my common app essay + writing advice (full scholarship to vanderbilt, accepted to emory)

Main Ideas

Joy Zou shares the Common App essay she submitted to Vanderbilt, along with advice for brainstorming, drafting, and editing college application essays. She says she received a full scholarship to Vanderbilt and was accepted to Emory.

She clarifies that she accidentally submitted an earlier version of her essay to Vanderbilt—the version she reads in the video. For Emory, she used a revised version, removing some details and changing the wording and sentence structure.

What Her Essay Is About

At 16, Joy is traveling alone when a snowstorm diverts her flight to Portland, leaving her stranded in the airport overnight. The experience reminds her of moving from Alabama to Washington and feeling out of place at her new school.

She describes struggling to fit in, feeling lonely, and initially waiting for things to improve on their own. Eventually, she realizes she needs to take the initiative: she introduces herself to classmates, joins new conversations, and builds friendships and a sense of community. Her YouTube channel becomes another way to connect with and positively affect people. Having experienced loneliness herself, she also makes a point of reaching out to students who seem isolated.

By the end, the airport feels less like a symbol of being stuck and more like evidence that she has learned to handle detours and uncertainty. The essay’s central themes are initiative, personal growth, connection, and learning to reach out.

Essay-Writing Advice and Process

• Start brainstorming with a specific moment. Joy’s English teacher advised her to narrow an essay idea down to “four minutes” of life. The moment does not need to be dramatic; an ordinary experience can work if it reveals a shift in perspective, an aspect of identity, or a meaningful personal trait.
• Explore what the moment reveals. Don’t only recount what happened. Reflect on what you thought and felt, what changed, and what the experience says about you. A small event can support a compelling essay if you examine it thoughtfully.
• Begin before senior year. Joy recommends starting to think seriously about essays around the end of junior year. She advises against waiting for a sudden inspiration or starting during the already-demanding senior year.
• Get help identifying possible topics. If your life seems too ordinary or your ideas seem cliché, ask people who know you well what they find distinctive about you. They may notice meaningful experiences or qualities that feel routine to you. Revisit memories and follow promising ideas rather than assuming the topic has to be impressive or dramatic.
• Use supplemental prompts as a brainstorming resource. Review the supplemental essay questions for colleges you are applying to. Consider possible topics across the prompts, then refine them so each essay has a clear, cohesive purpose.
• Draft freely before editing. Don’t expect a polished essay on the first try. Put your ideas down without stopping to perfect every sentence, then leave the draft for a while and return to revise it. Joy recommends separating idea generation from editing.
• Treat late-night drafting as a personal tactic, not a requirement. Joy says that, for her, writing when tired sometimes made it easier to write without a filter, especially for supplemental essays. Her broader point is to get thoughts onto the page first and edit later; the late-night approach was based on her own experience.
• Limit the number of editors and use them in sequence. Joy recommends roughly two or three readers, rather than a large group editing at once:
  1. Start with one or two trusted people who know you well and can help you develop the essay.
  2. Revise based on their feedback.
  3. Then ask someone less familiar with you and uninvolved in the drafting to read it.
  4. Ask that reader what impression they got of you from the essay. Compare that impression with the qualities you intended to convey.

She advises sending the essay to readers one at a time rather than having several people edit the same document simultaneously.

Speakers and Sources Featured

• Joy Zou — The video’s speaker, essay author, and source of the writing advice.
• Joy’s English teacher — Cited by Joy as the source of the “four minutes of your life” brainstorming approach.
• The Common App essay prompt — Quoted in the video; it asks applicants to recount a challenge, setback, or failure and explain its effect and what they learned from it.