your reader’s mind.

Revise your essay before submitting it to check its content, style, and grammar. Get feedback from no more than two or three people.

It’s normal to go through several rounds of revision, but take breaks between each editing stage.

Also check out our college essay examples to see what does and doesn’t work in an essay and the kinds of changes you can make to improve yours.

Respect the word count

Most schools specify a word count for each essay , and you should stay within 10% of the upper limit.

Remain under the specified word count limit to show you can write concisely and follow directions. However, don’t write too little, which may imply that you are unwilling or unable to write a thoughtful and developed essay.

Check your content, style, and grammar

• First, check big-picture issues of message, flow, and clarity.
• Then, check for style and tone issues.
• Finally, focus on eliminating grammar and punctuation errors.

Get feedback

Get feedback from 2–3 people who know you well, have good writing skills, and are familiar with college essays.

• Teachers and guidance counselors can help you check your content, language, and tone.
• Friends and family can check for authenticity.
• An essay coach or editor has specialized knowledge of college admissions essays and can give objective expert feedback.

The checklist below helps you make sure your essay ticks all the boxes.

College admissions essay checklist

I’ve organized my essay prompts and created an essay writing schedule.

I’ve done a comprehensive brainstorm for essay topics.

I’ve selected a topic that’s meaningful to me and reveals something different from the rest of my application.

I’ve created an outline to guide my structure.

I’ve crafted an introduction containing vivid imagery or an intriguing hook that grabs the reader’s attention.

I’ve written my essay in a way that shows instead of telling.

I’ve shown positive traits and values in my essay.

I’ve demonstrated self-reflection and insight in my essay.

I’ve used appropriate style and tone .

I’ve concluded with an insight or a creative ending.

I’ve revised my essay , checking my overall message, flow, clarity, and grammar.

I’ve respected the word count , remaining within 10% of the upper word limit.

Congratulations!

It looks like your essay ticks all the boxes. A second pair of eyes can help you take it to the next level – Scribbr's essay coaches can help.

Colleges want to be able to differentiate students who seem similar on paper. In the college application essay , they’re looking for a way to understand each applicant’s unique personality and experiences.

Your college essay accounts for about 25% of your application’s weight. It may be the deciding factor in whether you’re accepted, especially for competitive schools where most applicants have exceptional grades, test scores, and extracurricular track records.

A standout college essay has several key ingredients:

• A unique, personally meaningful topic
• A memorable introduction with vivid imagery or an intriguing hook
• Specific stories and language that show instead of telling
• Vulnerability that’s authentic but not aimed at soliciting sympathy
• Clear writing in an appropriate style and tone
• A conclusion that offers deep insight or a creative ending

While timelines will differ depending on the student, plan on spending at least 1–3 weeks brainstorming and writing the first draft of your college admissions essay , and at least 2–4 weeks revising across multiple drafts. Don’t forget to save enough time for breaks between each writing and editing stage.

You should already begin thinking about your essay the summer before your senior year so that you have plenty of time to try out different topics and get feedback on what works.

Most college application portals specify a word count range for your essay, and you should stay within 10% of the upper limit to write a developed and thoughtful essay.

You should aim to stay under the specified word count limit to show you can follow directions and write concisely. However, don’t write too little, as it may seem like you are unwilling or unable to write a detailed and insightful narrative about yourself.

If no word count is specified, we advise keeping your essay between 400 and 600 words.

Is this article helpful?

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Home — Application Essay — National Universities — Time Travel: College Admission Essay Sample

Time Travel: College Admission Essay Sample

• University: Colorado State University

About this sample

Words: 249 |

Published: Jul 18, 2018

Words: 249 | Pages: 1 | 2 min read

If I were a time traveler, I would go to what is now the southwestern area of the United States during the 1100’s. I would go there because I have always been fascinated with Native Americans. I am particularly interested in the Anasazi, “Ancient People” in puebloan. I am fascinated by them for several reasons. They were insane rock climbers who build dwellings high in the cliffs. While this was by necessity, it was still an impressive feat. I have a passion for rock climbing and being able to see these people cheat death to get to their homes and climb in completely untouched areas would be incredible. In addition, I have a passion for nature. Whenever I am on a hike, or even driving through a city, I can't help but wonder about what the land looked like before any large human influence laid its influence on the area. I think that being able to see an incredible place close to my heart in an incredibly pristine state would be amazing. This time travel dream is directly related for my love of the outdoors. I have used this love of outdoors to guide my decision making process when it comes to college and what I want to do as an adult. While I am not positive yet, I am sure that it will involve spending a large amount of time out in nature, experiencing the world much like the Native Americans once did.

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Essay Samples on Travelling

Composing an essay on travelling can easily turn into a classic blog post, which may be unacceptable when you are dealing with some strict college professor. Still, you can get creative and tell about your travel experience. At the same time, you should start with an outline and take notes as you explore. Your introduction part must offer basic background information about the country or some culture that you would like to address. If you had no recent opportunity to travel or the posts that you find online all look similar, consider checking our free travelling essay examples. These will provide you with great templates and inspiration as you can read through them all and choose something that you like. You can talk about adventure tourism or discuss how things have changed according to world events. Some travel essays that we offer will deal with the airline companies and the different challenges related to the world’s hotels, transportation, and pandemic restrictions. See the references in the final part of each paper and explore them online as a way to get even more information. Start with an outline, read various samples, and take one step at a time as you write!

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Write a Good Travel Essay. Please.

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Editor’s Note: We know that many of you are looking for help writing travel experience essays for school or simply writing about a trip for your friends or family. To inspire you and help you write your next trip essay—whether it’s an essay about a trip with family or simply a way to remember your best trip ever (so far)—we enlisted the help of Professor Kathleen Boardman, whose decades of teaching have helped many college students learn the fine art of autobiography and life writing. Here’s advice on how to turn a simple “my best trip” essay into a story that will inspire others to explore the world.

Welcome home! Now that you’re back from your trip, you’d like to share it with others in a travel essay. You’re a good writer and a good editor of your work, but you’ve never tried travel writing before. As your potential reader, I have some advice and some requests for you as you write your travel experience essay.

