When is the last time you changed a habit, opinion, or a decision? Why is change so hard? Oddly, some people pride themselves on never changing. Recently I attended a middle-school reunion of many years and encountered four women dressed in white pants and black shirts who acted snobby. The mean girls of middle-school had morphed into the mean girls of middle-age. We relish change in the early part of our lives, growing taller, starting high school, learning to drive and other, less concrete stuff like the first time we disagreed with a parent or a teacher or a friend, not to be disagreeable but because you had your own ideas and opinions. Good writing is all about change, finding a way to describe and detail a before and after. “Once I didn’t care about race but now…”, “Once I thought they were exaggerating the effects of climate change, but…” “Once I thought old people were boring but now…”

Writing about change can be challenging. The application essay needs to describe how and why you made a certain decision or choice. The reader needs to emphasize with the before, experience how the writer discovered a new way to think or act and then believe the writer’s new identity. You need to avoid being judgmental or smug while still convincing your reader the decision was a good one. The best way to frame this would be as a story that begins with the writer’s strong belief or habit, develops in telling the process by which they discovered a better way and, finally the results or the consequences of that change.

If I was writing this essay, I might use my need to win an argument no matter what and no matter how clearly, I was wrong. For example, I once had an argument with a nutritionist about the value of a certain food. I had no proof or knowledge about this topic, but I decided I was right. In order to make this position sympathetic I would have to use humor and awareness and possibly include dialogue to vividly illustrate how boneheaded I could be. Coming across as completely ignorant would be hard to justify. How did I change? I started to listen to people whose opinions and beliefs were opposed to my own. I didn’t necessarily change my own ideas, but I opened my mind and listened to a different version of the same situation. This is not a dramatic topic, but it is honest and meaningful and can be applied to many normal situations like your parents’ curfew or your little brother calling you selfish because you refused to let him watch something on television. Or, it can be deeper, like once you believed undocumented immigrants deserved to be sent back but then you met someone who told you about seeking asylum and why they felt in so much danger in their own country.

Point-of-view is a literary term that means what way is the story told, from what perspective, from which circumstances, from whose voice? While changing point-of-view in a movie or a book can be disconcerting as the main character has lost her authority and as a reader or a viewer you don’t know who to believe. But you are not an audience to your own life. Being flexible, aware, finding out the details of a situation can result in something good. A good decision, a good change, a brilliant college application essay.

—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach

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