Is this a failure (for secondaries)?

[E0001234]

Working on pre-writing secondaries and WashU has this prompt: "Describe a time or a situation where you have been unsuccessful or failed"

I am considering two different ideas here:

1.) As a student-athlete (NCAA team) I was frequently injured throughout college, but I felt that being able to practice with the team and compete in meets was more important than taking time off for recovery because I largely defined myself as a student-athlete. I continued to overwork myself and deny myself the recovery time I needed until my senior year, when I suffered a pretty significant injury that ended up in a physician deciding that I needed to be held out of competition indefinitely. To me, the failure here is: I failed to achieve my goal of competing in my final year as a student-athlete because I refused to value myself beyond athletics. I reflected on this failure by dedicating the time I was forced to spend out of training to developing other aspects of my identity, like peer mentorship.

2.) During my time on the executive board for a race-specific student-athlete group at my university, our university announced controversial plans to implement a private police force. I and other members of the e-board, knowing that this proposal would likely disproportionately impact the racial group with which we identified, set up a meeting with the university's president (it was a big deal for us!) and sort of explained to him our concerns, hoping that he would agree to pull back the reins on the proposal. He ended up kinda telling us that the university's first priority was to implement the police force and then reflect on potential consequences. The failure here is: as a group, we were unsuccessful in creating institutional change re: the police force. We reflected on this failure by recognizing the validity of the university's perspective (high-crime area, private police could more effectively address on-campus crime) and taking an alternative approach to raising awareness of the relationship of policing and our racial group by hosting a series of community seminars.

I like both of these essays, but I think the second one is more impactful because it touches on more pressing issues than 'I got injured because I liked running a lot'. However, the second situation isn't an individual failure, but instead a group failure. Does anyone have thoughts on which essay idea best fits the prompt? Thanks!

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[Mr.Smile12]

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1) I don't know the rules on taking a medical redshirt or deferral. Being injured stinks, but I don't know if I would necessarily call it a "failure." You could go with a simpler route about not winning a championship when you competed, even if you tried changing up some habits or routines.

2) I would not call your advocacy strategy a failure. Sounds like the President and the C-suite admins already made up their minds. It's great they listened to you, but being an advocate or administrator is more complex than your description of it being a failure that fits the prompt, IMO.

 

[deleted929944]

I'd change #2 slightly and you'd have a good answer. The failure is not successfully creating institutional change. I'd change it so that the failure is that of looking at the issue from different angles. Don't be trapped by your own convictions.

So here, you expand on the fact that you learned that as activist and a future doctor, you must look at problems from multiple angles. And you put that learning into action with the community seminars.

 

[LizzyM]

Another way to look at questions like this is that you can expect failure and disappointment at some point in med school (not necessarily failing an exam but failing to get a High Pass in a rotation that you felt you did well in, or not being selected for a specific training program) and what the adcom would like to know is how you have dealt with such disappointments and failures in the past. How do you change the things you can, accept the situations you can't change, and how do you tell one from the other?

In other words, the adcom may be less interested in what the failure WAS and more interested in what you did about it.