i am lucky essay

March 1, 2018

The Role of Luck in Life Success Is Far Greater Than We Realized

Are the most successful people in society just the luckiest people?

By Scott Barry Kaufman &

Clark Tibbs Unsplash

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American

What does it take to succeed? What are the secrets of the most successful people? Judging by the popularity of magazines such as Success , Forbes , Inc. , and Entrepreneur, there is no shortage of interest in these questions. There is a deep underlying assumption, however, that we can learn from them because it's their personal characteristics--such as talent, skill, mental toughness, hard work, tenacity, optimism, growth mindset, and emotional intelligence-- that got them where they are today. This assumption doesn't only underlie success magazines, but also how we distribute resources in society, from work opportunities to fame to government grants to public policy decisions. We tend to give out resources to those who have a past history of success, and tend to ignore those who have been unsuccessful, assuming that the most successful are also the most competent.

But is this assumption correct? I have spent my entire career studying the psychological characteristics that predict achievement and creativity. While I have found that a certain number of traits -- including passion, perseverance, imagination, intellectual curiosity, and openness to experience-- do significantly explain differences in success, I am often intrigued by just how much of the variance is often left unexplained .

In recent years, a number of studies and books--including those by risk analyst Nassim Taleb , investment strategist Michael Mauboussin , and economist Robert Frank -- have suggested that luck and opportunity may play a far greater role than we ever realized, across a number of fields, including financial trading, business, sports, art, music, literature, and science. Their argument is not that luck is everything ; of course talent matters. Instead, the data suggests that we miss out on a really importance piece of the success picture if we only focus on personal characteristics in attempting to understand the determinants of success.

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Consider some recent findings:

About half of the differences in income across people worldwide is explained by their country of residence and by the income distribution within that country,

Scientific impact is randomly distributed , with high productivity alone having a limited effect on the likelihood of high-impact work in a scientific career,

The chance of becoming a CEO is influenced by your name or month of birth ,

The number of CEOs born in June and July is much smaller than the number of CEOs born in other months,

Those with last names earlier in the alphabet are more likely to receive tenure at top departments,

The display of middle initials increases positive evaluations of people's intellectual capacities and achievements,

People with easy to pronounce names are judged more positively than those with difficult-to-pronounce names,

Females with masculine sounding names are more successful in legal careers.

The importance of the hidden dimension of luck raises an intriguing question: Are the most successful people mostly just the luckiest people in our society? If this were even a little bit true, then this would have some significant implications for how we distribute limited resources, and for the potential for the rich and successful to actually benefit society (versus benefiting themselves by getting even more rich and successful).

In an attempt to shed light on this heavy issue, the Italian physicists Alessandro Pluchino and Andrea Raspisarda teamed up with the Italian economist Alessio Biondo to make the first ever attempt to quantify the role of luck and talent in successful careers . In their  prior work, they warned against a "naive meritocracy", in which people actually fail to give honors and rewards to the most competent people because of their underestimation of the role of randomness among the determinants of success. To formally capture this phenomenon, they proposed a " toy mathematical model " that simulated the evolution of careers of a collective population over a worklife of 40 years (from age 20-60).

Initial setup of simulations (N=1000 agents) . Credit: Pluchino, Biondo, & Rapisarda 2018

The Italian researchers stuck a large number of hypothetical individuals ("agents") with different degrees of "talent" into a square world and let their lives unfold over the course of their entire worklife. They defined talent as whatever set of personal characteristics allow a person to exploit lucky opportunities (I've argued elsewhere  that this is a reasonable definition of talent). Talent can include traits such as intelligence, skill, motivation, determination, creative thinking, emotional intelligence, etc. The key is that more talented people are going to be more likely to get the most 'bang for their buck' out of a given opportunity (see here for support of this assumption).

All agents began the simulation with the same level of success (10 "units"). Every 6 months, individuals were exposed to a certain number of lucky events (in green) and a certain amount of unlucky events (in red). Whenever a person encountered an unlucky event, their success was reduced in half, and whenever a person encountered a lucky event, their success doubled proportional to their talent (to reflect the real-world interaction between talent and opportunity).

What did they find? Well, first they replicated the well known " Pareto Principle ", which predicts that a small number of people will end up achieving the success of most of the population (Richard Koch refers to it as the " 80/20 principle "). In the final outcome of the 40-year simulation, while talent was normally distributed, success was not. The 20 most successful individuals held 44% of the total amount of success, while almost half of the population remained under 10 units of success (which was the initial starting condition). This is consistent with real-world data, although there is some suggestion that in the real world, wealth success is even more unevenly distributed, with just eight men owning the same wealth as the poorest half of the world .

