We often gravitate towards the easiest way to do something because it saves time and energy for other more productive activities. For example, in the Internet age, we would rarely bother to leaf through an encyclopedia in search of a random fact for an hour when we could use a search engine to find it in 10 seconds. Why spend 20-30 minutes stirring and cooking rice on the stove when you can throw it in a rice cooker, press a button and forget about it?
It may sound counterintuitive, but this logic doesn’t always work when it comes to telling our best stories or showing personal and professional growth in application essays. Sometimes it’s best to get your hands dirty with a challenging subject. First, let’s define what “easy” and “hard” topics are. Easy topics would be those that one is eager to discuss, probably because they involve a shining success, impressive impact, or strength that the writer wants to highlight. Hard topics are those that might include failures, intensive personal struggles, uncertainty, mistakes, or setbacks. They are hard because they can be humbling or even embarrassing, and we are not eager to discuss them.
It is often natural for applicants to focus on easy topics because they have been advised that one of the surest paths to being admitted to a competitive graduate program is by showing they are among the best of the best and that they are impact players and leaders with impressive strengths. In many ways this is correct, and applicants should indeed find opportunities to communicate these things in their application, whether it be through an essay, resume, or interview response.
Most people would only bring up a hard topic if specifically requested by an essay or interview prompt such as this one:
Describe a professional work experience such as a task or project that you were involved with in which you experienced failure or, in hindsight, felt you could have performed better. Explain the reasons for choosing this experience for this essay, and if you had a second chance, how would you do things differently? (500 words)
If asked this question, the writer has no choice but to present an example involving hardship. This is one obvious example, but our intention in writing this blog post is to encourage applicants to discuss hard topics in open-ended essay questions like a Statement of Purpose (SOP) even if not prompted.
Why Choose the Hard Road?
What are the advantages of this approach? Voluntarily offering weaknesses or negative experiences seems to be an act of self-sabotage, and highly counterintuitive. On the contrary, offering stories about failures, struggles, and weaknesses humanizes the writer and makes them seem vulnerable. Being vulnerable is a hallmark that triggers empathy in others. When we feel empathy, a connection is being built between us. In short, the more we can relate to others, the more we may feel a connection and that we like them. And in this case, our goal is to make the admissions officers at our dream school like us and remember our stories.
Another way that applicants often take the easy road when writing essays is to describe themselves superficially by stating what they are passionate about, what skills they want to gain or improve, or even why they need an advanced degree without giving strong personal examples that help the reader understand why they feel this way. Here lies a second advantage of this strategy – the opportunity to portray your strengths and experiences using a real story, or put more simply, to show rather than tell. Many writers who take this approach will use a setback or failure story to illustrate where they are lacking skills or precisely how they realized they needed to pursue graduate-level studies in order to reach their goals. It’s important to understand how to tell a challenging story as a way of giving proof of self-knowledge and needs or weaknesses by connecting the challenge with the growth opportunity.
To be clear, this approach is not about eliciting pity from the reader. Showing vulnerability is more about honesty and showing deep self-awareness. If we are all honest with ourselves, we know that none of us are perfect. Thus, pretending to be perfect in every way in the application lacks sincerity. Thus, while we endeavor to put our best foot forward, we also want to search for ways to humanize ourselves, to demonstrate that we are aware of or searching for our blind spots, and have the growth mentality to try to improve them (in our daily lives and hopefully in graduate school as well).
Conclusion
Don’t lose sight of the fact that it’s imperative that you answer question prompts by staying on-topic and telling your best stories. But also don’t shy away from telling hard stories when you see an opportunity to display your personal and professional growth, resilience, strengths, and skills. Tackling the hard topics can be a great way to write memorable essays that can help your profile stay front of mind for admissions committee members when it comes time to make final admit/reject decisions.