Trip Essays: What to Avoid

Please don’t tell me everything about your trip. I don’t want to know your travel schedule or the names of all the castles or restaurants you visited. I don’t care about the plane trip that got you there (unless, of course, that trip is the story).

I have a friend who, when I return from a trip, never asks me, “How was your trip?” She knows that I would give her a long, rambling answer: “… and then … and then … and then.” So instead, she says, “Tell me about one thing that really stood out for you.” That’s what I’d like you to do in this travel essay you’re writing.

The Power of Compelling Scenes

One or two “snapshots” are enough—but make them great. Many good writers jump right into the middle of their account with a vivid written “snapshot” of an important scene. Then, having aroused their readers’ interest or curiosity, they fill in the story or background. I think this technique works great for travel writing; at least, I would rather enjoy a vivid snapshot than read through a day-to-day summary of somebody’s travel journal.

Write About a Trip Using Vivid Descriptions

Take your time. Tell a story. So what if you saw things that were “incredible,” did things that were “amazing,” observed actions that you thought “weird”? These words don’t mean anything to me unless you show me, in a story or a vivid description, the experience that made you want to use those adjectives.

I’d like to see the place, the people, or the journey through your eyes, not someone else’s. Please don’t rewrite someone else’s account of visiting the place. Please don’t try to imitate a travel guide or travelogue or someone’s blog or Facebook entry. You are not writing a real travel essay unless you are describing, as clearly and honestly as possible, yourself in the place you visited. What did you see, hear, taste, say? Don’t worry if your “take” on your experience doesn’t match what everyone else says about it. (I’ve already read what THEY have to say.)

The Importance of Self-Editing Your Trip Essay

Don’t give me your first draft to read. Instead, set it aside and then reread it. Reread it again. Where might I need more explanation? What parts of your account are likely to confuse me? (After all, I wasn’t there.) Where might you be wasting my time by repeating or rambling on about something you’ve already told me?

Make me feel, make me laugh, help me learn something. But don’t overdo it: Please don’t preach to me about broadening my horizons or understanding other cultures. Instead, let me in on your feelings, your change of heart and mind, even your fear and uncertainty, as you confronted something you’d never experienced before. If you can, surprise me with something I didn’t know or couldn’t have suspected.

You Can Do It: Turning Your Trip into a Great Travel Experience Essay

I hope you will take yourself seriously as a traveler and as a writer. Through what—and how—you write about just a small portion of your travel experience, show me that you are an interesting, thoughtful, observant person. I will come back to you, begging for more of your travel essays.

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my essay topic

So I have to apply to college this fall and one of the prompts for the essay reads:

"Describe a topic, idea, or concept you find so engaging that it makes you lose all track of time. Why does it captivate you? What or who do you turn to when you want to learn more?"

So I was thinking of ways to be original, and one of the topics that came to mind was time travel.

I just wanted to ask some people what they thought before putting my effort into writing it lol.

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How To Write a Good Travel Essay

Home / Blog / How To Write A Good Travel Essay - Guide With Examples

Introduction

“Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.”

-Gustav Flaubert

Packing the duffel with the bare essentials and hopping into the car, getting behind the steering wheel and driving with no perfect destination in mind – we all dream to live such a life, don't we? Travelling to unseen places and exploring what it has to offer can be an enriching experience. However beautiful can travel be as an experience, writing a travelling essay can be quite a challenge. It may seem easy to come up with the ideas that you want to include in the essay but putting them into coherent sentences can be difficult. Your words should be impactful enough to be able to sweep the readers off their feet and take them on the cliff or make them feel the saline breeze on a beach.  

A perfect travel essay must reflect the journey and highlight the little-known facts about the region. It should be infused with the character and culture of the place. If you are feeling stymied while writing a travel essay, then we have some brilliant tips for you that can make the task considerably easy for you.

8 tips for an outstanding essay on travelling

Here are 8 tips that you can cash on to produce a winning travelling essay:

• Be specific with the destination

Before you choose a topic for your travel essay, keep the time spent in the location in mind. If your trip is just for a couple of days, then do not make the mistake of writing about an entire city. Think it out practically – is it possible to travel through a city in just a few days? Take for instance your essay is about London. It is quite an insurmountable task to be able to cover all the distance even in a week. So stick to a particular destination so that you can include the nuances and minutest details of the place to paint a picture in the reader’s mind with your words. 

• Less guide, more exploring

Also, the destination need not be about an exotic locale. It can be a story about an idyllic rustic location in the suburb of the teeming city. It can be about a cottage up on the hills with just the view of snowy valleys and iced peaks. Your words should give the sense of exploring and not touring. The essay should not be like a guide. It should be a view of the location through your lens.

• Know the location like the back of your hand

Before starting to write a travel essay, do your research. A travel essay isn’t a made-up story so there should not be any fake information. Readers will be looking for more than just the necessary information about the must-visit tourist attractions. So you need to go beyond the surface and include more about the history of the place. Just do not write about the restaurants – talk about the cuisine of the place and the story behind it, if any. To get into the innermost recesses of the location, you can speak to the residents of the area. To bring richness in your travel essay, you must reveal another side of the destination.

• Include the nitty-gritty

The key to an impressive travel essay is to be able to break down the location into kernels and write the core details about them. As mentioned earlier, so not just write about the tourist attractions and restaurants in the destination. Write about the lesser talked streets and unknown landmarks and the history behind them. If the place is known for its delicacies, write about how the cuisine has evolved and who had started it. From quaint bookstores to ice cream parlours to run-down shabby pubs – shed light to such nuances to bring your essay to life. You can even mention the negative things that you have faced in the place – like irregular transport modes or impolite locals. These little details will help you make your essay more impactful.

• Be creative with the writing style

Since a travel essay is more like an anecdote, there is no specific format to write it. Therefore, a travel essay gives you the scope of setting your foot into the unchartered areas of creativity. You have got the creative freedom to write what you want. You can study how the natives of the locale speak and learn some of the basic words and phrases they use. To put them into writing you can read the local newspaper to get the pulse of the city you are in. Using the colloquial lingo can help the reader get a closer peek into the lives of the people living in the place. It will reflect a slice of how they live their way of life. Your words should be simple and yet impactful to portray and not just merely narrate. Touch every bit of the rust in the roof to make the reader feel like they are on the same journey with you.

