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Blog > Common App , Essay Advice , Personal Statement > The Best Way to Write College Essays About Moving

The Best Way to Write College Essays About Moving

Admissions officer reviewed by Ben Bousquet, M.Ed Former Vanderbilt University

Written by Alex McNeil, MA Admissions Consultant

Key Takeaway

Moving’s a big deal, especially when you’re in high school.

New state, new city, new school, new family dynamics, new friends—new everything, it may seem.

If you’ve recently moved, or if you’ve moved a lot throughout your life, you might be thinking about writing your college essay about moving.

Moving can work well as a personal statement topic, particularly when the experience shows your resilience and ability to adapt to new situations.

But because the topic is somewhat common, it can be risky if not done well.

In this post, we go over a few ways to approach a college essay about moving to avoid some of the biggest pitfalls and cliches.

Three Ways to Approach Your College Essay About Moving

Across the tens of thousands of college essays we’ve read, the following three approaches tend to produce great college essays about moving. They help writers avoid cliches and focus in on something deeply meaningful and strengths-based (remember: that’s the whole point of a college essay to begin with!).

Personal Insight

The first way you can think about your personal statement is by considering how your story about moving can reveal a personal insight about yourself to admissions officers.

Let me give you an example.

Emma moved from rural Montana to Los Angeles for her mom’s job. Sure, she could write about how she was shocked by the drastic weather differences, how she had to learn how to navigate a big city, or how she went from being in a school with 50 students to one with over 3,000.

Those topics would be interesting, but none would help us learn much about who Emma is or why we should admit her to our school.

To reveal a personal insight, Emma will have to be a bit more vulnerable and strategic. Let’s say that Emma wants to study agriculture. Emma’s college essay about moving would be more effective if it explored how she came to realize her love of agriculture only after she left her rural hometown.

Family Context

But maybe moving didn’t teach you something about yourself. Maybe it taught you about your family. Or perhaps you feel like admissions officers need to know about your family’s story to truly understand you.

This approach appears most often among students whose families have moved a lot because of a parent’s job or among those who have had a lot of changes in their home lives. Sharing your story, including the details of how a situation affected you personally, can help admissions officers learn about where you come from.

You can write about your experiences through the lens of resilience, diversity, or even joy or curiosity.

Lesson Learned

Finally, you can also approach your college essay about moving by reflecting on a significant lesson you learned throughout the process. Note that the key word here is significant .

Lessons like “I learned that I was strong and could handle anything thrown my way” or “I learned who my true friends were” are nice lessons, but they aren’t weighty enough for a college essay. Those kinds of lessons are too generic to actually tell admissions officers anything about who you are.

Let’s return to Emma for this example.

Instead of writing about how moving influenced her to study agriculture, Emma could also write about the lessons in diversity she learned when moving from a homogenous rural town to a big, diverse city.

Two Cliches to Avoid in Your College Essay About Moving

Okay, now that we’ve gone over three solid approaches, let’s go over what not to do.

Since college essays about moving are pretty common, you’ll want to avoid these overused and cliche methods. Your admissions officers will have read them a thousand times already, so they won’t be doing you any favors.

“Moving was the worst thing that ever happened to me…even though it wasn’t that bad.”

Listen. I know that moving can be really difficult. If moving was truly the most difficult thing you’ve experienced, then consider one of the approaches from above.

But too many applicants overstate the difficulty of their move solely because they think they have to write about something traumatic to get into college.

This approach leads to inauthentic essays that appear like they’re trying to pull the wool over the admissions officer’s eyes.

You don’t need to write about trauma, or even a difficult topic in general, in your college applications.

“Moving caused my grades to drop.”

The other big cliche that surfaces again and again in college essays about moving is the big Grade Drop following a move.

Moving can be such a disruption that it’s unsurprising if it affected your grades. It also makes sense that you want admissions officers to know that there’s a legitimate (and temporary) reason behind those less-than-perfect grades on your transcript.

But the problem with this approach is that it takes one of the most valuable pieces of application real estate—your personal statement—and fills it with information that probably belongs in the Additional Information section of the Common App.

Instead, save your personal statement for a topic that draws out your strengths and says something meaningful about who you are.

The Big Picture

Not every college essay needs to be written about a challenge. If your experience with moving has deep personal meaning, you can try it out in your personal statement.

But remember that you can also address something like moving in your additional information section.

Ultimately, you need to craft essays that say something personal about you while showcasing your strengths. It’s all part of what it means to create a cohesive application narrative .

Liked that? Try this next.

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Your chance of acceptance, your chancing factors, extracurriculars, how to write a moving college essay.

Guys, I need some advice for writing my college essays. I want to write something deeply personal and moving. Any tips or strategies on how to accomplish this? What makes an essay 'moving' for the admissions officer reading it?

One of the key aspects of writing a moving essay is to keep it deeply personal and genuine. You want to share your perspective and reflections, not what you think colleges want to hear. Here are some guidelines you might find helpful:

1. Choose a meaningful topic: This could be a transformative experience, a topic you are deeply passionate about, or a revelation you've had. Remember that the topic doesn't have to be grand; even quite ordinary, everyday themes can be very moving if treated with insight and authenticity.

