Essay advice for writing about challenges and obstacles

If you're going to write about an obstacle/special circumstances/personal challenges:
Your achievements can only be evaluated in light of what you've accomplished to get to where you are. If you've encountered and overcome a legitimate obstacle in your life, then it's important for your chances of admission that colleges know about it. It would be impossible to understand your perspective on the world and your accomplishments without knowing this information, so don't hold back!*

But if you're going to write about obstacles overcome, remember that lots of applicants think that writing about such things is the magic bullet for getting into college. If you consider the following advice, you will be more effective in writing this essay:

1. Maintain some perspective. Your personal obstacle is being compared to those of people who have overcome extreme poverty, deaths of their entire family, life-altering illnesses, etc. So if your biggest obstacle is that you had to share a bedroom with your little sister, then you should probably look elsewhere for a topic that will earn you sympathy from the admissions committee.

2. Try to provide the reader with tangible ways in which your obstacle has impacted your life. If all you discuss is the nature of the obstacle, it will be hard for the reader to compare your obstacle with the obstacles overcome by others. So, if you spend the entire essay describing your illness and don't discuss how that impacted the different areas of your life (say, your academics, ability to make friends, maintain other commitments, etc), then the reader will be left to guess how many points to give you.

3. Maintain a positive attitude in the essay. It's easy to write an essay whose point is, effectively, "woe is me," but what will impress the reader the most is the positive way that you've responded to your situation.

4. Remember that any of the nuances and details that you need to make your case can always be added to the "Additional Comments" section (present on most applications, including the Common Application and the University of California application.

5. If your obstacle has negatively impacted your grades and test scores, be sure to say how in your essay. Colleges need to know precisely how your obstacle affected you, so it's okay to come right and say that the obstacle impacted your academic or extra-curricular performance.

*In our experience with helping students with the application process, the one legitimate hurdle that almost always hurts the applicant to bring up is the struggle to overcome depression. We at Passport Admissions completely agree that depression is a legitimate medical obstacle and that a battle with depression can define a person's life. But to colleges, depression raises the red flag that you will a) drop out, b) stay in your dorm room, or c) do even worse. Indeed, admissions committees are worried that they may be responsible if they don't screen you well enough, and you may be compared to these other people who wrote about depression in their application essays.

But, you may need to talk about depression to account for other holes in your application, in which case you may find yourself needing to write just such an essay. Be sure to point out how you've overcome this article, and make a point of showing of evidence that you are indeed cured (a note from a doctor, etc).

For a discussion of the pro's and con's of writing such an essay, we think this article does a great job.

robhumbracht	Latest page update: made by robhumbracht , Jul 27 2009, 6:37 PM EDT (about this update About This Update Edited by robhumbracht 588 words added view changes - complete history)
	Keyword tags: advice challenge essay essays obstacle overcome writing More Info: links to this page