Normal Distribution of Talent. Credit: Pluchino, Biondo, & Rapisarda 2018

Highly Skewed Distribution of Success . Credit: Pluchino, Biondo, & Rapisarda 2018

Although such an unequal distribution may seem unfair, it might be justifiable if it turned out that the most successful people were indeed the most talented/competent. So what did the simulation find? On the one hand, talent wasn't irrelevant to success. In general, those with greater talent had a higher probability of increasing their success by exploiting the possibilities offered by luck. Also, the most successful agents were mostly at least average in talent. So talent mattered.

However, talent was definitely not sufficient because the most talented individuals were rarely the most successful. In general, mediocre-but-lucky people were much more successful than more-talented-but-unlucky individuals. The most successful agents tended to be those who were only slightly above average in talent but with a lot of luck in their lives.

Consider the evolution of success for the most successful person and the least successful person in one of their simulations:

Evolution  of Success for the Most Successful and Least Successful Individuals . Credit: Pluchino, Biondo, & Rapisarda 2018

As you can see, the highly successful person in green had a series of very lucky events in their life, whereas the least successful person in red (who was even more talented than the other person) had an unbearable number of unlucky events in their life. As the authors note, "even a great talent becomes useless against the fury of misfortune."

Talent loss is obviously unfortunate, to both the individual and to society. So what can be done so that those most capable of capitalizing on their opportunities are given the opportunities they most need to thrive? Let's turn to that next.

Stimulating Serendipity

Many meritocratic strategies used to assign honors, funds, or rewards are often based on the past success of the person. Selecting individuals in this way creates a state of affairs in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer (often referred to as the " Matthew effect "). But is this the most effective strategy for maximizing potential? Which is a more effective funding strategy for maximizing impact to the world: giving large grants to a few previously successful applicants, or a number of smaller grants to many average-successful people? This is a fundamental question about distribution of resources, which needs to be informed by actual data.

Consider a study conducted by Jean-Michel Fortin and David Currie, who looked at whether larger grants lead to larger discoveries. They found a positive, but only very small relationship between funding and impact (as measured by four indices relating to scientific publications). What's more, those who received a second grant were not more productive than those who only received a first grant, and impact was generally a decelerating function of funding.

The authors suggest that funding strategies that focus more on targeting diversity than "excellence" are likely to be more productive to society. In a more recent study , researchers looked at the funding provided to 12,720 researchers in Quebec over a fifteen year period. They concluded that "both in terms of the quantity of papers produced and of their scientific impact, the concentration of research funding in the hands of a so-called 'elite' of researchers generally produces diminishing marginal returns."

Taking these sort of findings seriously, the European Research Council recently gave the biochemist Ohid Yaqub 1.7 million dollars to properly determine the extent of serendipity in science. Coming up with a multidimensional definition of serendipity, Yaqub pinned down some of the mechanisms by which serendipity in science happens, including astute observation, "controlled sloppiness" (allowing unexpected events to occur while tracking their origins), and the collaborative action of networks of scientists. This is consistent with Dean Simonton's extensive work on the role of serendipity and chance in the evolution of creative and impactful scientific discoveries.

Building on this work, the Italian team who simulated the role of luck in success went one step further in their simulation. Playing God (so to speak), they explored the effectiveness of a number of different funding strategies. They applied different strategies every five years during the 40 year worklife of each agent in the simulation. Without any funding at all, we already saw that the most successful agents were very lucky people with about average levels of talent. What happens once they introduced various funding opportunities into the simulation?

Efficiency of Different Funding Strategies . Credit: Pluchino, Biondo, & Rapisarda 2018

This table reveals the most efficient funding strategies over the 40 year period in descending order of efficiency (i.e., requiring the least amount of funding for the greatest return on the investment). Starting at the bottom of the list, you can see that the least effective funding strategies are those that give a certain percentage of the funding to only the already most successful individuals. The "mixed" strategies that combine giving a certain percentage to the most successful people and equally distributing the rest is a bit more effective, and distributing funds at random is even more efficient. This last finding is intriguing because it is consistent with other research suggesting that in complex social and economic contexts where chance is likely to play a role, strategies that incorporate randomness can perform better than strategies based on the "naively meritocratic" approach.

With that said, the best funding strategy of them all was one where an equal number of funding was distributed to everyone. Distributing funds at a rate of 1 unit every five years resulted in 60% of the most talented individuals having a greater than average level of success, and distributing funds at a rate of 5 units every five years resulted in 100% of the most talented individuals having an impact! This suggests that if a funding agency or government has more money available to distribute, they'd be wise to use that extra money to distribute money to everyone, rather than to only a select few. As the researchers conclude,

"[I]f the goal is to reward the most talented person (thus increasing their final level of success), it is much more convenient to distribute periodically (even small) equal amounts of capital to all individuals rather than to give a greater capital only to a small percentage of them, selected through their level of success - already reached - at the moment of the distribution."

