Have You Found the End?
Has your life story ended? It hasn’t … has it?
The topic you choose for your essay might be an event that happened a few years ago. Your life and growth have continued since that story ended, and your essay should acknowledge and demonstrate that.
When you initially searched for your topic, I told you to “zoom in.” Stop trying to convey the essence of who you are as a person. It’s still true! But once you’ve told your focused story, you need to pull back and see it in context. The act of writing the story is usually a valuable tool in this self-reflection. By the time you get to writing the conclusion, you will have a better understanding of what the story meant than you did when you started.
Perhaps you took a life-changing exchange trip in your sophomore year. It’s a perfect story to show you learning and growing. But if you end the essay with sophomore year, imagine what your readers are wondering. “Is that the last time this student grew? How did the experience change the student afterward?” Sometimes focusing on what seems like the ‘exciting’ part—the trip itself—overlooks the greatest growth of the story!
If you are writing a Prompt 2 essay about learning from failure, don’t write only about the immediate after-effects. How did that learning play out in the years to come? For example, perhaps you’re writing about a particular robotics competition in which you realized you had greatly underestimated the amount of programming you needed to be successful.
You watched other teams work and saw how you could make your robot better, and you immediately set about improving it, doing a better job in the next round. Great. Now continue the story into how you changed as a team member (and even as a student and as a person) moving forward—how it impacted your work ethic or time management skills overall.
If you “challenged a belief” (Prompt 3), how did your behavior change? Did you embrace a new belief, or reinforce your original position? What are the impacts on your life TODAY because of that challenge?
In a very similar vein, if you “developed a new understanding of yourself or others” (Prompt 5) because of an experience a year or more ago … how is that new understanding holding up? Have you changed the way you behave as a result of that new understanding? How have you continued to evolve? In what ways? Sometimes an event that seemed insignificant at the time led to larger changes than you would have expected.
The Covid summer was a disaster for many rising seniors who lost opportunities for internships, camp counselor positions, mission or exchange trips, and more. But you lived through the summer just the same. What did you do with your time if you lost those things? If you were able to find a replacement for your plans, even if it seems less impressive, definitely include it. Many students had to rely on a lot more personal ingenuity to fill their summers than simply applying or signing up for a program. Readers will not miss that significance. Taking responsibility for your time, being creative within pandemic constraints, and showing determination to accomplish something are all traits that colleges will be pleased to see.
(Photo by Jonah Pettrich on Unsplash)
