Secondary challenge question opinion

[blacksweater]

Hi guys,

I need some help deciding what to write about for the secondary challenge question. Like a lot of applicants, I don't have a major challenge to talk about so I thought maybe a short term or small challenge would suffice since it's more important to look at the way you handle the challenge and not the challenge itself. Here are some ideas I had:

1) Not really a short term challenge but I could talk about how I was a very small and scrawny kid growing up, even through high school, and how I was made fun of and ridiculed by my friends and peers.
2) I could talk about a difficult roommate situation in college, where I lived with 3 other guys, and none of us would clean the bathroom and it would escalate up to the point where we would be doing petty things.
3) Or maybe talk about adjusting to college life, how it was the first time I ever lived away from home (OOS), making friends, and there was once a situation where I was taking the train to go home on Thanksgiving but got lost trying to find the station.

Let me know if any of these examples sound good or if any of these "challenges" aren't even real challenges.

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[CaliforniaDreamer]

It's more about how you handled the challenge and what actions you took to overcome it. So technically, any of these could work (except for getting lost tying to find a train station lol) if you had an appropriate elaboration on how you handled the challenge.

 

[Crayola227]

#3 is the only one that passes any muster, and it's still pretty bad

can you think of a time when you were the most upset, stressed out, or disappointed with yourself?

throw some by us because #3 is pretty weak

 

[blacksweater]

I've been trying to steer away from academic challenges, but I have thought about discussing my challenge of adjusting from high school to college studying and how after getting a 30% on my orgo exam, I've learned to become more humble and develop better my study habits.

I've also thought of another situation where I had a final group project to do, but one of my partners unexpectedly got sick and had to go to the hospital. We found out about it a few days later but it was stressful to me since he wasn't able to do any work even before his illness, my other partner was busy with cheerleading, and it was during finals week so I had loads of other stuff to do.

I'm just not sure how compelling these challenges are, and I've heard its a bad idea to talk about academic challenges.

 

[Crayola227]

No personal challenges? No one in the family ever been sick? Unemployed? Sad?

There's always dirt.

 

[blacksweater]

No, nothing too serious. And besides, it seems that challenges related to my family would be more stressful on them than on me, and it would be mostly about their resolution and not mine.