• Make it personal

The travel essay is your story. So add some personal experience in the story and at the same time do not make it self-indulgent. Include stories that can resonate with all your readers. Your experiences should be able to bring the reader back to the travel destination and connect him with the place. It should be the perfect blend of narration of the experiences you had while on the trip along with a vivid description of the place. To achieve the balance, write your essay in first person perspective to give a real touch to the story. Include the most interesting bits that will help the reader connect with you. You can even include the quotes of natives living in the area you had visited.

• Start with a captivating catch

Like every essay, the introduction is the key to make it an impressive read. The opening should be capturing enough to attract the reader’s attention. It should leave an impact and should make them want to go on reading the piece. Start with an unknown fact about the place and leave it hanging from the cliff. Use a tone of suspense to excite the readers to keep them guessing about the contents of the essay.

• Make it vivid with images

For certain places, words may fall short in being able to explain the exact description of a place. You cannot describe how the sky looked with the mountains seemingly touching the clouds or the horizon fading beyond the sea. Certain things cannot be explained in words – like the color of the sky or the water! This is where pictures come in! Providing real images of the place in between can help the readers stay connected. Vivid photos can also make the readers understand the story better by bringing them closer to it. So make sure you take breathtaking pictures of the place you are writing about. The images will help your essay stay in the readers’ mind longer.

With the above tips, we are sure you will be able to write an excellent travelling essay  that will impress your professor and fetch you a good grade.

And if you are still unsure about putting these to use, then below is a winning sample to show you how it is done!

Travelling essay sample

I have visited London several times, and yet it is amazing how I find something new to explore every time I visit the capital city. My visit last autumn too did not fail to surprise me. With the hustle and bustle and the rich royal history, London city has a lot to offer. Since I just had a few days to spare, I wanted to make the best out of this trip.

Although vast and sprawling, I decided to visit most of the city on foot this time. Now since in my previous visits I had seen most of the tourist-y attractions already, I wanted to take the path less travelled this time to discover the hidden gems of the city. The last time I had been to London, I had missed out on the chance to visit the chock full of literature and history that awaited me in the Shakespeare Globe Theatre. Being a student of literature, visiting the place where the Bard of Avon once enacted the plays he wrote was a spellbinding moment. And guess what? I also caught a staging of the Macbeth before I left the place. Before heading towards the Hyde Park tube station, I grabbed some of London’s famous Fish ‘n’ Chips from the oldest food market of the city, the Borough Market. From Hyde Park to Tower Hill in under fifteen minutes by Tube, I began exploring the Tower of London. It was there that I heard a guard speaking about where he hailed from. A quick conversation with Peter, I had gotten intrigued to know more about his village – Suffolk in Lavenham. I asked him how to get there and Peter, being the quintessential helping guide that Londoners are known to be, told me that I could either take a car from central London. Or I could wait for the next day and take the train from Liverpool to Sudbury and then take the bus route 753 and reach in around two hours. Having nothing to do, I spent that day in the British Museum and walking on Oxford Street.

The next morning, I started my journey to the quaint village of Suffolk. I had picked up a book about the village where I learned that the village had once housed Henry III in 1257. And a bonus for all the Harry Potter fans – the village also starred in ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’ as Godric’s Hollow where Hermoine and Harry are seen to be visiting Bathilda Bagshot. On reaching the village, the first thing that grabbed my attention was the picture-perfect silhouette of prosperous medieval England with all the half-timbered houses. The lime-washed and brightly coloured buildings added an idyllic element to the village with the De Vere House standing out from the rest. Adding to the rustic touch was the fifteenth-century St Peter Church with its soaring height of a 141ft tower. The autumn breeze welcomed me as I walked on the leaf-covered high streets. I saw some young guns cycling around in a park and called out to them for directions. My stay for the trip was an Air BnB home-stay where I had to put up with an elderly couple – the Havishams. I still remember how on reaching the gate of the house, I had caught a waft of crumpets and hot scones. After an exchange of banalities followed by me gorging on the scones, I had found out about the hidden gems from Mr Havisham who happened to be quite a cheerful talker. He told me what a must-visit Hadley’s was when in Suffolk. I had then set out with a local map to find the hidden gem. On reaching I had found that Hadley’s was a cutesy ice cream shop, almost run down, run by an old lady. Here Rebecca told me how the ice cream parlour was opened back in the 1850s and was still known for their hand-made sorbets.

Like the sorbet, my stay in Suffolk had been a sweet experience – a trip of revelation. The tour – with all the lonely walks – had in an inexplicable way helped me to get my perspectives right. It isn’t the exotic locales and the flight above the clouds that make travelling my drug. Rather, it is little but beautiful discoveries like Suffolk that feed my wanderlust. Thank you, London. Thank you for being a wonderful experience, once again.   

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How To Write a Good Travel Essay

• March 18, 2020

Travelling is one of the most exciting parts of everyone’s life. In the same way, this experience has the potential to be a fascinating topic for your writing assignments.

Writing a travel essay requires minimal creativity because trips are full of extraordinary events by their nature, as well as dramas and cultural findings. So, there’s no need to make things up or think through ideas while you are writing this kind of essay. To make life even easier you can even order essay .

However, as easy as it may sound, turning a travel experience into a piece of writing can be a bit challenging for students. Because if not careful, they will end up writing some dull clichés about a bunch of different places, and nothing more.

If you’ve never read any trips or you don’t have enough time to write a paper, you can quickly get your essay written by making use of available writing services. However, here we present some practical guidelines to help you write an exceptional essay:

Select Your Favorite City

Sometimes a trip is explicitly taken to collect information for an essay. If this is true about you, take your time to choose your destination carefully. Do some research before deciding on the city. Read about various regions and see which ones inspire you the most.

Your task here is to share useful information with people and get them involved in your journey. If you can’t enjoy your own trip, how can you let others have fun while reading the story? So it’s essential to choose a destination that you are interested in.

