Need help choosing a challenge/adversity essay topic

[astrophage]

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Hi! I am in the process of pre-writing some of the "core secondaries" that all schools ask. I am stuck on the personal challenge essay. The specific prompt is:

The Admissions Committee is interested in gaining more insight into you as a person. Please describe a significant personal challenge you have faced, one which you feel has helped to shape you as a person. Examples may include a moral or ethical dilemma, a situation of personal adversity, or a hurdle in your life that you worked hard to overcome. Please include how you got through the experience, how you handled the uncertainty or stress, and what you learned about yourself as a result. (500 words)

Option 1: moving back to the US after 11 years in France with my single mother because of COVID in only five weeks. I'd been prepping for the French medical track and was the equivalent of a rising HS junior. My mom spent her last savings to get us back and could only work as a schoolteacher here, since her PhD wasn't recognized. With two years of high school left, I worked weekends to help contribute to our finances and earned a full-tuition scholarship I otherwise couldn't have afforded for college, then kept working through college for rent and expenses.

I got through it by fixing on getting to college to resume the track I'd left and by taking active steps: the hardest course load I could handle, to prove I could manage the US system, plus a job to help with our finances. The takeaway is admittedly generic but true: if I made it through that, nothing stops me from what I set my mind to. A raw, vulnerable stretch I feel I've only really overcome six years later. (This is option is an expansion of what I briefly go over in my OIE, but I did not have as much room to dig in there)

Option 2 feels like another side of the same challenge, but it was the adversity of being a stranger in a country that was supposed to be my home. I was American by nationality, but a stranger in every other way after 11 years abroad. I resolved this stress by getting involved in my local community. Working at Chick-fil-A as a high schooler to be placed in an environment where I would have to learn quickly, and coming to college, getting involved in volunteering, an internship in my engineering industry, and clinical work. + I could throw in some humor about not knowing football and going to an SEC school. All of this helped me integrate, but I never forgot the part of me from abroad, this helps me navigate meeting people from different nationalities who feel out of place, as well as those who are vulnerable, as being out of place occurs in a lot of different ways. I can point to a specific anecdote at work or patient experiences to be more show-not-tell.

 

[Mr.Smile12]

Let me simplify the concepts for this year's writers. Obviously, secondary essay prompts conflate the two, so have different answers for these specific prompts... and make sure you know which of the two the prompt is asking for... even if it's not clear.

Challenges focus on what it takes for you to finish a race (or reach a goal).

Adversities focus on the road you traveled to finish the race (gravel track, sand, deep swimming pool; and the potholes or obstacles placed therein).

Read

Write Your Secondary Essays First | Student Doctor Network | SDN

Secondary essays are a critical part of your application that ensure your picking the right schools and prepare you for the interview process.

www.studentdoctor.net

 

[astrophage]

Let me simplify the concepts for this year's writers. Obviously, secondary essay prompts conflate the two, so have different answers for these specific prompts... and make sure you know which of the two the prompt is asking for... even if it's not clear.

Challenges focus on what it takes for you to finish a race (or reach a goal).

Adversities focus on the road you traveled to finish the race (gravel track, sand, deep swimming pool; and the potholes or obstacles placed therein).

Read

Write Your Secondary Essays First | Student Doctor Network | SDN

Secondary essays are a critical part of your application that ensure your picking the right schools and prepare you for the interview process.

www.studentdoctor.net

Helpful! Thank you. Yet, as you said, the prompt above (from CWRU) asks for a challenge, but then brings in adversity or a hurdle as possible examples. If the adcoms are conflating the two here, would it be acceptable to use an adversity example, while having a separate challenge essay when the two words are not conflated?

As I understand it from your recommended reading, adversity may be an unexpected event or obstacle one has to overcome, while a challenge may be a voluntary task or goal one chooses to undertake, such as doing a coveted internship and being assigned a very difficult summer project. A challenge may often be more self-contained than many types of adversity (socioeconomic, immigration status, structural barriers).

 

[polymerization]

In this particular case, they explicitly state that they're trying to get to know you as a person. I would start there and identify what qualities you're trying to communicate to them, and then recruit the story as the vehicle for delivering those qualities. I think right now you are just naming some of your factual circumstances and I don't know that the details are actually helping you.

It helped me a lot to occupy the persona of the harshest, most ruthless bad-faith reviewer I could imagine, and then read my work through that lens. It is helpful to use AI to help you do this.

Such a reviewer might say, quite gratuitously and unfairly, "OK, and? So you're telling me that you have a successful dual-passport-holding professor parent, you have only gone to the best academic programs in the world, received a full ride to college, and we're supposed to feel sorry for you because you had to work at a Chick-Fil-A? Thank you so much for descending from your Parisian tower to provide service to the plebeians and commit the world's sharpest most tortured intellect to the hardest courses at Probably A Famous University."

Once the sting wears off, you can see it for what it is, a map of the inconsistencies. The kernel of truth is where your opportunity is. How would you respond to someone who said this to you? How could you modulate your frame or narrative so it is less of a question? Iterate on that process a few times and you'll see how your writing changes.

