Essay About Overcoming A Challenge

How to Nail Your Overcoming a Challenge Essay: 5 Key Tips

Higher essays are one of the nearly important yet underutilized portions of college applications. By the time students reach this part of the admissions process, they're merely gear up to get everything completed and submitted so they can finally relax. However, college essays play a major role in determining whether or not your application receives a second await or gets tossed to the side.

Although all colleges take different essays, there are many themes that span beyond all schools. Ane of the nearly common and challenging of these prompts is the "overcoming a challenge" essay. Many students get stumped on this seemingly piece of cake and straightforward prompt for a variety of reasons.

Hither, we'll take a deep dive into this essay topic, explore what higher admissions officers are looking for, and offering some tips for writing an essay nearly overcoming challenges.

What'south the "overcoming a claiming" essay prompt?

Equally the name suggests, the "overcoming a challenge" prompt is any college essay question asking applicants to hash out a difficult obstruction or claiming they had to overcome. There are unlike variations of the question, but the fundamental subject matter is the same.

Higher admissions officers want to know how you handle arduousness and how challenges you've faced have shaped who you are today. Like many college essay prompts, this topic is asking you to get a chip personal and open up.

It'southward a crucial opportunity for applicants to reveal more about themselves to admissions officers to further prove they deserve an acceptance letter. While you might be tempted to recount 1 of the most traumatic events you've experienced in your life, it's important to go on in mind that these essays aren't judged based on the severity of the outcome encountered. In fact, the challenge can be something relatively mundane and common.

Admissions officers are going to evaluate your response based on how you responded to the challenge, overcame it, and learned from it. The whole signal is to bear witness colleges that you can handle setbacks and obstacles in your life and that y'all have the fortitude, resourcefulness, and perseverance to push through.

No affair where yous nourish, there's a good chance you'll experience some hurdles on your fashion to graduation. Colleges need to know their students can handle some of these challenges gracefully. The "overcoming a challenge" essay prompt helps colleges gauge this power.

Examples of "overcoming a claiming" essays

In lodge to requite yous a better idea of what these essays look like, let'southward review some actual "overcoming a claiming" college prompts. The starting time instance is from the Common Application and requires students to reply to the following question with a 650-give-and-take limit.

"The lessons nosotros take from obstacles we meet can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it impact yous, and what did you learn from the feel?"

Discover how the question isn't just regarding a setback or challenge you lot suffered in the past. The prompt is besides request you to expound on how this feel impacted you and how it changed you to this day. This is a keen example of how the emphasis of this prompt is on how it affected the bidder instead of the severity of the challenge itself.

Our 2nd instance of an "overcoming a challenge" prompt comes from MIT. For the 2018-2020 school twelvemonth, applicants were asked to respond to the post-obit question in 200 to 250 words.

"Tell us most the most significant claiming you've faced or something important that didn't get according to plan. How did you manage the state of affairs?"

In this prompt, you lot can see that the focus is on how you "managed the situation" not what you learned or how you've been changed as a event.

Information technology's imperative to pay attention to the specifics of the question as "overcoming a challenge" prompts tend to vary in how they're asked and what exactly they're looking for despite the overall subject area being the same. Paying attention to these details tin ensure y'all're giving admissions officers exactly what they're looking for when reading your awarding.

tips for writing an essay virtually overcoming challenges

i. Stay away from common topics.

One of the biggest pitfalls students experience when answering the "overcoming a challenge" essay is choosing a mutual topic. Considering that admissions officers have to read through hundreds if non thousands of essay responses to the same question, writing on a common topic can come up across as banal and unoriginal.

Even if your essay is pristine, the topic even so runs the hazard of bringing down your overall response. Instead, it's appropriate to try and identify a challenge or obstacle you lot've faced in your life that is unique or, at the very to the lowest degree, not and so mutual. Some mutual "overcoming a challenge" essay topics to avoid include winning a difficult sports game or passing a course in which you were struggling.

Think back in your life to events that made an impact on how you think and act. Are any of these experiences challenges that you overcame and changed for the better? Don't be afraid to get personal. The more unique and original y'all tin can make the topic, the better chance you have of standing out from the oversupply.

ii. Identify an obstruction that highlights qualities you lot want to emphasize.

Colleges apply "overcoming a challenge" prompts to learn more nearly applicants than other parts of the application would reveal. Most notably, these essays are intended to highlight some characteristics that a student might possess which would prove valuable for their time in college.

