Is my common app essay topic cliche?

Answered

This is a very tricky topic because it can easily backfire on you depending on how naive or ignorant you initially were to certain things. For example. Depending on who reads this it's hard to tell what the reaction is. So if you wrote, for example, I grew up in Arkansas and I never met a Jewish person in my life so one day I was in Little Rock for a school trip and met my first Jewish person. I had lots of questions. Nowadays where ever I am I take it upon myself to discover other ethnic/cultural minorities whenever I can. So far I've met a Muslim person, a Jew, a Buddhist, and a Sikh.

So how you frame your epiphanies without offending the application reader from their lens and perspective is critical to have a successful - "I was blind, now I can see" essay. If the application reader is Jewish and you are applying to an NYC university like NYU or Columbia, they might be shaking their heads thinking that you are a country bumpkin with no self-awareness of what you are doing or trying to say. They might conclude that collecting experiences for the sake of collecting them is rather shallow.

Now if you wrote that you started going Temple and learning Hebrew and Yiddish because you were intellectually curious about the Jewish culture that's different. If your thesis is that you want to come to NYC because it's the most popular city for Jews outside of Israel and you want to major in Hebrew Studies, well that's epic.