Areas of weakness or professional failures are topics that most graduate school applicants want to avoid. But there are many good reasons to work on getting comfortable talking about these parts of one’s profile and background. First and foremost, filling skill and knowledge gaps and bolstering professional networking are the primary motivating factors for grad school applicants who are seeking to accelerate their careers and reach their goals. Despite the clear correlation, many applicants remain shy about these topics when, in fact, they offer unique, memorable essay material. Here are a few reasons to consider bringing up an area of weakness or failure when writing your essays.
First-Mover’s Advantage
A few programs have specific essay questions about weaknesses, areas for growth, and personal or professional failures. However, unless explicitly asked in an essay, most applicants avoid these topics until it’s time to prepare answers for interview questions. But what if bringing up a challenging situation unprompted could maximize its value as a story?
Let’s discuss what ‘maximizing its value’ means in this situation. First, taking the initiative to highlight a weakness or failure shows that the writer is self-aware enough to take ownership of shortcomings and opportunities to grow. In other words, they possess a ‘growth mindset’, one of the key attributes graduate programs look for. Second, offering this kind of story can show tenacity and confidence in one’s ability to overcome struggles and achieve personal growth. Third, empathy is one of the strongest emotions tied to memory, so telling stories that others can relate to can have long-tail effects for the admissions officers who will read your essays.
Confidence May be Sexy, but Humility is Endearing
Another potential advantage of telling a personal story that exposes vulnerability is that humility often endears people to one another. Revealing a difficult or even heartbreaking experience and the subsequent personal growth that accompanied it can trigger a very strong memory or personal association for the reader, especially those who have experienced a similar challenge or failure. By sharing an authentic experience and related personal growth story, applicants invite the reader to a shared middle ground of understanding, which creates a powerful and memorable connection. This may work to the applicant’s advantage when it comes time for the admissions committee member to make a difficult choice between highly-qualified candidates.
Have a Sense of Humor
Being able to laugh at ourselves shows others several important qualities. Humility and confidence are built on acceptance. Only when we accept an unfortunate or negative experience are we able to process it in a healthy way and grow from it, and others can sense this. By owning our shortcomings with a smile on our faces, we can highlight our self-awareness and earn the reader’s belief in us.
Of course, being funny is difficult, but it can offer another way to tell a memorable story. Humor is subjective, so what one person finds funny, another person may not find amusing. When telling a funny personal story in an essay it is always a good idea to have a few trusted friends or peers read the story and share their honest feedback about whether they find it funny and how it might be communicated in a safe and entertaining way. Done right, “humor signals competence without arrogance,” says the organizational psychologist and Wharton professor Adam Grant. This should be the goal when using humor – show self-knowledge, personal growth, and the ability to move on from failure or embarrassment.
[Conclusion]
In a landscape as competitive as graduate school admissions, it can be advantageous to zig when others are zagging. There are many ways to tell compelling, memorable stories in application essays, but proactively bringing up areas of weakness or personal/professional failures have exceptional potential to grab and hold the reader’s attention. Of course, a story about personal failure or struggle should be among the two or three strongest stories an applicant can tell and should not simply be selected because it is a contrary approach. So when the time comes to consider which stories to tell in order to express one’s qualifications and readiness for graduate studies, don’t shy away from sharing a humbling experience as a way to convey life experience and personal strengths.