For example, a story about handling a challenging event in your life could demonstrate mental fortitude, social tact, perseverance, long-term thinking, follow-through, and other positive characteristics. A great mode to strengthen your response and improve your application overall is to cull a topic that will highlight certain qualities you want to demonstrate to admissions officers. For example, overcoming a disagreement with a friend might stand out to you lot like a meaningful claiming.

Nonetheless, the characteristics it might illustrate including forgiveness, understanding, and empathy might non be the traits you want to convey to admissions officers. Information technology's advisable for students to think ahead about the qualities they'd like to run across in their response and choose a challenge based on that criteria.

Once more, the whole bespeak of this essay prompt is to illustrate some positives nigh yous and your personality. Thinking alee virtually how your essay topic will come up beyond to admissions officers tin make your overall piece more impactful and calculated.

iii. Steer clear of common paragraph structures.

Are you ready for a pro tip that well-nigh applicants won't ever consider? In society to make your "overcoming a challenge" essay stick out from other responses, yous should pay attention to the essay construction. Yes, you lot heard that right!

The mode yous organize your prompt response can play a massive role in how the essay comes across. Fifty-fifty if your topic is unique, admissions officers will still notice regurgitated paragraph patterns. To ensure your "overcoming a challenge" essay attracts the attention of colleges, you'll need to pay attending to how it's written. The vast bulk of students stick to the following structure:

Depict a challenging event or feel –> Explicate how you overcame the challenge

It's not that this format will hurt your essay. Rather, the betoken is that coming up with something more unique and unexpected tin help your essay stand out. Need some ideas to get your creativity flowing? No problem! Instead of focusing on a singular result or occasion, you could write about a challenge you overcame over a prolonged menstruation of fourth dimension and the various events that helped y'all push forward.

If you really want to get innovative, yous could focus on a claiming that you're still in the process of overcoming. You could bring it into the present twenty-four hours and talk virtually what you lot plan to practice in the future. These variations aren't essential but are a great manner to catch the attention of admissions officers.

iv. Focus on internal aspects

When asked to draw an consequence or obstruction, like the "overcoming a challenge" prompt requests, many students focus on detailing people, places, circumstances, and other physical or tangible elements. While this is a groovy writing technique in general, you're not writing for a Pulitzer Prize when answering college essays.

It's all near giving admissions officers exactly what they want, ensuring your responses stand out, and demonstrating your strengths in the process. As a result, it'southward advisable to focus more on the internal components of your topic rather than the circumstances surrounding it. For example, instead of going into detail about what happened during the challenging effect, you should write about how y'all reacted, how you felt, what you idea, and how you overcame it mentally.

Were y'all anxious, worried, nervous, scared, dislocated? Did the event surprise you or frustrate you? These are all questions you should exist thinking about when writing your "overcoming a claiming" essay. Your psychological feel and development throughout the triumph of this obstruction is the real story. It'due south more than captivating and more than revealing nearly who you are and who you lot became in the procedure. This narrative will make admissions officers feel like they know you lot more personally which tin work wonders for making your essay stand out.

5. Emphasize the impact, not the event.

Every bit mentioned earlier, the whole betoken of an "overcoming a challenge" prompt is to give admissions officers a meliorate thought of who you lot are and how yous bargain with challenges. The question involves a difficult or challenging situation in your life but the emphasis is on how you reacted to the situation, rose to the occasion, and became better as a consequence. Some students feel the need to focus on the challenge itself rather than what was learned in the process.

Spending also much time on the upshot instead of how it impacted yous can end up hurting the quality of your answer. Don't forget that y'all're dealing with a strict give-and-take limit. Although it varies betwixt each schoolhouse, some universities merely give applicants a few hundred words to answer. The biggest clamper of your response should focus on the impact the event had on your life rather than how difficult it was or the specifics surrounding the challenge.

Now, this doesn't mean yous accept to explicitly write that "from this outcome, I learned…" Yous certainly tin can brand it that evident, but information technology'southward more effective to show your reader rather than telling them by providing examples of how yous're improve for having gone through the challenge. For example, let's say you had a debilitating fright of public speaking.

To overcome the challenge you joined a debate society and worked through the discomfort to become a stronger speaker overall. Instead of saying "I became more confident in front of crowds" you could illustrate that transformation by saying "Now, I can even deliver extemporaneous speeches with ease." This describes the qualities you've developed instead of proverb them outright. It's a pocket-sized detail that can make a large divergence for the admissions officers reading your essays.

Take your college application to the next level

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