So yesterday I wrote my rought draft for my common app essay on the topic of failure. I wrote about how one year when I tutored a kid I failed to become the teacher and instead became the student. I had failed to teach the kid how to read in an entire year. Even though I failed to teach her, my student taught me how failure doesn’t measure success.
I hope that summary makes sense. But anyways I chose this topic because tutoring these underprivileged kids in reading has dominated my high school career. It is something I love and want to continue for the rest of my life. I read online that it is best to start an essay with kind of like an antedote and then to get to the point, so it started my essay talking about how I won the contest for taking the fastest shower at camp. It plays off the idea that I was not going to fail at taking the fastest shower.
At first glance, I think your topic is ok (I mean depending on how you wrote it it could come off as too much of a “savior” feel but I haven’t seen the actual essay), but the shower anecdote at the beginning really doesn’t connect well at all with the main subject of your essay. Just my opinion, though
@yonceonhismouth what do you mean by savior feel? Like that I am trying to be the savior to the kid I was tutoring? And I know the shower thing is a little far fetched, but I tied it back into my essay. I talked about how I’ve always been good at taking fast showers so it would be easy for me to win the contest. And then I compared that to how I always excelled in reading and so I thought that teaching a kid how to read from scratch would be pretty simple. My essay is really not trying to be at all like I am a savior. I am just talking about how I failed at something, but still some success came out of it.
No, I agree with @yonceonhismouth; the notion of you saying that you thought it would be easy to teach a kid how to read from scratch could definitely be construed as savior-ish. But again, I haven’t read the essay so I don’t know.
@Philpsych I understand where y’all are coming from. I guess I thought it would be easy because I had done it in years past with the tutoring program. As I revise and present it to my college counselor, I will definitely bring up the savior problem!
Yea, just to clarify I wasn’t saying that’s how you meant for it to sound, but often admissions officers get that “tone” from it because they read a lot of essays on that theme.