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Hey guys!
I'm writing a failure essay for a secondary application and wanted to get some feedback on the following potential topics. Also, is it desirably to write about a failure that was ultimately turned into a success? Or should it just be left as a failure and elaborate on the lessons learned? I can't honestly think of any truly unmitigated failures that occurred after high school. If I could write about my pre-college experiences, I could wax poetic on my many failures.
1. During one of my semesters in college, I took a 23 credit hours of upper level math and CS classes, and due to being constantly busy, I failed to be a good friend to someone who was going through a really tough time with personal family stuff. Our friendship really suffered that semester and almost ended up breaking apart. From talking with my friend, I learned that the problem wasn't that I was constantly busy - it was that I was making it seem as though everything was fine on my end and not properly communicating how busy I was and my reasons for not being able to offer more support. This experience taught me the importance of communication in maintaining my personal life and friendships in a stressful environment as well as the necessity of setting reasonable boundaries and expectations for friends and others that I am close to.
2. As a Peace Corps teacher in an African country, I was responsible for helping my kids succeed and achieve the highest grades they could. In my first 6 months as a volunteer, I taught additional periods, added office hours to my schedule, and tried various techniques to improve performance. Much to my surprise, however, students' performance dropped significantly lower than historic norms. I met with the head of the school and he basically told me that I needed to pull up their performance or the school would terminate its relationship with Peace Corps. Feeling very discouraged but wanting to do right by my students, I did a series of anonymous questionnaires to assess what I could do better as a teacher. The overwhelming answer was to teach in Swahili and to do this, I threw myself into learning Swahili. As I improved, so did my students, and recently, that first class of mine led all the other public schools in the district in national examination performance. Through this experience, I learned about the need to persevere and adapt in the face of adversity and the importance of understanding the unique needs of the population that I am serving.
3. During my first 6-7 months of volunteering in a research lab, my supervisor told me that I was like a magpie - quite smart but also easily distracted by the first shiny thing that I saw. His comments came from the fact that I would often get distracted from my primary project by an interesting potential lead that I saw on PubMed and start testing a tangentially related hypothesis instead. Due to this inability to focus on a single thing, I produced no valuable data during my first 6 months as a research volunteer. I took his advice to heart and began to really hammer at a single hypothesis, even if I saw something else that I thought was "shiny." This experience taught me the value of being focused on a single objective and not trying to answer 10 different questions at once. Since that time, I have produced valuable data that has led me to be named as a coauthor on multiple publications.
Thoughts?
I'm writing a failure essay for a secondary application and wanted to get some feedback on the following potential topics. Also, is it desirably to write about a failure that was ultimately turned into a success? Or should it just be left as a failure and elaborate on the lessons learned? I can't honestly think of any truly unmitigated failures that occurred after high school. If I could write about my pre-college experiences, I could wax poetic on my many failures.
1. During one of my semesters in college, I took a 23 credit hours of upper level math and CS classes, and due to being constantly busy, I failed to be a good friend to someone who was going through a really tough time with personal family stuff. Our friendship really suffered that semester and almost ended up breaking apart. From talking with my friend, I learned that the problem wasn't that I was constantly busy - it was that I was making it seem as though everything was fine on my end and not properly communicating how busy I was and my reasons for not being able to offer more support. This experience taught me the importance of communication in maintaining my personal life and friendships in a stressful environment as well as the necessity of setting reasonable boundaries and expectations for friends and others that I am close to.
2. As a Peace Corps teacher in an African country, I was responsible for helping my kids succeed and achieve the highest grades they could. In my first 6 months as a volunteer, I taught additional periods, added office hours to my schedule, and tried various techniques to improve performance. Much to my surprise, however, students' performance dropped significantly lower than historic norms. I met with the head of the school and he basically told me that I needed to pull up their performance or the school would terminate its relationship with Peace Corps. Feeling very discouraged but wanting to do right by my students, I did a series of anonymous questionnaires to assess what I could do better as a teacher. The overwhelming answer was to teach in Swahili and to do this, I threw myself into learning Swahili. As I improved, so did my students, and recently, that first class of mine led all the other public schools in the district in national examination performance. Through this experience, I learned about the need to persevere and adapt in the face of adversity and the importance of understanding the unique needs of the population that I am serving.
3. During my first 6-7 months of volunteering in a research lab, my supervisor told me that I was like a magpie - quite smart but also easily distracted by the first shiny thing that I saw. His comments came from the fact that I would often get distracted from my primary project by an interesting potential lead that I saw on PubMed and start testing a tangentially related hypothesis instead. Due to this inability to focus on a single thing, I produced no valuable data during my first 6 months as a research volunteer. I took his advice to heart and began to really hammer at a single hypothesis, even if I saw something else that I thought was "shiny." This experience taught me the value of being focused on a single objective and not trying to answer 10 different questions at once. Since that time, I have produced valuable data that has led me to be named as a coauthor on multiple publications.
Thoughts?
