<p>Can anyone rate my common app essay from a scale of (1-10). I couldn't come up with any brilliant ideas for my essay but I think my essay is pretty good. Please provide any suggestions to improve my essay.</p>
<p>The prompt is:
Recount an incident or time when you experienced failure. How did it affect you, and what lessons did you learn?</p>
<p>My essay:</p>
<pre><code> A Blown Opportunity
</code></pre>
<p>We encounter failure at certain instances in life. At times, failure can be heart-breaking and morose. But we can only achieve true success if we keep on standing up every time we fall.</p>
<p>I’ve been playing basketball ever since I was 4 years old and I’ve grown a deep temper for basketball since then. You’d think that a scrawny Indian kid like me would barely be able to pick up the ball, leave alone wondering that I playing basketball would be a gargantuan task, but you’d be wrong. Although, I did get tossed around here and there in the court, I was still tall, very fast, could leap very high and had the best accuracy then any of my teammates on my school team. It’s what distinguished me from them.</p>
<p>Our school basketball team was one of the best teams in the city, though last summer, we had a gruesome season. The St. Andrews tournament is one the biggest tournaments held in the city. For a team to qualify to the next round, they must win 2 out the 3 games they play. We had lost the first game marginally though our second game was very close call. Predictability, the game had come down to the final minutes of the fourth quarter where we up by 4 points. I started to feel quite ecstatic that our team might have a chance to win this tournament after all despite our horrendous season, though my happiness was ephemeral. Instead of using this remunerative opportunity to score the winning basket, I had lost the ball twice consequently allowing the opponent team to chance over the turnover points I had committed. This was the most depressing and humiliating moment of my life.
I was inconsolably angry with myself. Though, my teammates and my parents tried to consolidate me, I was in utter despondence and paid no heed to their assuagement. For the next few days, I was miserably thinking how I had encumbered the burden of loss on my team’s shoulders. If it weren’t for me, my team would have been on their way to victory.</p>
<p>Later that week, my coach came up to me and told me not worry about the loss. He told me that his key inspiration was a famous quote by Wayne Gretzky “We miss 100% of the shots we don’t take”. I realised then that failure is a natural human tendency and we can overcome this failure by pushing ourselves forward with absolute sheer will all the time with one goal in mind. But I have also realised that we can overcome failure and achieve true success not only with sheer will, but to forgive ourselves for the mistakes we have done and keep on moving forward.</p>
<p>[ P.S. I'm thinking of applying to Caltech, Georgia Tech, Yale, Michigan, etc;]</p>