Adversity/Challenge Essay Topics: one from a long time ago but deals with racism, one from a professional environment

[Doctoscope]

I'm revisiting some of my secondaries, I have 2 main outlines that deals with the following topics. One is from almost 15-ish years ago, but much more personally meaningful. The other is more recent and professional, but more common.

1) When I first moved to Canada when I was in the 6th grade, I attended a predominantly white school, I experienced a bit of a cultural shock/immature racism from the other students. Things like making fun of the food I eat, talking in another language with my parents on the phone and making fun of the language, etc. My first gut reaction was to react with hostility, but I later took another approach of educating/sharing my food/media etc. with the students, and we ended up bonding/growing closer together with it. The racism also stopped once I started doing that. I've taken this approach in almost every new culturally new situation since then.

2) When I worked for my father and his business partner in ~2016-2017, I was responsible for building a database for their business. I vastly underestimated the amount of time developing a graphic interface would take, and focused all of my attention on the backend. This later came back to bite me and I couldn't realistically meet the deadline. I was admonished, and through this failure I learned how to better partition a large project into manageable sizes/chunks.

I am leaning towards #1 for my adversity essay, and #2 for my challenge/failure essay. I am just wondering if #1 is too far back in the past for me to write about it? It was quite a significant moment for me (first time experiencing some form of racism, and overcoming it), but I'm worried maybe 15 years ago is too far back (I'm a non-trad btw). Thanks for your tips.

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[Goro]

I prefer hearing about things when you weren't a child.

For #2, how did that display your grit and resilience? Because what you wrote is not an adversity topic. A challenge, yes.

 

[Doctoscope]

I prefer hearing about things when you weren't a child.

For #2, how did that display your grit and resilience? Because what you wrote is not an adversity topic. A challenge, yes.

I do have a significant major life event that I could write as an adversity topic (won't be sharing it here because it's extremely unique and easily identifiable), but I also talked about it on my personal statement for about a paragraph. People reviewing my PS thought it was a great hook and interesting. I could get into more details in the adversity essay that I did not write about on my PS, but I was worried about repeating myself. Do you think it's OK to talk about something I already talked about on my PS if it's in more detail?

Also, for the aforementioned topic, the only thing I could do was tough it out as there was literally nothing I could do about it (government related, nothing illegal or anything like that). Would that be OK, or have I had to take some action to overcome it in order to write about it?

 

[Mr.Smile12]

I agree #2 is a challenge where you definitely failed, but I would be interested in how you applied the lesson to the next challenge. What were the consequences of failing: just a tongue-lashing? I don't get how high the stakes were. Most people like stories with happy endings for challenges (unless prompted) so how you resolve it would be of interest.

I agree #1 doesn't really work. I read it as I got teased as a child. Throwing the word racism also includes active, deliberate decision making to exclude or punishing you just because you are not a preferred member of a group, often with no "resolution". If you experienced a lack of opportunity in your education, in sports, in getting food, in getting a job because of your ethnicity or race, then it works. Otherwise, you didn't really answer the question.

 

[Doctoscope]

I agree #2 is a challenge where you definitely failed, but I would be interested in how you applied the lesson to the next challenge. What were the consequences of failing: just a tongue-lashing? I don't get how high the stakes were. Most people like stories with happy endings for challenges (unless prompted) so how you resolve it would be of interest.

I agree #1 doesn't really work. I read it as I got teased as a child. Throwing the word racism also includes active, deliberate decision making to exclude or punishment you solely because you are not a preferred member of a group, often with no "resolution". If you experienced a lack of opportunity in your education, in sports, in getting food, in getting a job because of your ethnicity or race, then it works. Otherwise, you didn't really answer the question.

I agree, upon reading #1 again I can see how it's can seem like just a childhood teasing thing. I would like to talk about a professional challenge in my secondaries, and I've come up with 2 more recent ones:

1) Learning how to come up with different teaching strategies for different types of students as a tutor over ~7 months. I was teaching 3 different classes, all at different grade levels, so I had to learn to be versatile and adapt to various students' needs. e.g. some students learn better from many example problems, while others learn better from analogy-based explanations. Having to come up with different strategies for middle school, junior high, and high school students all with different goals could get a little overwhelming sometimes, and I definitely fumbled some classes. Kids losing attention, getting confused and not wanting to do any work etc., and dealing with tiger parents who wanted me to pile on more and more work if the kids didn't understand anything. In the end, I feel like I succeeded, and the students did well in their classes and a lot of them (I heard) did well on their SAT math sections.

Problem with #1 is I feel like this is a VERY common topic.

