One of the two essays to a college I’m applying to requires an essay (3,000 character max) with the prompt: “Do you have any personal life experiences where you have overcome adversity or challenges that have shaped you into the person you are today?”
The biggest thing that I’ve had to overcome is my insecurity and self-confidence/shyness issues. They started mainly due to the fact that my parents had been fighting a lot and it just became a toxic thing where they would sometimes take their anger out on me verbally, saying lots of things that ended up really effecting me over time. To be honest I was probably borderline depressed, which is completely at odds with my normal, outgoing personality. A couple years ago I was determined that that wasn’t how I wanted to live, and knew that I had to make a change and defeat my insecurities and self-hatred because it was ruining my life. I managed to slowly overcome it, getting my grades back up (I had let them fall quite a bit, which unfortunately will show in my transcript), then taking harder classes as I gained the confidence back to do so, then joining different sports that involved teamwork, to taking more leadership roles in those sports. I became confident in myself, and in doing that gained back an appreciation for life. It was the hardest thing I ever really had to do, but it made me who I am today. I’m confident in myself and my abilities, and I’m currently doing really well in very difficult classes as well as two sports and an extracurricular club where you mentor underpriveliged kids. All of this is because I was able to overcome my crippling insecurity and am now able to thrive, and help others as well. Through this, I am able to empathize better and genuinely want to make the world a better place in the small ways that I can (part of why I want to become a doctor).
My question is…how do I frame this in a positive way? I want to make sure that it doesn’t come off as whining, because that’s not the message I want to portray of me.
Talking about a toxic home environment is not a good place to start a college admissions essay, except under some very exceptional circumstances, at the hands of a very skillful writer. Nor do you necessarily want to lead with a mental health issue - depression. You could talk about being shy or introverted or self-conscious (without getting into the why) and how your ECs helped you become/discover the person you want to be - with specific concrete incidents showing how you did that. Keep in mind that crippling insecurity is something that many teens would say is their ground state of being, so you will need to make your own challenges in this area come alive in really vivid way.
That’s the direction that I was planning on going…they don’t need to know the gory details, what they really want to know is the progress and why it made me a better person. And I agree, but how would you suggest I make my challenges “come alive” exactly?
The same way you do any good piece of writing: With concrete examples and relevant detail. Possibilities: Lead off with a ‘before’ example. Or find a quote or line of poetry that describes how you feel or your situation. Or a verbal picture of any visual that describes how you felt in a visceral way. Or what someone else said about you that you think was accurate. You want your interviewer to ‘get’ the you then vs. how it is for you now. Same goes for describing your ECs - be specific.
And have at least two people who aren’t friends or parents read your essay: An English teacher perhaps? You want them to check not just for spelling, typos and grammar, but for cliches and posturing and anything else that makes it ring less than 100% true and 100% you. If anyone else could have written this essay, then it’s not your best work. And that’s why you need to start working on this stuff long before the deadline.