Choose a Few Attractions

Every city or town usually has several tourist attractions. If you attempt to include every single place you visited on that journey, your writing would be a boring list of city attractions that can be found anywhere, such as a tourist website.

Rather than mentioning multiple sights, focus on two or three places, and provide detailed information about them. Let readers know few, but know well.

Another point is that famous attractions are not proper choices for your writing because almost everyone knows the basic information about these places. Put your focus on unknown sites, remembering that people want to hear about something they have never heard.

Write a Compelling First Paragraph

Your first paragraph is usually the most important one. It’s where you convince the readers you had an incredible trip – one that has something new to teach your audience and is worth reading about.

Start with an unusual tradition you witnessed, an interesting dialogue you had, or a cultural misunderstanding you faced during your journey.

Use your sense of humor. Be as innovative as you can. No matter what you do, the final aim is to engage the readers and make them stick to your story.

Show Rather Than Tell

‘Showing’ is what makes a difference between a boring and outstanding travel essay. When you show something with your words, you actually describe what you experienced in full details. However, when you tell something, it’s like you’re just giving a brief report on what you did.

Readers won’t understand what an incredible park, a fabulous road, or a fantastic building means unless you show it to them. Showing makes the readers feel they’ve been there with you.

Therefore, don’t merely rely on telling where you went. Instead, add specific descriptions about that place, talk about your feelings, and paint an imaginary picture of that space in the minds of readers.

Images serve as a complement to your verbal description as they help readers imagine your story better.

One or two pictures is enough, but try to pick the most breathtaking ones that are more related to your narrative. Also, remember that vivid shots are always a better option than black and white ones because they are more eye-catching and can better intrigue the reader’s curiosity.

Keep It Simple

The primary purpose of writing a traveling essay is to entertain your readers. So, there’s no need to show off by using literary words or highly academic structure. Instead, use an active voice, try to be friendly, and bring readers closer to your story.

In this kind of essay, your writing intelligence depends on your ability to amuse people and your art of describing scenes, not using a lot of fluffy sentences.

Describe What You Achieved

If your traveling experience didn’t teach you anything or couldn’t make a positive change in your life, it would be a significant loss of time and money. Every great experience comes with great achievement. This can be as small as a shift in your beliefs, or as big as making wonderful friends. Whatever the accomplishment is, it’s worth telling your readers about it.

Give Readers a Good Ending

Every fantastic narrative begins with a good starting point, continues with a climax, and ends with a reasonable conclusion. Plan your paragraphs before writing. Think about the ways you want to start your story, go through the rising action, and then slow it down gradually to let readers know they are reaching the end of the story. If you end your writing in the middle of the turning point where the reader is reading the most thrilling part of the story, they might get puzzled and confused. It’s like putting an obstacle in front of a high-speed runner and making him stop all of a sudden.

Bottom Line

Travels are full of new experiences. Sometimes a short trip gives you a handful of stories to tell your future grandchildren. They have a lot to teach us and therefore, a lot to talk about. So why not use them as a subject for your writings? The next time you will be searching the net for online essay writing services with “interesting topics to write my essay,” think about your traveling experiences and bring everything you can remember on the paper. Then, google some “help write my essay tips” to learn the main guidelines for writing a travel essay.

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• essay writing
• student travel

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Trump Rallied in Battleground Georgia, as Harris Mulled Her V.P. Choice

Donald J. Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, campaigned in the same Atlanta arena where Kamala Harris held an event this week. She is expected to announce her running mate by Tuesday.

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Neil Vigdor

At Atlanta rally, Trump says Georgia’s governor is hampering his efforts to win there.

Former President Donald J. Trump suggested without evidence on Saturday that Georgia’s Republican governor was hampering his efforts to win the battleground state in November, a claim that carried echoes of Mr. Trump’s attempt to overturn his defeat to President Biden there in 2020.

“In my opinion, they want us to lose,” Mr. Trump said, accusing the state’s governor, Brian Kemp, and its secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, who is also a Republican, of being disloyal and trying to make life difficult for him.

At a rally at the Georgia State University Convocation Center in Atlanta, in a speech that lasted more than 90 minutes and that was peppered with grievances about his loss four years ago, Mr. Trump falsely claimed, “I won this state twice,” referring to the 2016 and 2020 elections.

Mr. Trump lost to Mr. Biden by roughly 12,000 votes in Georgia in 2020. Last year, the former president was indicted by an Atlanta grand jury on charges related to his efforts to subvert the results of that election in that state. On Saturday, he complained that he might have avoided legal jeopardy if Mr. Kemp and Mr. Raffensperger had cooperated with his attempts to reverse the 2020 results.

Mr. Trump added that he thought Georgia had slipped under Mr. Kemp’s leadership. “The state has gone to hell,” he said.

Mr. Kemp, who indicated in June that he had not voted for Mr. Trump in the Republican primary this year, said on X that his focus is “on winning this November” and “not engaging in petty personal insults, attacking fellow Republicans, or dwelling on the past.”

“You should do the same, Mr. President, and leave my family out of it,” he said, sharing a social media message that Mr. Trump had posted earlier Saturday in which he jabbed at Mr. Kemp and Mr. Kemp’s wife.

Mr. Raffensperger shared a screenshot of the same post from Mr. Trump and said : “History has taught us this type of message doesn’t sell well here in Georgia, sir.”

Mr. Trump held his rally in Atlanta in the same arena where his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, held a rally earlier in the week. Both candidates filled the complex, which holds 8,000 people, though Mr. Trump, who has long bragged about his ability to draw overflow crowds, questioned whether Ms. Harris’s supporters had in fact come to hear the hip-hop star Megan Thee Stallion, who performed at that event.

Mr. Trump recalled that Bruce Springsteen had performed at a rally for Hillary Clinton in 2016 . “I’m not a huge fan,” he said of Mr. Springsteen. “I have a bad trait. I only like people that like me.”

Mr. Trump, who was preceded onstage by his running mate, Senator JD Vance, repeatedly leveled personal attacks against Ms. Harris. He mocked the pronunciation of her first name, insulted her intelligence and communication skills, and called her a “radical left freak.”

“Kamala,” Mr. Trump said, enunciating with derision the syllables of her name. “You know there’s about 19 different ways of saying it. She only likes three.”