People talk about writing like just generating words is the hard part. This is the hard part. Your life is not going to be 100% professionally legible and it is genuinely hard work to try and navigate writing in a context you've never had to before and that nobody can truly guide you on with the granularity that would be helpful. And it's high stakes enough that nobody is going to definitively tell you "hey, write x, y, z."

It's impossible to be totally unassailable, but bear in mind that the qualities that they are provoking you to engage have their own fine lines you want to be careful not to overstep. They want to see you are challenged but not defeated. You have to be ambitious but not ostentatious about it. They want to see that you see value even working in unglamorous settings, but not overreach into trauma p*rn territory. You want to come across noble and sympathetic but not just nakedly trying to earn brownie points in the vulnerability Olympics.

And in the end, don't worry, a year from now you will read back on the secondaries you wrote after all of that work and you'll still cringe and hate it.

I'm realizing it's all part of the process.

 

[astrophage]

Such a reviewer might say, quite gratuitously and unfairly, "OK, and? So you're telling me that you have a successful dual-passport-holding professor parent, you have only gone to the best academic programs in the world, received a full ride to college, and we're supposed to feel sorry for you because you had to work at a Chick-Fil-A? Thank you so much for descending from your Parisian tower to provide service to the plebeians and commit the world's sharpest most tortured intellect to the hardest courses at Probably A Famous University."

You must have the harsh, cynical reviewer voice mastered, because this certainly stung a bit. Hopefully, they remember that in the sea of undoubtedly privileged pre-med son/daughter of doctor parent of doctor parent going four generations back, there are still some of us doing this for the first time. One comment I received recently that I still scoff at from these individuals is "Oh, why aren't your parents paying for medical school." Anyways, I digress.

Do you mean that the point is not to make an essay totally immune to a bad-faith reading, but to use that reading to find where my framing may be unclear or invite an unintended interpretation from a normal reviewer? Here, I need to make sure the essay is not asking the reader to feel sorry for my circumstances. Rather, it should show how I navigated those circumstances and what I learned about myself/who I want to be. Essentially, the harsh-reader exercise helps expose where the narrative needs to make those qualities more legible.

 

[Mr.Smile12]

I think the most important part of the secondary essay-writing exercise is knowing how you embrace your vulnerabilities and weaknesses with authenticity and humility. I agree with @polymerization it's part of the process... you'll be writing about more times you will feel incompetent and unsure in your medical school reflection essays (such as these). It's a question whether you recognize times when your process failed (improve study habits) or you were placed in a no-win situation (the patient died anyway; or the Kobyashi Maru, for you Star Trek fans).

You can't change your luck if you hit a bad-faith reviewer. I can only assure you that you shouldn't hit more than one (on the same adcom) that automatically puts on the cynical filter.

 

[polymerization]

You must have the harsh, cynical reviewer voice mastered, because this certainly stung a bit. Hopefully, they remember that in the sea of undoubtedly privileged pre-med son/daughter of doctor parent of doctor parent going four generations back, there are still some of us doing this for the first time. One comment I received recently that I still scoff at from these individuals is "Oh, why aren't your parents paying for medical school." Anyways, I digress.

Do you mean that the point is not to make an essay totally immune to a bad-faith reading, but to use that reading to find where my framing may be unclear or invite an unintended interpretation from a normal reviewer? Here, I need to make sure the essay is not asking the reader to feel sorry for my circumstances. Rather, it should show how I navigated those circumstances and what I learned about myself/who I want to be. Essentially, the harsh-reader exercise helps expose where the narrative needs to make those qualities more legible.

I come in peace... it is offered only with the best intentions. There are many ways to approach writing and I acknowledge that what worked for me is not going to resonate with everyone. I'm pretty introspective, philosophical, and melodramatic in temperament at baseline and I think my coping mechanisms for getting through this definitely reflected those tendencies. You will develop your own model: keep what works for you, throw out what doesn't.

This isn't really a fully-fledged and published theory on writing or anything, but yes, internalizing the harsh/skeptical perspective is intended to reveal logical inconsistencies and find ways to get ahead of them.

Affectionately referred to as generalized anxiety disorder by psychiatrists, but what do they know?! I can stop whenever I want!

 

[astrophage]

I come in peace... it is offered only with the best intentions. There are many ways to approach writing and I acknowledge that what worked for me is not going to resonate with everyone. I'm pretty introspective, philosophical, and melodramatic in temperament at baseline and I think my coping mechanisms for getting through this definitely reflected those tendencies. You will develop your own model: keep what works for you, throw out what doesn't.

This isn't really a fully-fledged and published theory on writing or anything, but yes, internalizing the harsh/skeptical perspective is intended to reveal logical inconsistencies and find ways to get ahead of them.

I completely understand, and I'm grateful whenever I see you in a random SDN comment thread or on my own posts. Your long responses are insightful and welcome. I think your 'criticizing' voice must have at least been partially borne of some sort of annoyance, discontentment, or insightful awareness about this process. Though I feel I understand where it comes from.

