An 'Insufferable Know-It-All' - Who You Are - UBC Uni Writing Prompt 2019

University of British Columbia Application Writing Prompt: "Tell us about who you are. How would your family, friends, and/or members of your community describe you? If possible, please include something about yourself that you are most proud of and why. (maximum 250 words).

Here's my answer. 250 words max makes me wanna die.

Insufferable Know-It-All

An 'Insufferable Know-It-All' is how many of my elementary school teachers would often describe me. Although being deemed socially unpopular by all, I was defiant and kept my hand raised for questions and my nose stuck in a book. It is because of my inquisitive and studious nature that I received multiple academic awards in school, curated hours of volunteer work, participated in extracurricular activities and moved to a different country by myself at the age of 18. And for that, I am proud. I am proud of the little girl who was called nerdy, for she has led me to the woman I am now; confident in my abilities and assertive in my intelligence.

Please let me know what you think and if there's anything that I need to change.Thank you for any and all responses, I greatly appreciate them :)

Regards,
KK

The first sentence could be more active, instead of saying a... is how my..teachers describe me you could put "my elementary teachers would often call me as an..."

It's good but it needs more background information, I want to know why you were called nerdy or what happened in your past, how did you come to this point in your life, what were the challenges you had to face to get here? things like that. Overall good paragraph! :) (i'm not great at english so you don't have to take my advice/opinion)

Change the whole essay. You are supposed to represent yourself from the point of view of up to 3 different persons: your parents, friends or a best friend, and/or a community member. Your essay describes you coming from only the point of view of your teachers, that makes one person describing you, an academic leader and school community member. So you need 2 more representations based on the prompt requirements. A simple description of what your parents think of as your strongest representation will suffice for their POV. As for your friend, use the reason as to why your best friend chose you to be her bestfriend / confidante would help the reviewer get to know you better as well.

As for the "most proud of" aspect, you are over-discussing that part of the prompt. You need to discuss only 1 accomplishment that you are most proud of because you have to divide 250 words between all of the prompt discussion requirements. Pick one among the several descriptions you have presented for that part and fully develop a paragraph around that accomplishment. Don't allow it to take over more than half the essay.

I know it is hard to write 250 words but you have to give it a shot. It isn't hard to do if you actually go to your friends and parents to ask them to respond to the question for you. Then you can just rewrite their explanation from the 2nd person POV. You should have 250 words written in no time. Your aim should be to write about 62 words per discussion requirement to hit the 250 mark.