The Harris campaign provided a statement on Saturday night from Geoff Duncan, a Republican who was the lieutenant governor of Georgia during the 2020 election, denouncing Mr. Trump.

“Tonight, we heard a particularly unhinged, angry version of the same Donald Trump that Georgia rejected in 2020,” said Mr. Duncan, who has endorsed Ms. Harris.

Mr. Trump, who has been criticized for his past praise of dictators and authoritarian leaders, also suggested that Russia had managed to get the better end of a major prisoner swap with the Biden administration this week, which resulted in the release of the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and the security contractor Paul Whelan.

“I’d like to congratulate Vladimir Putin for having made yet another great deal,” Mr. Trump said of the Russian president.

He added: “Boy, we make some horrible, horrible deals.”

Jonathan Weisman and Reid J. Epstein

Harris to interview V.P. contenders in final test of chemistry.

Vice President Kamala Harris will meet with top candidates to serve as her vice president on Sunday, closing out her search for a running mate with a test of whether she and her potential new partner click.

At least three leading candidates — Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota and Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania — are scheduled to meet with Ms. Harris on Sunday at her residence at the Naval Observatory, in Washington, according to several people briefed on the plans who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private meetings.

It was unclear whether other potential candidates — including Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg — were also on the schedule, or if they had already met with Ms. Harris.

The in-person meeting, described as a “chemistry test,” is a final step in the search, but one that Ms. Harris is expected to put considerable stock in. Aides and associates have said that she often prioritizes personal rapport with her staff and advisers.

Ms. Harris is also searching for a running mate who will help her win. Among the finalists are two popular state leaders from battleground states, Mr. Kelly and Mr. Shapiro, and several politicians with a record of appealing to moderates and voters in Republican areas. Ms. Harris, a California Democrat, has scant experience winning over Republicans.

The assets and liabilities of the three candidates on her schedule on Sunday vary. Mr. Kelly is a swing-state senator with an impressive résumé and moderate positions on immigration that might help neutralize a problematic issue for Democrats. Mr. Shapiro is broadly popular in Pennsylvania, arguably a must-win state. But he has faced criticism from the left, especially from pro-Palestinian activists, over his support for Israel and his handling of college protests over the war in Gaza.

Mr. Walz is a fairly new face, even to most Democrats, but he has recently become a favorite among progressives who relish his folksy takedowns of former President Donald J. Trump on cable news. Minnesota, however, is unlikely to be critical to Ms. Harris’s path to the White House.

Ms. Harris’s search has been unusually accelerated. It began in earnest just two weeks ago, shortly after President Biden withdrew from the race and endorsed her to replace him. The vetting — a deep investigation of the candidates’ personal, financial and political lives — was completed by Covington & Burling, a Washington law firm, on Thursday.

Finalists for the job were briefed by Harris campaign advisers about whatever information was found — or not found — by the firm, according to a person close to one of the finalists. They will be told either Monday night or Tuesday morning whether they were picked.

The Harris campaign has said it will announce its choice before she and her new running mate start a cross-country tour with a rally in Philadelphia on Tuesday.

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Donald J. Trump just wrapped up his remarks at a rally in Atlanta, where he repeatedly attacked Vice President Kamala Harris over immigration, crime and inflation in a meandering speech that lasted more than 90 minutes.

At his rally in Georgia, a state he won in 2016 but lost to President Biden in 2020, former President Donald J. Trump is relitigating his defeat in the last election. “I won this state twice,” he falsely claimed. Trump also attacked Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, and its secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, two Republicans who defied his bid to overturn his defeat. He suggested, without evidence, that they were making life difficult for him in the 2024 election. “In my opinion, they want us to lose.”

Ken Bensinger and Jim Rutenberg

Doug Emhoff, Kamala Harris’s husband, acknowledges a long-ago affair.

Doug Emhoff, the husband of Vice President Kamala Harris, said on Saturday that he had an extramarital affair during his first marriage, years before he met Ms. Harris.

The acknowledgment, which was released in a statement, came hours after a British tabloid reported that Mr. Emhoff had a previously undisclosed relationship with a teacher who worked at the elementary school his children attended in Culver City, Calif., approximately 15 years ago.

At the time, Mr. Emhoff, an entertainment lawyer, was married to Kerstin Emhoff, a film producer, with whom he had two children. The couple filed for divorce in 2009. Mr. Emhoff met Ms. Harris in 2013, and they married the following year.

“During my first marriage, Kerstin and I went through some tough times on account of my actions,” Mr. Emhoff said in the statement. “I took responsibility, and in the years since, we worked through things as a family and have come out stronger on the other side.”

The Biden campaign was aware of the affair before it decided to tap Ms. Harris as vice president in 2020, according to a person familiar with the vetting process, who spoke on condition of anonymity. In addition, this person said that Ms. Harris knew of the affair before she married Mr. Emhoff in 2014.

According to an article published by The Daily Mail on Saturday, Mr. Emhoff had the relationship with a woman who at the time worked as a teacher at The Willows Community School, a private school in west Los Angeles.

The woman, who now lives on Long Island, did not respond to messages seeking comment.

In the years since their divorce, Mr. Emhoff and his ex-wife have frequently referred to each other as friends, and they have said they have worked to raise their children with Ms. Harris , whom they call a “co-parent.”

Ms. Emhoff also has lately defended Ms. Harris. After Senator JD Vance, Republican of Ohio, was named the vice-presidential nominee, critics began resurfacing remarks he made in 2021 claiming the country was run by “childless cat ladies,” including Ms. Harris. Ms. Emhoff called the attacks “baseless” and praised the vice president’s role in her family.

The former couple’s two children, now both adults, have also defended the vice president’s role in their upbringing. Ella Emhoff, in a social media post last week, wrote “how can you be ‘childless’ when you have cutie pie kids like Cole and I,” referring to herself and her brother.

In another statement on Saturday, Ms. Emhoff also addressed her husband’s affair, but stopped short of blaming it for their divorce.

“Doug and I decided to end our marriage for a variety of reasons, many years ago,” Ms. Emhoff said. “He is a great father to our kids, continues to be a great friend to me and I am really proud of the warm and supportive blended family Doug, Kamala and I have built together.”

