DePaul: Common App Personal Statement (DePaul's optional essay)

250-650 words

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. (Common App prompt 7, which DePaul accepts as the optional personal essay.)

What it’s really asking

DePaul does not write its own prompt. It accepts the Common App personal statement, and the most flexible of the seven Common App prompts is the free-choice option above. You may answer any of the seven Common App prompts; this open one simply means you are free to tell whatever true story best shows who you are. Note that program-specific tracks add their own steps: the School of Music and The Theatre School require auditions or interviews, and animation, film, and some art majors require a portfolio and a creative statement separate from this essay.

Why they ask it

DePaul reads holistically and, for test-optional applicants, leans on this essay as evidence of how you think and write. With no Why DePaul prompt and optional recommendation letters, this is the main place your character and voice reach the reader. A vivid, reflective essay reassures them you will handle college work and contribute to a service-minded, urban campus.

Three ways in

An ordinary repeated moment

A small recurring part of your daily life, like a job, a chore, or a commute, that quietly shaped how you see things. Ordinary settings let your specific observations do the work.

A belief you are reworking

A value or habit you inherited from family or culture that you have started to question or make your own. This shows the self-awareness DePaul trusts.

Someone you noticed

A time you helped or simply paid attention to a person other people overlooked, and what it changed in you. This connects naturally to DePaul's service-minded mission.

✕ Weak opening

“Ever since I was a little kid, I have always been passionate about helping others and making a difference in my community.”

✓ Strong opening

“The freezer at the food pantry stuck shut every Tuesday, and by November I knew the exact angle to kick it.”

✦ Annotated example · The 6:14 bus. Written by EssayLens to teach, not a real applicant’s essay. Tap a highlighted line →

The 6:14 bus is never on time, and neither was I, until the morning my grandmother forgot how to swallow her pills.¹For two years I had treated mornings as something to survive. I would slap the alarm, miss the early bus, and slide into first period with the apology already rehearsed. Then my mother started working doubles at the dialysis center, and the job of getting Lola her medication moved, quietly and without ceremony, onto me. Nobody announced it. There was just a Sunday when my mother left a laminated index card on the counter, seven boxes of pills, and a look that said she trusted me more than I trusted myself.The first week was a disaster. I crushed the wrong tablet, I confused the white pill with the off-white one, and once I found Lola standing in the kitchen at 5 a.m. holding the card upside down, reading it back to me in Tagalog like a poem she half-remembered.²I wanted to call my mother and tell her she had picked the wrong kid. Instead I did the only thing I knew how to do when I was overwhelmed, which was make a system. I color-coded the boxes. I set three alarms with names instead of times, so my phone buzzed "Lola, blue one" at 7:05 and "Lola, the heart pill" at noon.What surprised me was not that the system worked. It was that it changed the mornings themselves. To beat the 7:05 alarm I had to be awake, dressed, and downstairs, which meant I started catching the 6:14 after all. I would sit with Lola while she took the blue one, and she would tell me about the province she grew up in, the cousins who shared one bicycle, the typhoon that took the roof but not, she always insisted, the good humor of the people under it.³I had spent years thinking discipline was a punishment for people who could not enjoy themselves. Lola taught me it was closer to a kind of attention, a way of showing up for someone before they have to ask. The pills were never really about the pills. They were about whether the person who needed me could count on the person I was at 7:05 in the morning.⁴Lola passed in March. I still wake before my alarm. Last month I started volunteering at the senior center two stops down the line, sorting the weekly pill organizers for residents whose grandchildren live too far to color-code anything. The volunteer coordinator asked why a seventeen-year-old wanted the medication shift, the one nobody requests. I told her I was good at it, which is true, but the fuller answer is the one I am still learning to say out loud.⁵I show up early because someone once needed me to, and I would rather be the kind of person who is already there when the need arrives than the kind who is still rehearsing his apology on a bus that is never on time.⁶

1Opens mid-scene with a concrete, slightly off-kilter detail. The bus that is "never on time" plus a jarring medical specific signals a real human voice rather than a polished thesis statement.
2Admitting concrete failures (crushing the wrong tablet, the upside-down card) is the self-awareness DePaul rewards. It also earns the later growth, so success doesn't sound handed to him.
3The pivot reframes the chore as connection rather than burden. The grandmother's specific stories (one bicycle, the typhoon) give the reader a second living person instead of a prop.
4This is the self-aware insight that ties grit to care. He names a wrong belief he held and replaces it, which is exactly the reflection the prompt and school value.
5Extending the lesson into service at the senior center shows the community dimension and proves the growth is durable, not a one-time epiphany.
6Closes by circling back to the opening image of the late bus and the rehearsed apology, now inverted. The callback gives the essay shape and lands the voice without overstating the moral.

Stuck? Start here

What is a small, ordinary moment from the last year that I still think about, and why does it stick?
What is something I used to believe or do that I have changed my mind about, and what changed it?
When did I notice or help someone other people walked past, and what did it teach me about myself?

Before you submit

Could only I have written this essay, or could half my class have submitted it?
Does the reflection unfold across the second half, instead of being crammed into the last sentence?
Is it well under 650 words and written in a voice that sounds like me reading it aloud?

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