Prompt: Describe a setting in which you have collaborated or interacted with people whose experiences and/or beliefs differ from yours. Address your initial feelings, and how those feelings were or were not changed by this experience.
How to be Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable
Walking into the natatorium on the first day of practice, on the first day of my freshman year, was a terrifying, yet eventually enlightening experience. Being the shy and timid person that I was, I went and sat by the one person that I knew because that's what anyone would do right? Well what about those days when that one person wasn't there?
Being on the swim team forced me to learn how to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. Since anyone can learn how to swim, the swim team was full of a very diverse group of kids. There were the ones who had been swimming their entire lives, ones who decided they wanted to join the swim team because they thought it would be fun, and then there were the ones who joined the team because they needed an athletics credit and figured it would be an easy way out. And then there was me, the timid freshman who had been swimming a decent amount of time but still wasn't even close to being one of the fastest on the team. Now, for those days where my one familiar face wasn't there, I was forced to make new friends for those 15 minutes before practiced started and I could shove my face in the water and move on with my day. There was the girl who had been homeschooled up until that year, the guy who believed he was going to be the youngest Olympic swimmer in history, the two kids who hardly said ten words the entire year, and a collection of others. At first, I didn't really know how to handle each different person all in the same environment. It wasn't until our first team outing did I realize what it was really all about.
It was the simple bus ride to our first swim meet that I realized it wasn't the differences that I should be focusing on, but the similarities. We all had one thing in common, swimming. Without it, none of us would be there anyways. After I had this epiphany, my thoughts about nearly everything changed. It didn't matter that we had come from different places because we all ended up in the same one. All that mattered was that we were all there, together. That team became some of my best friends for the next four years of my life.
Being a part of the swim team has taught me things about life way deeper than just how to effectively swim across a pool. The experiences I have had with this team have taught me to look at people not as the individual things they have experienced, but as the sum of all of their parts.
" Since anyone can learn how to swim " try to restate this
Your essay is too genearl. Focus on one specific friend you made from the swim team, your first impression of him/her and how that changed after the bus ride to the swim meet. Write in a narrative form as if your telling a story.
You have a good idea but just try to make it more personal, your starting was good just continue to write your entire essay like that.