2) Same topic as before - building a database for my dad and his partner's store over ~3 months. I had a wrong approach to a very big problem (building an entire database/inventory system by myself), and my approach completely fell apart halfway through the assignment. My initial approach was to completely finish the backend, and then finish the front end, and things got very buggy very fast. The consequences weren't too severe; I was admonished, and they considered letting me go because I essentially had to start a lot of the project over. I convinced them to give me another month-1.5 months, and I learned a new, proper approach online, and worked with things as small individual pieces that fit together. Ended up even adding extra features to the final project, like sales projections, and they were very satisfied. I could talk about how this taught me how to properly approach very large problems, and how to properly partition/divide it to not get overwhelmed. I actually took the same mindset of breaking things into chunks into my post-bacc and MCAT studies, and it turned out well.

Some wording/phrasing for #2 is a bit off since I just wrote this up, but the general gist of it is there. Any thoughts @Mr.Smile12 ? I am leaning towards #2, but I do not feel too sure. Should I scrap both and try to come up with something else?

 

[Mr.Smile12]

I agree, upon reading #1 again I can see how it's can seem like just a childhood teasing thing. I would like to talk about a professional challenge in my secondaries, and I've come up with 2 more recent ones:

1) Learning how to come up with different teaching strategies for different types of students as a tutor over ~7 months. I was teaching 3 different classes, all at different grade levels, so I had to learn to be versatile and adapt to various students' needs. e.g. some students learn better from many example problems, while others learn better from analogy-based explanations. Having to come up with different strategies for middle school, junior high, and high school students all with different goals could get a little overwhelming sometimes, and I definitely fumbled some classes. Kids losing attention, getting confused and not wanting to do any work etc., and dealing with tiger parents who wanted me to pile on more and more work if the kids didn't understand anything. In the end, I feel like I succeeded, and the students did well in their classes and a lot of them (I heard) did well on their SAT math sections.

Problem with #1 is I feel like this is a VERY common topic.

2) Same topic as before - building a database for my dad and his partner's store over ~3 months. I had a wrong approach to a very big problem (building an entire database/inventory system by myself), and my approach completely fell apart halfway through the assignment. My initial approach was to completely finish the backend, and then finish the front end, and things got very buggy very fast. The consequences weren't too severe; I was admonished, and they considered letting me go because I essentially had to start a lot of the project over. I convinced them to give me another month-1.5 months, and I learned a new, proper approach online, and worked with things as small individual pieces that fit together. Ended up even adding extra features to the final project, like sales projections, and they were very satisfied. I could talk about how this taught me how to properly approach very large problems, and how to properly partition/divide it to not get overwhelmed. I actually took the same mindset of breaking things into chunks into my post-bacc and MCAT studies, and it turned out well.

Some wording/phrasing for #2 is a bit off since I just wrote this up, but the general gist of it is there. Any thoughts @Mr.Smile12 ? I am leaning towards #2, but I do not feel too sure. Should I scrap both and try to come up with something else?

Can I ask what competencies you are highlighting (primary and secondary emphasis) in your topics?

You don't need to worry about how common the topic is. How you describe your experience makes you stand out.

The second topic still sounds better as a challenge but you need to answer the prompt given to you.

 

[Goro]

I do have a significant major life event that I could write as an adversity topic (won't be sharing it here because it's extremely unique and easily identifiable), but I also talked about it on my personal statement for about a paragraph. People reviewing my PS thought it was a great hook and interesting. I could get into more details in the adversity essay that I did not write about on my PS, but I was worried about repeating myself. Do you think it's OK to talk about something I already talked about on my PS if it's in more detail?

Also, for the aforementioned topic, the only thing I could do was tough it out as there was literally nothing I could do about it (government related, nothing illegal or anything like that). Would that be OK, or have I had to take some action to overcome it in order to write about it?

In your PS, you must have used the incident to discuss your path to Medicine.

In the adversity essay, you need to show how you demonstrated your grit and coping skills.

 

[Doctoscope]

Can I ask what competencies you are highlighting (primary and secondary emphasis) in your topics?

You don't need to worry about how common the topic is. How you describe your experience makes you stand out.

The second topic still sounds better as a challenge but you need to answer the prompt given to you.

I see. The things I would like to highlight from the challenge essay is my ability to break down large problems into manageable chunks that fit together when all completed, to remain composed and think of new solutions in the face of overwhelming situations, and how to not get stuck with a certain way of thinking because of sunk cost fallacy.

I think I will very briefly talk about why I failed initially in 1-2 sentences, write more about the strategies/thoughts I had as I looked to rebuild large portions of the project from scratch. and hen the bulk will be all the things I wrote above,.

 

[Doctoscope]

In your PS, you must have used the incident to discuss your path to Medicine.

In the adversity essay, you need to show how you demonstrated your grit and coping skills.

Is it OK to talk about a situation where I literally could not do anything to solve the problem (involves lawyers)? I would focus more on the growth of my mindset/outlook during the time instead of actually solving the problem.

Or should I stick to something where I personally took action to solve a problem?

 

[Goro]

Is it OK to talk about a situation where I literally could not do anything to solve the problem (involves lawyers)? I would focus more on the growth of my mindset/outlook during the time instead of actually solving the problem.

Or should I stick to something where I personally took action to solve a problem?

The latter is what medical schools are looking for.