¨In the Face of Adversity...¨-VCU CommonApp Essay

Hi all, I'm applying to Virginia Commonwealth University and could use a few tips on how my essay is so far. I've gotten mixed reviews from others, some even (strongly) recommending that I scrap it and rewrite the whole thing. Hope you guys can help. It's still a rough draft but I'm coming close to my application deadline.

Describe a challenging situation you've faced. Briefly state the situation, how you responded and why, would you have done anything differently, has it affected or shaped who you are today? (100-250 words)

As co-president of my school's gay-straight alliance Spectrum, we, as a club are expected to perform in the Homecoming parade prior to the game. It is tradition to create a float. The other co-president and I along with several members slaved for about a month after school: brainstorming, painting, building, and rehearsing. After repeating this process for 1-2 hours every day, including weekends, we had finally finished preparing a float and a routine. On the day of the Homecoming game, we were informed that we did not have a trailer. Stress levels mounted until the other co-president began wildly improvising, attaching this to that using only duct tape. It was then that I decided to walk out of the project. Many would consider this rude, however, my response warrants an explanation: it was not fun anymore. It was more stress than reward and, as it is only the beginning of the year and many of our members are freshmen, I did not want to give an unreasonable amount of stress and expectations for a club designed to create a safe space. This experience has taught me when it is acceptable to admit an overload of stress, even if that requires abandoning a long-term project; for me, it was never about winning a float contest or even getting recognition as a club. The experience of working and getting to know and help others on a personal level and having fun doing so served as a reward in itself.

I understand where you are coming from with the stress, but this made me feel as if you don't like to be put under pressure or be put in challenging situations. This may not be the case, but reading your "essay", that is what it comes across as. Please don't get offended, maybe write about you coming out, if you are gay. This has a deeper meaning to you, and doesn't have that negative backlash. If you are not gay, or have not come out, I am sorry if I have offended you, but I'm sure there are many more experiences you can write about. Good luck!

James, one of the reasons that you are asked to write a response to prompts such as this one is that you are bineg asked to show how you perform when faced with a challenge, adversity, or challenge. Now, I understand that people respond to these obstacles in varying ways and to different degrees. Your reaction is most likely what felt normal for you which is why you decided to walk out. In my opinion, you cannot be faulted for that. Nither can be considered as the wrong response to this sort of question as there are no right or wrong answers in these instances. Only the opinion of the reviewer matters in this case. So his perception of your reaction should be your primary consideration in the development of your response.

As I said, your response may have been the right one for you and it accurately responds to the first part of the prompt. However, you could have slanted your response to develop a more positive outlook if you had taken the time to develop a proper response to the second half of the question that asked you if you would have changed anything about that previous decision, and how that event has helped you become the person you are today.

You could have responded with something along the lines of

"I know it seems like I don't perform well under pressure. The truth is, I perform rather well. However, I believe that with pressure should come fun. That way the pressure and work becomes something I look forward to doing. When a task proves to just be all about pressure and nothing more, when it places the team camaraderie on the edge, and causes the members of the group to begin in-fighting, then I do not believe that any task is worth the challenge. So no, I don;t believe that I would have changed the decision I made that day. I would not change anything about it..."

Then add something on a positive note about how the parade ended for your club. Maybe your group pulled out of the parade and helped prove your point? Right now, the essay ends on a highly negative note as Mary said. However, that does not mean that you have to totally change your response. You just have to make the response work with the prompt somehow. In this case, I think that lies in creating a reasonable response to the latter part of the prompt.

- As co-president of my school's gay-straight alliance, Spectrum, we,
- The other co-president and I along with several members
- including weekends, we had finally finished
- Stress levels mounted until the other co-president
- forto me, it was never about
- The experience of working and getting to know andas well as help others
- on a personal level and having fun doing so, served as a reward in itself.

James, above are my corrections on your essay, hopefully it helped.
On a personal note, indeed there's no shame in walking out from responsibilities when you are drowning
with stress already, it doesn't help staying in a program when you are just pretending you can do something when you can't do anything at all.

I wish you the best of luck!

That's the main reason why I was told to think of a different experience, or at least describe it in a way that shows more about my positive work ethic than the fact that I failed in the end. I was going to write about coming out like Mary said (I'm transgender), but I already wrote my personal long essay about realizing I was trans, and I wanted to show them something else about me. Other than that, I don't have a whole lot of experiences that stand out to me as one I could write about which is a problem.

I do have a rough draft of another experience to write about; the time when I woke up with my depression coming back on the day of my AP Lang exam. But even then, it feels like there isn't enough substance to talk about it (or depression in itself is too broad a topic).

Thank yu for the advice and the corrections though, everyone. I think that I may keep the experience that I've written, but I'might try and see if I can tweak it to be more positive and more about the leadership role I took and how much work/dedication it took to complete it (and make it seem that it was the school's fault that we didn't have a trailer, not a failure on my part, which it wasn't). In actuality, we worked hard on it and I led most of that work. That's the angle I wanted to approach it from, but I guess it comes off as more negative.

It's also hard to try and fit the experience in only 250 words.