<p>Evaluate a significant experience, achievement, risk you have taken or ethical dilemma you have faced and its impact
on you is the prompt. </p>
<p>Should I talk about me taking the risk of dropping out of an undergraduate program in Bangalore 1 year back and teaching myself online and in an internship as the biggest risk I took or would that suggest to the college that I don't have the staying power for college.</p>
<p>Would a better topic be the fact that I've had heart surgery for a congenital heart defect and how that impacted my future life. Which topic would be better? </p>
<p>PS: The univ I'm applying to uses pre 2013 essay prompts for everything. </p>
<p>You cannot judge whether a topic will be good or bad without first writing the essay. You could write a powerful essay about both topics, you could also write a self-indulgent awful essay about both topics. So much depends on the story you tell, what you say and how you say it. There isn’t a short cut to writing a great essay – you have to write a first draft on each topic, see where each essay takes you, and then make a decision.</p>
<p>Thanks! I will do that. I thought of another event which impacted me a lot, more than the t the first other 2 even, but the event itself is a small one. It was reading A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. Would writing about reading a book as a significant event seem frivolous or a little irrelevant.
Thanks again</p>
<p>Again, it all comes down to execution – it’s what you say and how you say it.</p>
<p>FWIW: Several years back, when my kids applied to college, they spent 3 to 4 months writing their Common Application essay. And, they didn’t just write 1 essay, they wrote about 5 or 6 of them each. It was only after having written, edited and polished all their essays that there were able to narrow down which essay they wanted to submit. Good writing takes time and introspection – and most kids spend more time on test prep than they do writing their essays when, IMHO, it should be the reverse. </p>