Don't start with the essay prompt. That's the wrong entry point.

I spend most of my time with the students I work with on storytelling. And a lot of it, honestly, it looks more like therapy. Just trying to figure out the underlying why and the underlying themes of your application. And the thing is, you can't figure out the themes if you haven't actually sat with your full story first.

Think about it like this. With deferred, you're typically working with one year of work experience max and 22, 23 years of life experiences. Your application should reflect that. Most schools don't give you that many words. Wharton's main essay is 350 words. Stanford gives you about 650. It's not like you're writing some poetic thing. Since you have so little words, the topic you pick and the themes you pick have to be the right ones.

And everything you choose to write about means you're choosing to not write about something else.