Jason asks,
I’ve heard that colleges want to know if you’ve experienced any hardships, and I’m thinking about writing my essay about my parents’ divorce. Is that a good idea? Or is that too common?”
It's a good question, Jason. I don't know the circumstances of your parents' divorce so it's hard for me to say if that's the right topic for you. But here are a few things any student should know when you're considering writing about a hardship.
1. Don't write about a hardship just because you think it will give you an advantage.
A lot of students think that a hardship gives you some kind of automatic admissions advantage. And unfortunately, that means way, way too many essays are submitted about hardships that weren’t actually all that hard. I don’t want to sound cold here, but “When my grandmother died, it taught me to appreciate life more,” is pretty cliché in the world of college essays. If you’ve faced something difficult, something that affected you deeply, especially something that impacted your education in some way, colleges will want to know about it. But for students who haven’t, don’t manufacture hardship. Instead, tell a different story.
2. Remember that the college essay has to be about you.
You don’t need to write an essay about divorce to convince admissions officers that a divorce is difficult for a student. Your college essays have to be about you. They have to help admissions officers get to know you better in ways that they never could have known from the rest of the application.
One of our Collegewise students wrote her essay about her parents’ divorce. But only two sentences of the essay had to do with the divorce. The rest of the essay was about a major change in the student’s life when she went to live with her father. She didn’t want to change schools because she was afraid of losing credits and falling behind. So she got up at 5 a.m. every day, took a train and two buses for two hours to get to school, then repeated that at the end of the day. And surprisingly, she got the best GPA of her life because she spent all that time on the trains and buses studying. So while the divorce was part of the essay, the story was all about her.
3. Maintain your perspective.
It’s important to be thankful for what you have and to remember that lots of other people aren’t so lucky. I mention this because when a student writes an essay about switching schools when her father changed jobs, and that essay treats having to say goodbye to her friends as if it were a devastating tragedy, it paints that student as being a little immature. Saying goodbye to friends is painful. But if your dad still has a job, and that job is going to pay for you to go to college, and everyone in your family is still healthy, you’re a lot better off than a lot of other students. It doesn’t mean you aren’t allowed to really miss your friends, but you’ve got to be able to differentiate disappointment from real hardship.
4. Use all the parts of the application.
You might not need to write an entire essay to explain a hardship. A lot of colleges have a section on the application that allows you to share anything that didn’t fit in the other spaces, or to describe any circumstances that affected your education. If a student writes:
“In February of my junior year, I broke my leg in a soccer game and had to keep my leg in traction for six weeks. I had my younger brother bring me all of my assignments from school, and my teachers let me do take home exams so I wouldn’t fall behind…”
How much more really needs to be said? An admissions officer knows the important facts. If there was a slight dip in your grades second semester of your junior year, colleges can now put that situation in context. You don’t need an entire essay to explain it to them.
5. Try the best friend litmus test.
Great college essays are the kinds that when your best friend reads them, he or she says, “This is totally you.” You only get limited space on the application to share what you want to share about yourself. So don’t waste it trying to wedge in a hardship just because you think that’s a good strategy. Pick a topic that actually means something to you, something that you’d be excited to share, that hasn’t been described in detail elsewhere on the application, and that would pass the best friend litmus test. If the story that fits the criteria is a hardship, go ahead and share it. But if not, be thankful that you’ve had a pretty good life, and share another story about it.
Thanks for your question, Jason. If you've got a question of your own, email us at blog [at] collegewise [dot] com. If we pick yours, we'll answer it here on our blog.
And you can find even more advice in our video, “How to Write Great College Essays.” It’s $12.99 and available as a streaming download.