Mr. Emhoff, who left his law practice when Ms. Harris was elected as President Biden’s vice president, has become an integral and prominent part of Ms. Harris’s political operation. On Friday he co-hosted a fund-raiser on Fire Island for the campaign, along with Chasten Buttigieg, the husband of Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary, which the Democratic National Committee said had raised $321,000.

At his rally in Atlanta, Donald J. Trump returned to a favorite preoccupation of his campaign speeches: crowd size. He argued that his Democratic opponents, from Hillary Clinton in 2016 to Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024, needed celebrity headliners to fill arenas. He harkened back to the 2016 election when Bruce Springsteen performed at a rally for Clinton. “I’m not a huge fan,” Trump said of the Boss. He added: “I only like people that like me.”

Vice President Kamala Harris held a rally in this same arena on Tuesday, when roughly 10,000 people attended. The arena is filled again tonight, but Trump has repeatedly complained that officials with the complex would not allow in all of the people who had lined up to attend.

Jonathan Weisman

Abed Ayoub, a Palestinian-rights activist in Michigan, confirmed on Saturday that he was a finalist to be the Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein’s running mate. Al Jazeera reported that Ayoub, the executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and two other Palestinian-rights activists, were the finalists, suggesting that Stein was determined to make it that much tougher for Vice President Kamala Harris to win battleground Michigan, which has a large Arab American population.

Former President Donald J. Trump, who has been criticized for his past praise of dictators and authoritarian leaders, suggested during his Atlanta rally that Russia got the better end of a major prisoner swap with the Biden administration this week that resulted in the release of the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and the security contractor Paul Whelan. “I’d like to congratulate Vladimir Putin for having made yet another great deal,” Trump said of the Russian president. He added: “Boy, we make some horrible, horrible deals.”

Former President Donald J. Trump is taking the stage at a campaign rally in Atlanta, where he was introduced by his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio.

Shawn McCreesh

Senator JD Vance of Ohio is speaking here at the Trump rally in Atlanta. He says that when Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democrats make fun of him for being “weird,” it’s evidence of their elitist, sneering, condescending worldview — of a piece with Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment in 2016 and Barack Obama’s remark in 2008 about “bitter” working-class voters who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.” The crowd gave Vance a thundering reception.

Reid J. Epstein

Gov. Tim Walz, Democrat of Minnesota and a contender to be Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate, has canceled a planned trip to New Hampshire on Sunday, his spokesman, Teddy Tschann, said. “The governor’s schedule has changed,” Tschann said.

Former President Donald J. Trump will soon take the stage here at the Georgia State Convocation Center, the same arena in Atlanta where Kamala Harris held a packed rally on Tuesday. It’s totally filled for Trump, too, but the crowd is overwhelmingly white, except in one spot — the section directly behind the stage that is in full view of the broadcast cameras. Representatives Mike Collins and Marjorie Taylor Greene are here as warm-up acts. “Kamala Harris is like the Stacey Abrams of California,” Collins told the crowd, referring to the voting-rights activist who twice lost the governor's race. “Georgia didn’t want Stacey, and we don’t want Kamala.”

Ahead of his rally in Atlanta on Saturday, former President Donald J. Trump renewed his grievances with two Georgia elected officials, both Republicans, who rejected his bid to overturn his election defeat in the battleground state in 2020. In a social media post, he called on Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state, to “do his job,” and he amplified his false claims about election fraud. Trump also attacked the governor, Brian Kemp: “His Crime Rate in Georgia is terrible, his Crime Rate in Atlanta is the worst, and his Economy is average.”

A campaign official for Vice President Kamala Harris accused Donald J. Trump on Saturday of scheming up a Sept. 4 debate on Fox News to avoid a debate scheduled for six days later on ABC News that Trump had committed to before President Biden dropped out of the race. “We’re happy to discuss further debates after the one both campaigns have already agreed to,” Michael Tyler, the Harris campaign’s communications director, said. “Mr. Anytime, Anywhere, Anyplace should have no problem with that unless he’s too scared to show up on the 10th.”

Nicholas Nehamas

As the Harris campaign brings on new top-level aides , it is also hiring staff members in battleground states. In the next two weeks, the campaign will add 150 people to its staff in the blue wall states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and “more than double our staff in Arizona and North Carolina,” according to a memo from Dan Kanninen, the campaign’s battleground states director. The memo says that the campaign currently has more than 1,400 staff members across the swing states.

Neil Vigdor Maggie Haberman and Simon J. Levien

Trump cancels a debate with Harris on ABC News and pitches one with Fox News instead.

Former President Donald J. Trump declared late on Friday that he was dropping out of an ABC News debate scheduled for Sept. 10 and presented a counterproposal to Vice President Kamala Harris, his presumptive opponent, to face off on Fox News six days earlier.

The change, which Mr. Trump announced on his social media site, Truth Social, raised objections from the Harris campaign and appeared to throw a potential showdown between the rivals into question.

A campaign official for Ms. Harris on Saturday accused Mr. Trump of scheming up the Fox News debate to distract from reneging on his commitment to the ABC debate. Mr. Trump had agreed to that debate in May, before President Biden dropped out of the race and before Mr. Biden’s calamitous performance in a CNN debate on June 27.

“Donald Trump is running scared and trying to back out of the debate he already agreed to and running straight to Fox News to bail him out,” Michael Tyler, the communications director for the Harris campaign, said in a statement. “He needs to stop playing games and show up to the debate he already committed to on Sept 10.”

Mr. Tyler said that the Harris campaign was open to discussing further debates if Mr. Trump honored his commitment to the ABC debate.

“Mr. Anytime, Anywhere, Anyplace should have no problem with that unless he’s too scared to show up on the 10th,” he said.

A spokesman for ABC News would not say whether the network would go ahead with its debate and give time only to Ms. Harris. In a post on X on Saturday, Ms. Harris said: “I’ll be there on September 10th, like he agreed to. I hope to see him there.”

A spokesman for the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday. Representatives for Fox News did not respond to questions.

