Nursing School Admissions Essay (assault, abuse, poverty, mental illness)

admissions application essay

Prompt: There may be personal information that you want considered as part of your admissions application. Write an essay describing that information. You might include exceptional hardships, challenges, or opportunities that have shaped or impacted your abilities or academic credentials, personal responsibilities, exceptional achievements or talents, educational goals, or ways in which you might contribute to an institution committed to creating a diverse learning environment. Limit 3000 characters.

I am a generally good essay writer, but I have trouble with broad prompts such as this one. I have no idea where to start and frankly, I'm afraid that I might choose the wrong thing to write about. I don't know where to start as far as structure.

I've come up with some ideas: why I want to be a nurse, my experiences with sexual assault, abuse, poverty, mental illness and how they've shaped me, and my academic accomplishments. I just don't know how I would weave these together in a way that isn't too wordy or emotionally exhausting to the reader. I don't know if I should leave out my hardships to keep others from being uncomfortable or leave them in to show how my unique experiences make me who I am. I just feel like if I don't show them that side of me I will not be the "diverse" candidate they are looking for. On paper I seem like just another privileged student, even though I have faced struggles that don't reflect in my grades and achievements.

In regards to why I want to be a nurse, I want to be an activist and an advocate for patients in under-served communities and I feel that my experiences have given me the strength to face the challenges that the nursing profession entails. I have a lot of ideas I just can't think of a good way to structure them into an essay. My whole academic life professors have pretty much just given me an outline of exactly what they want, so I've never really learned how to make one myself. Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated!

What you have to understand is that the reviewer is looking for a unique backstory that will reflect the reason as to why you have managed to achieve what you have in life so far. What makes you a unique person? What might set you apart from the other applicants? Why would this make you an interesting addition to the student roster? So where is what I think you should write about in the essay:

- Talk about your advocacy and what you have done so far to support these ideals.
- Explain how your advocacy relates to the abuse you experienced in your life
- Relate the advocacy and abuse to your desire to become a nurse.
- Give reasons as to why your experience, advocacy, and ambition in life, when combined, can allow you help the under served communities.
- Talk about how you envision your future based upon these 3 topics. That should help close your response on a strong note.

Again, these are merely topic suggestions. It is meant to just give you a starting point for your essay draft. You may adjust the content or totally change it. It all depends upon you and how comfortable you will be opening up to the reviewer using your personal experience. It might be too raw for you to discuss at this point so the approach is really all based on how you want to share the information with the reviewer.