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SLU: Common App Personal Statement

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. (You may also choose from the seven Common Application prompts, including: 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.)
What it’s really asking

SLU does not add its own prompt. First-year applicants submit the standard personal statement through the Common App, Coalition (Scoir), or SLU's own application, choosing from the seven Common App prompts or writing on a topic of their choice. This is the only required essay. Program-specific tracks (Nursing, OT, PT, Flight Science) share the same essay but have a December 1 deadline; the optional Honors Program has a separate prompt below.

Why they ask it

With no supplement, this essay is the entire window into who you are beyond your transcript. SLU's Jesuit, holistic read is looking for self-awareness, care for others, and a genuine voice. They are essentially asking: when this student has 650 words and no guardrails, what do they choose to show us, and does it sound like a real person they want in a dorm and a discussion section?

Three ways in
Anchor on one small thing

Pick one small object, place, or recurring moment and let the whole essay grow out of it. Specificity beats scope every time.

Let the story pick the prompt

Find the prompt that fits a story you already want to tell, rather than inventing a story to fit a prompt. The 'topic of your choice' option means you are never forced.

Build around the turn

Locate the single sentence where your thinking changed, then write toward and away from that turn so the reader feels the shift, not just hears about it.

✕  Weak opening

“Ever since I was a little kid, I have always been passionate about helping people and making a difference in the world around me.”

✓  Strong opening

“The soup ladle at the shelter held exactly one and a half servings, which meant I had to decide, fast, who looked hungriest.”

✦ Annotated example · The Sunday food pantry. Written by EssayLens to teach, not a real applicant’s essay. Tap a highlighted line →
The walk-in cooler at Holy Trinity smells like cardboard and cold milk, and for two years it was the closest thing I had to a confessional. Every Saturday at six in the morning I would prop the heavy door with a milk crate and start sorting donations, because if I didn't wedge it open it would lock behind me and I would be alone with four hundred pounds of perishable food and no way out.1I started volunteering because my mother made me. That is the honest version. She had been bringing groceries home from that pantry during the year my father was out of work, and when things turned around she told me I owed somebody. I was fourteen and resentful and convinced that owing somebody meant showing up, doing the minimum, and leaving before anyone learned my name.2What undid me was the inventory. The pantry ran on a clipboard system that was older than I was, and within a month I could see that we threw out crates of produce every week, not because nobody needed it but because nobody knew it was there before it spoiled. The spinach rotted in the back while a family in the front left with canned corn. That bothered me in a way I couldn't put down.3So I built a spreadsheet. It was not impressive. It was rows for what came in, columns for expiration dates, and a tab that turned red when something had three days left. I taught two other volunteers to update it on their phones. By spring we were sending the red-tab produce to a soup kitchen across the river instead of a dumpster, and the woman who ran the kitchen started calling our director to ask what we had that week.4I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to make myself the hero of a story about feeding people, and I wasn't. The spreadsheet didn't grow the food or drive the van. What it did was let me see the pantry as a body with a circulatory system, a thing where a blockage in one place meant hunger in another. I had walked in thinking generosity was about how much you gave. I walked out understanding it was mostly about how closely you paid attention.5That attention changed how I treat the people in front of me. I learned the names I had been so determined to avoid. There was Mr. Okafor, who took only what he could cook for one and always asked about my exams. There was a girl my age who came in with her little brothers and would not meet my eyes, the way I am sure I would not have met hers if our positions were reversed.6I am applying to Saint Louis University because the Jesuit phrase I keep hearing, men and women for others, sounds less like a slogan to me than a job description I already tried out at six in the morning in a cold room. I am not finished learning how to do it well. But I know now that the work I want is the unglamorous kind that happens behind the counter, where attention is the whole job, and where, if you are paying it, nobody good has to leave with only the canned corn.7
  1. 1Opens inside a specific physical place with a sensory detail and a small concrete problem (the door). No grand thesis, just a scene. This is the unpolished, grounded voice SLU rewards over a resume line.
  2. 2Admits a selfish, reluctant origin instead of claiming lifelong passion. That honesty about motive is exactly the 'real, unpolished voice' SLU asks for, and it sets up genuine change.
  3. 3Pivots from feelings to a concrete, observed problem. Service is made tangible (rotting spinach, canned corn) rather than abstract 'helping people.' Shows a mind that notices systems.
  4. 4The 'project' is deliberately modest and real, not a heroic invention. Specificity (red tab, three days, soup kitchen across the river) makes it believable and shows initiative without bragging.
  5. 5Self-aware deflation of the hero narrative, then a genuine reflective turn. SLU explicitly rewards reflection over resume, and this is the essay thinking about what it means, not just what happened.
  6. 6Returns to people, concretely named, after the systems insight. This braids together the two things SLU values, service and reflection, and quietly nods to the dignity of those being served.
  7. 7Ties personal experience to SLU's Jesuit mission authentically, by reframing a slogan through lived detail rather than quoting the website. Closes by echoing the opening image (cold room, canned corn) for unity.
Stuck? Start here
  • What is one moment when you were wrong about something or someone, and what specifically changed your mind?
  • If you had to tell your story through a single object you own, what would it be and why?
  • Who is a specific person, not famous, who shaped how you see the world, and what is the one scene that proves it?
Before you submit
  • Read it aloud: does it sound like you talking, or like a college brochure? If the latter, cut every word you would not actually say.
  • Find your turning sentence. If you cannot point to the one line where something shifts, your essay is still summary, not story.
  • Confirm at least one specific named person, place, or object appears in the first three sentences.

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