Unlocking your unique potential: The power of self-reflection in college admission essays

"While conventional achievements are one way of assessing a person’s personality, it’s not the only way.. This is a message that young people need to heed so that they don’t believe that there’s only one way to stand out which is shown by the number of certificates and gold medals that they acquire," writes Nuggehalli Nigam

My dear students by Nigam Nuggehalli. on US admissions

You must reflect on your background, your personal experience, what feels authentic to you, says Nigam Nuggehalli.

5 min readNew DelhiSep 18, 2023 09:25 AM IST First published on: Sep 17, 2023 at 10:55 AM IST

(‘My dear students’, a fortnightly column that is a conversation with young minds on current events, books, popular culture — just about anything that’s worth talking over a cup of coffee.)

My dear students,

As some of you might know, applying to US universities is a litany of woes, the mainstay of which is the requirement that you write about yourself. The essay questions (or prompts as they are often called) are meant to provoke you into writing creatively but can have the opposite effect. An admissions essay is the surest way to a writer’s block for whenever someone tells you to write about yourself, there’s a tendency, unless you are a blowhard, to be a bit reticent about it.

Into this dreary landscape has entered a refreshing piece of scenery in the form of an essay prompt introduced by the undergraduate admissions team at the University of Virginia: ‘What about your individual background, perspective, or experience will serve as a source of strength for you or those around you at UVA?’

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I like this prompt for a number of reasons. The essay does not ask you to undertake a vanity project. It does not ask about your accomplishments but about your individual backgrounds, perspectives and experiences.

Accomplishments in our societies follow a somewhat uniform template, whether at school, university or work, with success being defined in straitjacket terms. The UVA question recognises that while conventional achievements are one way of assessing a person’s personality, it’s not the only way, perhaps not even the most interesting way. This is a message that young people need to heed so that they don’t believe that there’s only one way to stand out which is shown by the number of certificates and gold medals that they acquire. But I don’t want this to be only an exhortation. It requires some work on your part.

You must reflect on your background, your personal experience, what feels authentic to you. Each of you has had very different life experiences and each of these, however trivial or magnificent, has shaped who you are and who you have become. You bring a distinct flavour to the cultural and social practices around you, and only you can discover that. I take it that the prompt does not want you to just identify yourself as unique; it wants you to work through that idea even if you are reluctant to do so. Being unique is not a tag to be carried around like an Aadhar Card.

Let’s say you like to write stories. You don’t have to be a published author. But you can reflect on what made you write in the first place, what in your family and geography and time helped you write, why you think writing a story or a poem is fun or therapeutic or useful. There is a bit of navel gazing here, but the self-reflection is important for you to understand yourself and discover what made you the person you are. There is nothing in what I have said about being successful or achieving a socially sanctioned goal. I am not saying achievements are unimportant; they simply do not play an important role in the question that we are considering.

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The second part of the question is as important as the first. This part of the question is interested in asking how your experiences and interests will enrich other people’s lives. Once again, I doubt this is understood very well in the current climate. When universities talk about diversity this is part of what they mean, although it comes across as meaningless prattle about identities. Quite often the malaise that young people find themselves in is because they feel their lives are not particularly relevant to the lives of people around them. Their feelings of loneliness and inadequacy are because of their inability (perceived either dimly or not at all by them) to contribute to other people’s lives.

The question takes us away from the idea of your contribution to others, which in reality is another version of the tyranny of merit that we have discussed before. You can be a source of strength for others because your life experiences are something that others can draw on, not in the transactional sense of ‘return on investment’ but in the sense in which an appreciation of other people’s varied lived experiences is of inherent value in itself. The question understands diversity in the way it is meant to be understood, which is that the life experiences of persons enrich everyone. You are a source of strength not only because of your achievements but because your life history itself might be of interest or inspirational for others. The question captures the idea that you can be, by being yourself, just by that very fact, a source of strength for others.