Challenging Experiences in High School as a Topic for Application Essays

When you apply to a college or university, you will probably be asked to write an essay or personal statement.  The application essay is a crucial part of the application package, because the essay adds personality and character to your test scores and grades.  Another advantage of the essay is that it helps you reflect on important times in your life, offering a great opportunity to write about challenges and hardships that have made you a better person.  If you want to make an excellent application essay based on the challenges that you encountered in high school, keep reading.

What makes an experience challenging?

The term “challenging” can be used in many ways to describe a variety of situations and circumstances.  When determining what challenging experience to write about in your application essay, you may want to choose challenges that have made your life more meaningful and your personality stronger.  For example, you can choose to write about the challenge of overcoming your fears to deliver a speech or the challenge of working while taking up high school.  You may even want to talk about the challenge of adjusting to a new environment or place, especially for foreign students or those who moved to a new area during their high school life.  Basically, the main objective is to describe how you have developed, learned, and grown from such challenges.

Writing about how the experience changed you and what you've learned from the experience

Now that you know have an idea of how to go about integrating your challenging high school experiences into your essay, it's time to do a little research.  Before you start writing, you may want to check out how others have written their admissions essays based on hardships, failures, and shortcomings.  By reading sample admissions essays, you can better understand how to develop your essay.  Numerous Internet sources have sample personal statements that you can look over.  Try to analyze what types of topics otherpeople talked about, how they discussed the challenges, and what overall tone they used.

Here are some basic tips on writing your admissions essay:

-  Try not to dwell too much on the negative aspects of the challenge, but make sure that you give the reader a well-rounded description of your experience.
-  Focus on the positive by discussing how you responded to the challenge and how you triumphed over the odds.
-  Remember to mention the virtues, character traits, and values that you gained from the experiences.  Explain how, as a result of going through such challenges, you are better disposed to be successful in college and in life in general.

Stating what you plan on doing if faced with similar challenges in the future

Perhaps the best way to prove that you have learned and grown from such challenging high school experiences is to discuss how you would tackle a similar challenge in the future.  As you grow older, you are likely to encounter more challenging experiences.  Explain how you are ready to deal with such challenges head-on, because of what you have learned through your experience in the past.