Mr. Trump has repeatedly railed against ABC News, which he is suing for defamation, a case that a federal judge in Florida recently allowed to move forward . He has attacked George Stephanopoulos, the host of “This Week” on ABC, who did the first television interview with Mr. Biden after his debate performance. He also turned combative toward Rachel Scott of ABC News during a question-and-answer session on Wednesday at a convention of Black journalists in Chicago.

Mr. Trump has appeared to be struggling to find his footing since Mr. Biden left the race, despite the fact that Democrats had been increasingly calling for such a change since the president’s debate performance.

He has tested out a series of nicknames against Ms. Harris and has made clear he would rather attack her personally and focus the public discussion on her race — Ms. Harris’s father was born in Jamaica and her mother in India — than attempt to tie her to the Biden administration’s record or her own record as a prosecutor in California.

Mr. Trump, who spent nearly 16 months getting nonstop attention since he was first criminally indicted in March 2023, has also struggled to try to inject himself back into the headlines at a moment when Ms. Harris is enjoying a political honeymoon. By canceling the ABC debate, Mr. Trump has put himself back in the news cycle.

According to Mr. Trump’s post on his social media site, the Fox News debate would take place on Sept. 4 at a to-be-determined location in Pennsylvania, one of the most consequential battleground states. The network’s anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum would moderate.

Mr. Trump said on social media that the Fox News debate would have a live audience; the previous debate between him and Mr. Biden was hosted by CNN in an empty venue. Though both campaigns agreed to the format of the first debate, Mr. Trump had bemoaned the lack of a crowd.

He added that the rules would be similar to the CNN debate, though he did not specify which rules. The candidates’ microphones in the June debate were muted when it was not their turn to speak to prevent interruptions.

Mr. Trump also said that he was “totally prepared to accept” Ms. Harris as the Democrats’ new candidate. Since her campaign suddenly took shape after Mr. Biden dropped out of the race about two weeks ago, Mr. Trump has characterized her ascendancy as a “coup” within the Democratic Party. In his debate announcement, the former president complained about the shake-up.

“I spent Hundreds of Millions of Dollars, Time, and Effort fighting Joe, and when I won the Debate, they threw a new Candidate into the ring,” Mr. Trump said on his social media site on Friday, adding that he hoped to tie Ms. Harris to Mr. Biden’s policies.

The Sept. 4 date is close to the start of some states’ early voting windows and long after Ms. Harris has clinched the nomination from her party. (The Democratic National Committee said on Friday that she had already won enough delegates in a virtual roll call vote to secure the party’s nomination.)

The first presidential debate between Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump had a seismic impact on the race. Mr. Biden gave a halting performance, in contrast to Mr. Trump, who spoke comparatively vigorously while repeatedly advancing falsehoods.

Mr. Biden’s garbled responses supercharged concerns among his Democratic colleagues about his age and health, as well as his ability to beat Mr. Trump in the general election. After several weeks of declining poll numbers and mounting pressure from key allies, Mr. Biden announced on July 21 that he would withdraw from the race.

Since then, Ms. Harris has challenged Mr. Trump to debate her and criticized his reluctance to commit to a date. As recently as Friday morning, in an interview with Fox Business, he was refusing to say whether he would debate Ms. Harris.

After the president dropped out, Ms. Harris said she would be willing to debate in Mr. Biden’s place, but Mr. Trump was noncommittal.

“Well Donald, I do hope you’ll reconsider to meet me on the debate stage,” Ms. Harris said at her rally in Atlanta on Tuesday. “Because as the saying goes, ‘If you’ve got something to say, say it to my face.’”

Shapiro’s college-era criticism of Palestinians draws fresh scrutiny.

Gov. Josh Shapiro, Democrat of Pennsylvania, wrote in his college newspaper three decades ago that Palestinians were “too battle-minded” to achieve a two-state solution in the Middle East, prompting criticism as Vice President Kamala Harris considers him to be her running mate.

Mr. Shapiro, 51, has embraced his Jewish identity and been one of the Democratic Party’s staunchest defenders of Israel at a moment when the party is splintered over the war in Gaza.

But he says his views have evolved since publishing an opinion essay as a college student at the University of Rochester in New York, when he wrote that Palestinians were incapable of establishing their own homeland and making it successful, even with help from Israel and the United States.

“They are too battle-minded to be able to establish a peaceful homeland of their own,” he wrote in the essay, published in the Sept. 23, 1993, edition of The Campus Times , the student newspaper. “They will grow tired of fighting amongst themselves and will turn outside against Israel.”

Mr. Shapiro, who was 20 at the time, noted in his essay that he had spent five months studying in Israel and had volunteered in the Israeli Army.

“The only way the ‘peace plan’ will be successful is if the Palestinians do not ruin it,” Mr. Shapiro wrote, adding, “Palestinians will not coexist peacefully.”

During a news conference on Friday at Cheyney University of Pennsylvania, the nation’s first historically Black college or university, Mr. Shapiro tried to distance himself from those remarks, which were first reported by The Philadelphia Inquirer .

“Something I wrote when I was 20, is that what you’re talking about?” Mr. Shapiro told a reporter who asked him about it. “I was 20.”

Mr. Shapiro said he had been in favor of a two-state solution, with “Israelis and Palestinians living peacefully side by side” long before the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7 that started the war in Gaza.

“It is my hope that we can see a day where peace will reign in the Middle East,” he said, “where there will be a two-state solution, where all leaders involved in the conversations will respect the other side and show a willingness to make the hard choices to find peace.”

Mr. Shapiro’s explanation did not satisfy the Philadelphia chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which later on Friday called on him to apologize.

“We are deeply disturbed by the racist, anti-Palestinian views that Governor Shapiro expressed in this article,” Ahmet Tekelioglu, the group’s executive director said in a statement. “We are also concerned by his failure to clearly apologize for those hateful comments, especially given how quickly and harshly he has targeted college students protesting the Gaza genocide for their speech.”

In regards to Mr. Shapiro’s having written that he had volunteered in the Israeli army, a spokesman for Mr. Shapiro, Manuel Bonder, said in a statement: “While he was in high school, Josh Shapiro was required to do a service project, which he and several classmates completed through a program that took them to a kibbutz in Israel where he worked on a farm and at a fishery. The program also included volunteering on service projects on an Israeli army base. At no time was he engaged in any military activities.”