2. Keep it deeply personal: The essay is your chance to offer admissions officers a look into who you are beyond your grades and test scores. It’s an opportunity to reveal your personality, values, and character, all of which can make a powerful impact.

3. Emotional resonance: Strive to evoke emotions in your readers. To do this, you must first genuinely feel the emotion you're trying to get across. Engage their empathy, make them root for you, let them share in your joy, sadness, or wonder.

4. Show, don't tell: Utilize storytelling techniques. Give clear instances and vivid details that can paint a mental picture. For example, instead of saying "I was happy when I got the internship", describe the feeling.

5. Reflect: In the conclusion, reflect on how the experience changed or affected you or your perspective. Admissions officers are not just interested in what happened to you, but how you reacted to it, learned from it, and how it has shaped your understanding or approach to life.

6. Edit and revise: Make sure your essay is well-structured, that your points are brought out clearly and eloquently, and that there are no grammatical or spelling errors.

Remember, the best essays are those that are honest and from the heart. It's not always about the biggest achievements or tragedies; sometimes it's the smaller moments that speak volumes about who you are.

About CollegeVine’s Expert FAQ

CollegeVine’s Q&A seeks to offer informed perspectives on commonly asked admissions questions. Every answer is refined and validated by our team of admissions experts to ensure it resonates with trusted knowledge in the field.

Home — Application Essay — Nursing Schools — Moving: College Admission Essay Sample

Moving: College Admission Essay Sample

• University: University of Pennsylvania

About this sample

Words: 397 |

Published: Jul 18, 2018

Words: 397 | Pages: 1 | 2 min read

From the first day, one thing became painfully obvious--if I didn’t get moving, I would get run over. It started off easy; I made sure to travel in the right direction. The tempo was slow. It was a cinch to fix a mistake without being noticed or running into another marcher. Eight steps forward, eight steps back. Stay in line with the people in front of me. Simple. But then the tempo sped up, everyone started moving in different directions from different places on the field, a crowd was cheering from the stands, I had to play music from memory, I was eighteen inches taller because of that huge, sparkly plume on top of my hat, and if I made a wrong move, I could have a trombone slide hitting the back of my head.

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As a marcher on the field, I was responsible for only myself. If I knew my spot in the show, I had succeeded. It was easy to give myself a pat on the back and call it a day--I’d done my job, right? Yes, but there’s a perspective beyond that. I may have been moving, all of my own accord and on the right pathway, but I had no sense of the effect my movements had on the people around me or how they contributed to the marching show as a whole. That was the drum major’s job, not mine.

But now I am the drum major and that is my job. Up on the podium, I can pick out every member of the band by name, and I see each of them learn to march their spot in the show. I see everyone’s effort to get their part right and fix their mistakes. Just like them, I have my part to learn. I memorize tempo and time changes, cues and salutes, all aspects of my personal, present success. However, unlike members of the band, I have a responsibility to see the greater goal. It’s my job to understand how their movements work together and contribute to success as a band and not just success as an individual.

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Taking the experience and lessons learned as a drum major, I will move not only with confidence and conviction, but I will also strive to perceive how my movements will impact the world around me as well as my future successes.

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Is an essay about moving too cliché?

I’ve already written my Common App essay, but after looking online, I’ve been doubting the quality of my topic.

My current essay is about how I moved across the country after middle school and learned how to embrace changes. I talk about how I went through a period of boredom and stagnation before realizing I should challenge myself and invest more in my passions. I obviously won’t detail the whole thing here, but I do include other values like family, resilience, etc. in the essay.

The con with this essay is that I feel like it’s cliché and could come off as a sob story. I try not to talk a lot about the challenge itself and instead how I developed from it, but I’m still iffy on it. My backup plan is to talk about my journey to discover my passion, but with that I risk repeating myself in the individual colleges’ supplementals.

TL;DR Would me talking about how I learned from a move just be like a cliché “overcoming adversity” essay?

You might be ok, if you hit the right bullets. Just remember, you want to “show, not just tell.” That means, not just saying that you “developed,” but examples of how you take on new challenges, reach out to others, try new things, etc.

I see, so I should describe a few examples and reflect briefly on the experience, right? I’ve heard the “show don’t tell” thing a lot, but I guess it’s difficult to judge when one is being too factual v. writing too much purple prose.

Use the move to frame what you want to show about yourself. “Last year, my friends and I picked our ECs as a group. Having moved 1200 miles over the summer, this, and pretty much everything else, was now a solitary endeavor.” Then you can show who you are by how you decided how to invest your time, whom to befriend, what you treasured in the friends you left behind, etc. The AO will understand, without you writing about it, how hard a high school move can be. Use the essay to show who you are as a person.

Your instinct to talk about learning to challenge yourself is spot on! Talking about topics like families or resilience might not be the most compelling subjects.

Instead, you could focus on the specific challenges you needed to overcome as you adjusted to your new environment. Focusing on the most recent positive steps you’ve taken to adjust will show college admissions readers who you are and how you adjust to new situations.

I see; so really focus in on how I overcame the challenges and what it shows about my personality, those are the crucial things, right? I see, I’m going to keep revising.

“Show, not just tell” means examples of how you are a new, improved version. Not just saying so. The examples give some authenticity.

It’s less “how” you overcame and more who you have become.

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