Thank you for reflecting on your purpose.

Below is the essay you drafted in your toolkit. Looking back at your essay from time to time in the future can help you consider how to take actions that are aligned with your purpose or recognize ways your purpose may be evolving.

If you haven’t already, we encourage you to copy and paste what you wrote into a file on your computer in order to save your own copy.

The Purpose Challenge was created with the idea that applying to college is a perfect opportunity to become more aware of your purpose. Check out some examples of essay questions in the widely used 2017-2018 Common Application, and see the tips below about adapting what you’ve written for different essay prompts.

Congratulations on becoming a more purposeful person!



Tips for how you might revise your essay for submitting in college applications:

1. Some colleges ask you to talk about what you want to do in your life—this essay will probably fit pretty well into a prompt like that. But some also ask you why you want to go to their specific college—if that college has something about it that directly relates to your purpose or direction, revising your essay to make that part crystal clear (often in a sentence or two up front) can help an essay like this fit into that kind of prompt.

2. Regardless of whether they say it or not, colleges usually like to know what’s specifically important to you about their particular college. In other words, revise statements like “get into a good college for pre-med” to statements like “I want to go to [University X] because your amazing pre-med program, with professors like [name] and [name], will give me the rigorous education I want to be able to go onto a great medical school.”

3. Make sure you’ve also edited to fit all their formatting requirements—they might have specific word lengths, file formats, or other structures they expect, and you wouldn’t want your hard work to get tossed out on a technicality!