The topic is:
Successful students at Johns Hopkins make the biggest impact by collaborating with others, including peers, mentors, and professors. Talk about a time, in or outside the classroom, when you worked with others and what you learned from the experience.
I collaborated with adults during an internship I did over the summer, I collaborated with nurses during volunteering at a hospital the summer before, and most recently I collaborate with my club officers (I am the president). Which one of these would be best to use?
Where did you learn something where you can write about improvement or growth?
Where can you show with examples that you’ll function well in a diverse campus community?
Where did you do interesting work that will be interesting to read about?
With which option can you best illustrate your true personality and interests?
When in doubt, free write multiple options and see which one “flows.”
In the hospital experience you can bring in a good amount of varied human interest stories. The club officers experience can help you demonstrate leadership. As mentioned by the person above, give both a shot at it and see which one comes out better.
So supposedly “collaboration” is the new “leadership”. In today’s world, more collaborators are needed than so called leaders. More and more companies recognize that to accomplish a big task, you need to bring together people of various talents including psychologists, engineers, design teams, marketing, financial etc.
I think they want to see that you realize that people can be equals, that many have different talents and all can make equal contributions, and that that’s the kind of environment you find appealing–lots of different people coming together to rise to a challenge, and how you need mutual respect and ability to share ideas and hand things off and take things on that are already in progress and make it better before passing it off. You aren’t needed to lead or follow, but rather walk side by side with others.