Loyola Chicago: Common App Personal Statement (used for Loyola)

650 words maximum (one of seven prompts)

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. / 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? / Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea. What prompted your thinking? What was the outcome? / 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? / Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others. / 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? / 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.

What it’s really asking

Loyola does not give its own essay prompt, so the essay that reaches them is your Common App personal statement. The Common App offers seven prompts and you choose one. The school is asking, in effect, who are you when the transcript is set aside? For Loyola specifically, the strongest essays tend to surface reflection, service, gratitude, or growth, which sit close to the school's Jesuit values. Note: Loyola lists the personal essay as not required, so this essay is optional, but submitting a strong one is one of the few ways to shape how you are read.

Why they ask it

Loyola reads files holistically and connects December 1 applicants to scholarship review. With no required writing, almost everyone shows up as numbers and a list. A genuine, specific essay is rare in this pool, so it carries real weight. It is the school's only window into your voice, your values, and how you reflect, which is exactly what a Jesuit institution wants to see before it admits you and trusts you with its community.

Three ways in

Start small and true

Pick the smallest real story that changed how you see something. A Loyola reader trusts a quiet realization far more than a grand achievement.

Find the service moment in real life

Look for where responsibility or care actually showed up: a sibling you raised, a customer you calmed, a neighbor you noticed. Build the essay around that scene.

Write what only you could write

If a classmate could submit your essay with their name on it, it is not specific enough yet. Push for the detail only you have.

✕ Weak opening

“Ever since I was a little kid, I have always believed that helping others is the most important thing a person can do.”

✓ Strong opening

“The freezer at the food pantry was broken again, and Mr. Alvarez was the only one who knew the trick to make it hum back to life.”

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

The 47 bus pulled away from my corner at 6:52 every weekday morning, two minutes before I usually reached it. For most of freshman year I watched its taillights shrink down Ashland Avenue while I stood there with a half-zipped backpack, already calculating how late I would be.¹I want to tell you I fixed this through discipline, that I started setting three alarms and became the kind of person who is early. That is not what happened. What happened is that a bus driver named Ms. Carol started waiting for me.²I never asked her to. The first time, I rounded the corner and the doors were still open, the bus idling against the curb while a line of commuters quietly resented me. I sprinted, mumbled thanks, and collapsed into a seat. The second time it happened, I realized it was not luck. She had seen me running the week before and decided, without discussion, that those thirty seconds were mine.³I started to notice she did this for others too. The man with the cane who took the long step up one foot at a time. The mother folding a stroller with a baby on her hip. The high schooler from Senn who always boarded eating cereal straight from the box. Ms. Carol ran a schedule, but she ran it like the schedule existed for us, not the other way around.⁴This bothered me, in a way I could not name at first. I had grown up believing the world was a sorting machine. You were early or you were late, prepared or you were not, and the machine recorded the result. My report cards said as much. But Ms. Carol kept overriding the machine with something it did not measure, and the bus still got everyone downtown on time.⁵I began to wonder where else I had mistaken a system for a law of nature. At school, I tutored kids in the math resource room, and I had been keeping a private tally of who improved and who did not, treating the slow ones as a problem to be solved or, honestly, given up on. After the bus, I stopped tallying. I started staying the extra thirty seconds.⁶There was a kid named Marcus who could not get fractions to behave. For weeks I had been the impatient one, glancing at the clock, ready to move on. So I tried Ms. Carol's method instead. I held the door. I let the lesson idle at the curb until he was actually on it. The week he finally explained why one-half is bigger than one-third, out loud, to another student, I felt something I had been chasing without knowing it.⁷I still do not believe the world is purely kind. Buses leave. People get left. But I no longer think the leaving is a law. It is a choice that someone, somewhere, made about whose thirty seconds matter, and that means it can be unmade. Ms. Carol unmakes it every morning on the 47, one open door at a time.⁸I do not know if she remembers me. I graduated off her route, and someone else is probably running late on that corner now. But I think about her whenever I am in a position to wait for someone, which it turns out is most of the time. I plan to spend college learning how to build the kinds of systems people get stuck in, and then learning, from her, how to leave the doors open.⁹

1Opens on a specific place and a concrete daily failure instead of a thesis. Loyola rewards place and context, and naming a real street roots the reader in a world.
2Subverts the resume-essay expectation. By admitting the tidy version is false, the writer signals honesty and prepares for reflection rather than self-promotion.
3Slows down to render one small human act in detail. Service here is a person doing something specific, not an abstraction about kindness.
4Widens the lens from the writer to a whole community on the bus, showing observation of others. This reflects the Jesuit value of attention to real people.
5This is the reflective turn. The writer interrogates a belief about how the world works, which is exactly the questioning the prompt invites.
6Translates the insight into changed behavior in another setting, proving the lesson took. Growth is shown through action, not announced.
7A second concrete scene mirrors the first, giving the essay structural unity. The named student keeps it grounded in a person rather than a moral.
8Earns a measured conclusion that refuses easy uplift. Acknowledging the world's hardness while affirming agency reads as mature reflection, not a slogan.
9Closes by looking forward and tying personal growth to future purpose, gesturing at service-minded study without listing accomplishments.

Stuck? Start here

When did you do something kind or hard for someone and learn that your first reason for doing it was wrong or shallow?
What is a belief your family holds that you have quietly started to question, and what real moment started that?
Whose name in your daily life would surprise an admissions reader, and what does knowing that person teach you?

Before you submit

Could only you have written this essay, with your specific names, places, and details?
Is there one real scene a reader can picture, rather than a summary of many events?
Does the ending show how you changed through an action, instead of telling the reader you grew?

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