On one hand, the adcoms must get tired of seeing the thousands of applicants who clearly don't know what a challenge or adversity is, and become cynical, which your voice seems to be acutely aware of. On the other hand, it feels like navigating a maze of linguistic and stylistic choices where, even when you feel like you are being authentic, you cannot be sure if your version of authentic is what the adcoms desire. Whenever I encounter this issue in writing, I think back to another post you wrote about how, when writing your PS, you eventually come to an uncertain contentment with what you have written. I think those words are very true, though I prefer my STEM-based exams where there is one correct answer.

Affectionately referred to as generalized anxiety disorder by psychiatrists, but what do they know?! I can stop whenever I want!

opens DSM 5 🧐

 

[Mr.Smile12]

I completely understand, and I'm grateful whenever I see you in a random SDN comment thread or on my own posts. Your long responses are insightful and welcome. I think your 'criticizing' voice must have at least been partially borne of some sort of annoyance, discontentment, or insightful awareness about this process. Though I feel I understand where it comes from.

On one hand, the adcoms must get tired of seeing the thousands of applicants who clearly don't know what a challenge or adversity is, and become cynical, which your voice seems to be acutely aware of. On the other hand, it feels like navigating a maze of linguistic and stylistic choices where, even when you feel like you are being authentic, you cannot be sure if your version of authentic is what the adcoms desire. Whenever I encounter this issue in writing, I think back to another post you wrote about how, when writing your PS, you eventually come to an uncertain contentment with what you have written. I think those words are very true, though I prefer my STEM-based exams where there is one correct answer.


opens DSM 5 🧐

Fortunately, the adcoms don't get to read thousands of applicant essays. It's the screeners who do it.

Read Like a Screener: Giving the Best Personal Statement Feedback | SDN

Asked to review a prehealth peer's personal statement? Read like an admissions screener and skip the line-by-line rewrite.

www.studentdoctor.net

 

[polymerization]

I completely understand, and I'm grateful whenever I see you in a random SDN comment thread or on my own posts. Your long responses are insightful and welcome. I think your 'criticizing' voice must have at least been partially borne of some sort of annoyance, discontentment, or insightful awareness about this process. Though I feel I understand where it comes from.

On one hand, the adcoms must get tired of seeing the thousands of applicants who clearly don't know what a challenge or adversity is, and become cynical, which your voice seems to be acutely aware of. On the other hand, it feels like navigating a maze of linguistic and stylistic choices where, even when you feel like you are being authentic, you cannot be sure if your version of authentic is what the adcoms desire. Whenever I encounter this issue in writing, I think back to another post you wrote about how, when writing your PS, you eventually come to an uncertain contentment with what you have written. I think those words are very true, though I prefer my STEM-based exams where there is one correct answer.

I mean, you're here because you see how impossible this whole situation really is: don't be too much, don't be too little, be just enough.

Be an overachiever but not a robot, check all the boxes but don't be neurotic about how you're managing time (though you are being judged for your time management), spend thousands of hours in service of others but don't proselytize or overclaim deep moral fiber or humanitarian impulse, do more than any other cohort of physicians-in-training ever have for the same seat at the same medical school but don't wince and even thank them when they condescend about your chances.

The norms in medicine can be very paternalistic, self-sealing, and hypocritical. And it's worse the more you spiral when you think about how it gatekeeps elite compensation behind classed experiences that essentially guarantee admission only to the already wealthy, and you start to feel like there are too many coincidences for this to be fully explained by unintended consequences. Work in the industry long enough and you start seeing it more clearly. Don't meet your heroes.

So there's a cognitive dissonance there, of course: I recognize that medicine is not the noble profession it presents, but I still see value in the profession and responsible stewardship of authority for the common good. I think more people should have the opportunity to present a polished, admissible persona to medical school beyond the very wealthy, so I share my experiences having been admitted to well-known institutions. But I'm still upset that I believed in the meritocracy and the bootstraps, all of it, for it to have been, basically, a lie. I'm frustrated that my success will become a testimonial for why the system works rather than the many ways I had to adapt to its failure.

So I'm always straddling imparting the two imperatives "the education system is inherently adversarial and not on your side" and "you still have to play by their rules even if you don't find them to be fair." I acknowledge that message can come across discouraging, but the acceptance rate at any given school is less than 5% in most cases. Chances are genuinely stark.

So when writing, deciding where to stop ends up becoming this whole thing where you're reconciling the totality of your application, all of your writing, all of your experiences, the risk inherent in application, your imagined vision of the future, literally your entire life... and it all comes down to just clicking one last green button. Submit, and it's gone. That's it. Maybe you get an interview tomorrow; maybe you never hear from them again, so whatever you write matters a lot.

I think about what it must have been like to write the message attached to the Golden Record. How do you write a message to an extraterrestrial alien? How do you compose a message to an audience you're not sure will ever receive it? How do you distill the experience of consciousness as a specific human being to someone you know nothing about? I'm still mulling it over, and it's all safely in the rearview, now.

So yes, it never feels "good," because to feel resolved would mean having certainty that doesn't exist. Do your best, but don't miss the forest for the trees. You eventually have to submit something, perfection is illusory, and the clock is ticking.