Mr. Shapiro has been one of the most vocal party leaders to condemn the documented rise of antisemitism since the Hamas-led attack on Israel. When he was previously asked if he considered himself a Zionist, he said that he did.

He has also not shied away from criticizing college administrators over their response to campus antisemitism, including at the University of Pennsylvania.

If Ms. Harris chooses Mr. Shapiro to be her running mate, he will become only the second Jewish vice-presidential nominee on a major-party ticket. The first was Joseph I. Lieberman, the former Connecticut senator who died in March . He ran with Al Gore in 2000.

Jon Hurdle and Katie Glueck contributed reporting.

Eduardo Medina

Reporting from Lucama, N.C.

Mark Robinson tries to reframe his strict anti-abortion position in a new ad.

Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson of North Carolina, the Republican nominee for governor, released a new ad on Friday that sought to moderate his opposition to abortion, saying that he supports the current state law, which generally bans the procedure after 12 weeks of pregnancy.

His campaign had previously said that he wanted a so-called heartbeat law, which would ban the procedure after about six weeks of pregnancy, when many women have yet to realize they are pregnant.

Mr. Robinson’s softened stance was included in an ad that focused on the story of how his wife, Yolanda Hill Robinson, had an abortion in 1989 — a decision that he said “was like this solid pain between us that we never spoke of.” The couple had previously disclosed the abortion in a Facebook video in 2022.

The ad appeared to be an attempt by Mr. Robinson’s campaign to blunt the criticism he has received for his past comments on the issue and to get ahead of future attacks. One of the first ads released by his Democratic opponent, Josh Stein, the attorney general of North Carolina, featured a compilation of clips showing Mr. Robinson discussing his restrictive views on abortion.

“An abortion in this country is not about protecting the lives of mothers,” Mr. Robinson says in one clip. “It’s about killing a child because you weren’t responsible enough to keep your skirt down.”

Mr. Stein’s campaign has accused Mr. Robinson of hiding his true intentions to seek a stricter abortion ban if elected, pointing to some of his past comments, such as when he said in February: “We’ve got it down to 12 weeks. The next goal is to get it down to six, and then just keep moving from there.”

Abortion is a central issue in North Carolina’s race for governor, which is expected to be one of the most expensive and consequential elections in the country, and one that could influence the presidential race. Republicans have rarely held the governor’s mansion in Raleigh over the past century, and recent polls show that the race is tight this year. Still, a Democratic presidential candidate has not won the state since Barack Obama in 2008.

The governor’s race also has been viewed as a Rorschach test for the swing state, where the current Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, is term-limited. Will voters go with a moderate Democrat in Mr. Stein, or veer to the right with Mr. Robinson?

With less than 100 days before the election, Mr. Robinson’s ad underscored how some Republicans have taken a more cautious approach when discussing abortion since the repeal of Roe v. Wade, which energized Democrats in the 2022 midterms. Despite the anti-abortion movement’s longtime support for a national ban, Republican former President Donald J. Trump has said that abortion restrictions should be left to the states.

In North Carolina and elsewhere, Democrats have pushed to make abortion rights a focal point, with Mr. Stein repeatedly bringing up Mr. Robinson's comments in stump speeches. Republicans have sought to tie Mr. Stein to President Biden and portray him as an out-of-touch extreme liberal.

Mr. Stein has said he supports a framework for abortion based on Roe v. Wade, which generally allowed the procedure through the point of viability, or roughly between 24 and 26 weeks.

In his ad on Friday, Mr. Robinson specified that he supports the current 12-week ban, which includes exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother.

“When I’m governor, mothers in need will be supported,” Mr. Robinson said.

Morgan Hopkins, a spokeswoman for Mr. Stein’s campaign, said in a statement that Mr. Robinson “has resorted to running from his record and misleading voters.”

“If North Carolinians want to know where Mark Robinson really stands on abortion, they should listen to every other comment he’s made on the issue before today,” Ms. Hopkins said.

Mr. Robinson, a fiery orator who has been bolstered by the MAGA faction of his base, has drawn criticism in the past for incendiary comments perceived as antisemitic, hateful and conspiratorial.

In recent months, Mr. Robinson has attempted to moderate his tone in public speeches and focused more of his campaign on the economy, though he still discusses cultural issues, such as denouncing diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and transgender women in sports.

Noam Scheiber Kate Kelly and Kenneth P. Vogel

Harris’s brother-in-law, Uber’s chief lawyer, is taking a leave to advise her.

Vice President Kamala Harris’s brother-in-law, Tony West, will go on leave as Uber’s chief legal officer later this month to take an unofficial role in her presidential campaign.

Mr. West, a Stanford-trained lawyer and former Justice Department official, has informally advised Ms. Harris throughout her political career and has been by her side frequently since President Biden announced that he would not seek re-election.

The company revealed the change in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday afternoon.

In an email to Uber employees on Friday, Mr. West wrote that while he loved his job at the company, “I have always believed family comes first. So I’ve decided to dedicate myself full-time to supporting my family and my sister-in-law on the campaign trail.” Mr. West is married to Ms. Harris’s sister, Maya.

Beginning Aug. 17, he said, he will work as a “family-member surrogate” for the vice president, sharing the perspective of someone who has long been close to her, but will not have a formal campaign position. He said he intended to return to Uber after the presidential election and stressed that Uber would continue to take no position on the election.

Mr. West was general counsel of PepsiCo before joining Uber in 2017. He served in the Justice Department in the Clinton and Obama administrations and was the department’s third-ranking official from 2012 to 2014.

Some in the labor movement have expressed concerns about Mr. West’s ties to Ms. Harris in light of his role at Uber, which in 2020 helped enact a California ballot measure that exempted its drivers from a state law that would have probably classified them as employees.

As a result of the measure, which was recently upheld by the California Supreme Court, Uber drivers and other gig workers in the state do not benefit from certain legal protections, like state rules governing the minimum wage and overtime. The measure provided some benefits , like a separate wage floor and health care subsidies.