Hello guys, I've got an essay that I've written on the topic, A significant challenge that I've overcome. Please could you give me as much feedback as possible, I'd greatly appreciate that. It's a touching essay, but feel free to expose all the areas that need to be improved.
Nick's Death
"Nick, are you okay?" I asked him
"Yes, don't worry." He replied, whilst we were walking along a straight path, under the Jacaranda trees, which took us to the boarding houses.
Three days later, Nick passed away.
The day we got chosen as prefects were one of the best days of our lives. It was, simply, a beautiful day. After that, Nick and two other colleagues got picked to be our heads( Headboy, Deputy Headboy, and Senior Prefect) with Nick as our Headboy. We had both achieved our goals and that sense of achievement was overwhelming.
There was a night when I went into Nick's room and we started playing video games( Fifa 2016, NBA 2K16 and Assassin's Creed) on his laptop. It was all going well until he, all of a sudden, threw his controller onto the floor and told me that he wasn't feeling too good. I was shocked. Something was wrong because what he had done was out of character. Anyway, I just left it and moved on. The next day, he had to go for a checkup early in the morning and the medical diagnosis was that he had a chest infection. I went to get him when he came back from the hospital and they had loaded him with medication, but it didn't seem that serious. As we walked back to the hostel area, I asked him if he was alright and he responded confidently with a colorful smile, "why wouldn't I be." Unfortunately, I took those words in and didn't pay attention to the brevity of the situation. A few days later, he was rushed to the hospital and that's where he left us. My friend was gone. Our Headboy was gone. I was broken.
The next few weeks were the worst. Each day was filled with unbearable pain and the memories of the good times that we had together were swallowed by the condemnation of not having noticed the seriousness of Nick's illness. I couldn't take it. It was as if a dark could was above my head and no sunshine would ever be made available to me. It seemed like it would never end until I read the touching story of Horatio Spafford and how he handled the tragic, untimely deaths of his four daughters whom were on a transatlantic voyage. When he got the news of their deaths, instead of falling down and dying emotionally, he wrote the famous Christian hymn, " It Is Well with my Soul." That's when I realised that I needed to get up and rise above the pain. I had mourned long enough, it was time for a change. I decided to channel my energy back to the duty that had been placed in my hands: leadership. We, as the student council, rallied the school together, motivating all the sportsmen and those individuals in their respective clubs. We took the words that Nick had proclaimed, "Take All Leave Nothing" and drilled them into the students' minds. This resulted in the sporting teams: The Tigers( rugby team), Springboks(hockey team) and the Lions (soccer team) all having a remarkable year. The toastmasters club, the club that I was in charge of, went on to make great strides, with a lot of the gentlemen winning Public speaking awards. It turned out to be a year that I would never forget( for the right reasons).
I used to think that death was the end of it all, the destroyer of everything, but I learned that it can actually bring the finesse out of people. Looking back at what we did, I think of Napoleon Rich's words, think and grow rich. In our case, think and win everything. Nick's death may have been bad at first, but I used it as my Bugatti. I continued moving.Holt Educational Consultant - / 14,864 
4788 Tapi, here is the thing, the focus of the essay and the challenge has to be related directly to you. More than half of this essay deals with Nick, his illness, and subsequent death. There was no proper explanation as to why his death could have affected you that way, even though it is evident that you took it hard. This is not an experience that focuses on you because further explaining why you took Nick's death that way will even increase his exposure in the essay. While I understand how special this story is to you, this is not the essay that you should be presenting for this essay.
A proper essay for this topic has to be developed through an event that had a direct relation to you. So think of a failure, an incapacity, or a moment in time when you were prevented from achieving something you wanted to. A significant challenge has to be related to a drawback on your part, not related to the death of someone else. A significant challenge could be being rejected for a scholarship then eventually winning it, being rejected by your university of first choice then eventually getting in, learning to do something that you thought you never could.
Basically, the essay needs to prove character development along with intellectual maturity through an obstacle that needed to be overcome. This grief is not something that accurately depicts such a thing. It seems like the whole school mourned his death, but it is unclear why that is so. This creates the wrong presentation for the essay because Nick is cemented as the central character instead of you. So you can do one of two things, either refocus the essay to center more on you in terms of discussion or, write a different essay which has you and your "trial" or "challenge" that you overcame as the focal point of the essay.
