Those entering their senior year of high school should begin the process of college application essays. That one common application essay, approximately 650 words in length, is essential and can oftentimes prove difficult.

There are typically seven prompts to choose from, which are meant as guidelines to keep you from writing about how much you love your cat. If you were J.D. Salinger or Toni Morrison, you might be able to pull off that topic, but most young writers cannot. These prompts ideally will assist with establishing potentially who you might be as a citizen of the world. Topics typically focus on the future and how you will approach it – because you’ll be doing that on the college administrators’ turf, the campus.

For many, this is the first time they may have thought about such a question. Here’s how to approach this situation. The future has a lot to do with past accomplishments. Are you a tennis player, a voracious reader, a technical theater director? Each leads to possibly a different major –perhaps in sports management, English or engineering – so tell the administrators the way you lean. Remember, your answer doesn’t have to be permanent. Lots of students go to college undecided. Whatever you write, colleges simply want to see a glimpse of your human side. Empathy, according to many recent citations in major media, will be a keyword during your career because so far, robots and automation can’t provide that. It’s only human. So if you went to Guatemala or built a Habitat for Humanity house, what did you learn from it – the process, teamwork, perseverance and, most of all, the needs of the people living there?

Do not underestimate the human factor. I have some clients who, when I ask them about community service, say, “Oh, yes, I have that!” as if they bought it somewhere. Then, in several cases, they continue, “We made bologna sandwiches in homeroom for the homeless.”

Then I ask them, “What did you do with the sandwiches?”

“Oh, we gave them to the man who comes in.”

“What did the man do with them?” I respond.

“He took them down there to the homeless.”

“To the city?”

“Yeah, probably.”

Further conversations with multiple students over almost 20 years now have convinced me the city is, to some young people, an anonymous pit somewhere east of Skinker yet not Forest Park or the Cardinals’ ballpark. Comments like these, of course, I intercept and explain why they don’t work. Serving one’s community must reflect genuine care in today’s competitive college application environment.

A truly good college application essay answers not only who you are but also why you are yourself. You don’t have to have all of that figured out yet, but the essay requires deep thinking and serious effort. Answering the why is the most difficult part in any situation, yet produces the best reflection of who you are now and who you may become. Then, using visual examples and positive points to prove what you say is true is essential to producing an essay that offers you your best chance.

We all talk to ourselves, sometimes even out loud, and especially when an issue is important. Studies consistently show that three life changes that may most seriously affect one’s emotional state are the death of a loved one, divorce and moving from a home where one has lived for a long time. Each can prompt vital discussions with oneself.

Selling one’s house is hard, forcing us, in many cases, to confront decluttering and downsizing. The former, some real estate agents practically order by rote, going from room to room saying, “This has to go. That can’t stay there. Change out that carpet.” (This actually happened to me when my husband and I put our house of 28 years on the market last month.) After picking up oneself from feeling like an intern to Meryl Streep’s Devil Wears Prada character, one faces the even tougher job of throwing stuff out; except to oneself, it’s not just stuff.

Downsizing requires letting go of part of one’s personal history, forcing one to constantly ask oneself, “Is this part of my life worth keeping, and if so, how much of it?” It basically divides the accumulations of life between a moving box, a donation and a trash bag. The more emotional one is, the longer the process takes because every little memory can come flooding back.

For example, I found our son’s fifth grade English paper – his first “A.” He and I had struggled through “learning style differences” diagnosed when he was in third grade, then tutors, then working together on homework every night and weekend. The word because was becuz for three years – then he finally got it. Today, at 35, he is in his office as a pricing executive at Walmart headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas. Can I throw that out? No way.

But I also have to ask myself, what will I ever do with it? And if I keep this one, am I starting a snowball effect that will continue until I’m on my 10th box, including his final 36-page treatise for his MBA? Good thing my husband and I had only one child, rather than three or four, or I’d be paying a storage unit rental bill rivaling our food budget!

Keepsakes can enhance a new life or keep it focused on the past. The combination will be unique for each of us and, I am finding, certainly complex. On the one hand, one would like to be remembered positively by what is saved, yet not be perceived as a pack rat. On the other hand, gone is gone forever.

I decided to keep that fifth-grade paper. Someday, far off, when our son discovers it among our things, he’ll remember the struggle on his own. But realizing I kept it? In my mind, there should always be room in the box for that.

It’s tough trying to discern what is and isn’t real journalism in 2018, yet democracy demands a citizen endeavor to be as informed as possible to assume the freedom of educated voting.

Journalism is widely defined. My thoughts are largely shaped by my master’s degree training from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York. After that, I was a television news reporter in Detroit, in St. Louis and at CNN in New York City before working 20 years in corporate media training, and nobody ever completely agreed on this topic.

Classically, news should be “new” – something you didn’t know before but now need to know. When I was a news reporter, I always said to myself, “Hey, I’m going to find out what’s going on today while you’re busy at work and tell you on the news tonight.”

Journalists have a responsibility to be honest and fair. A reporter should not go into any story with a preset point of view unless he or she can prove it. We are to be inquisitive about things you want to know. Good journalism should also affect the most people to be relevant. The six “Big C’s” are important: crime, corruption, catastrophe, chaos, competition and color. Then there are the “three H’s”: health, handbag, heart – because we are all concerned about staying alive, having enough money to pay bills and enjoying stories that affect our emotions.

Then, there’s “breaking news” – in my opinion, the most overhyped term on TV news today. Real breaking news is 9/11, a Syrian airstrike, a wildfire, a mass murder, a plane crash. But when a morning cable TV anchor says, “Breaking news! The Fed is considering raising rates in discussions today,” in my opinion, no, that’s not breaking news. That’s just an effort to grab the increasingly short attention span of a public overloaded by news choices in the 24/7 cycle – a TV station versus your phone. The danger of breaking news becoming a cliché is public inaction when a real crisis occurs.

Most of all, journalists should be “explainers of complicated issues,” a phrase Prof. Fred Friendly, the former president of CBS News, had printed on a card he gave to each of his Columbia students. (I still have mine.) But few reporters can do that in 2018. Digging doesn’t break fast enough when you’re running your own camera and have six live shots to fill per day! But the best keep trying.