Stimulating the Environment

This incredible Italian team didn't even stop there! Hey, if you're playing God, why not go all the way. :) They also ran simulations in which they varied the environment of the agents. Using this framework, they simulated either a very stimulating environment, rich of opportunities for everyone (like that of rich and industrialized countries such as the U.S.) as well as a much less stimulating environment, with very few opportunities (like that of Third World countries). Here's what they found:

Success of the Most Successful Individuals Living in an Environment with Rich Opportunities (top) or an Environment with Poor Opportunities (bottom) . Credit: Pluchino, Biondo, & Rapisarda 2018

Look at the difference between the outcome distribution of the environment rich in opportunities for everyone (top) from the outcome distribution of the environment poor in opportunities for everyone (bottom). In the universe simulated at the top, a number of medium to highly talented individuals were able to reach very high levels of success, and the average number of medium-highly talented individuals who reached at least above average levels of success was quite high. In contrast, in the universe simulated at the bottom of the figure, the overall level of success of the society was low, with an average of only 18 individuals able to increase their initial level of success.

The results of this elucidating simulation, which dovetail with a growing number of studies based on real-world data, strongly suggest that luck and opportunity play an underappreciated role in determining the final level of individual success. As the researchers point out, since rewards and resources are usually given to those who are already highly rewarded, this often causes a lack of opportunities for those who are most talented (i.e., have the greatest potential to actually benefit from the resources), and it doesn't take into account the important role of luck, which can emerge spontaneously throughout the creative process. The researchers argue that the following factors are all important in giving people more chances of success: a stimulating environment rich in opportunities, a good education, intensive training, and an efficient strategy for the distribution of funds and resources. They argue that at the macro-level of analysis, any policy that can influence these factors will result in greater collective progress and innovation for society (not to mention immense self-actualization of any particular individual).

© 2018  Scott Barry Kaufman , All Rights Reserved

Note: One suggestion I made to the Italian team is for their future simulations to take into account the real-world finding that talent develops over time , and is not a fixed quantity of the individual. They graciously said this was a valid point and would definitely take that into consideration in their future work.

Why Luck Matters More Than You Might Think

When people see themselves as self-made, they tend to be less generous and public-spirited.

I’ m a lucky man. Perhaps the most extreme example of my considerable good fortune occurred one chilly Ithaca morning in November 2007, while I was playing tennis with my longtime friend and collaborator, the Cornell psychologist Tom Gilovich. He later told me that early in the second set, I complained of feeling nauseated. The next thing he knew, I was lying motionless on the court.

He yelled for someone to call 911, and then started pounding on my chest—something he’d seen many times in movies but had never been trained to do. He got a cough out of me, but seconds later I was again motionless with no pulse. Very shortly, an ambulance showed up.

Ithaca’s ambulances are dispatched from the other side of town, more than five miles away. How did this one arrive so quickly? By happenstance, just before I collapsed, ambulances had been dispatched to two separate auto accidents close to the tennis center. Since one of them involved no serious injuries, an ambulance was able to peel off and travel just a few hundred yards to me. EMTs put electric paddles on my chest and rushed me to our local hospital. There, I was loaded onto a helicopter and flown to a larger hospital in Pennsylvania, where I was placed on ice overnight.

Doctors later told me that I’d suffered an episode of sudden cardiac arrest. Almost 90 percent of people who experience such episodes don’t survive, and the few who do are typically left with significant impairments. And for three days after the event, my family tells me, I spoke gibberish. But on day four, I was discharged from the hospital with a clear head. Two weeks later, I was playing tennis with Tom again.

If that ambulance hadn’t happened to have been nearby, I would be dead.

Not all random events lead to favorable outcomes, of course. Mike Edwards is no longer alive because chance frowned on him. Edwards, formerly a cellist in the British pop band the Electric Light Orchestra, was driving on a rural road in England in 2010 when a 1,300-pound bale of hay rolled down a steep hillside and landed on his van, crushing him. By all accounts, he was a decent, peaceful man. That a bale of hay snuffed out his life was bad luck, pure and simple.

Most people will concede that I’m fortunate to have survived and that Edwards was unfortunate to have perished. But in other arenas, randomness can play out in subtler ways, causing us to resist explanations that involve luck. In particular, many of us seem uncomfortable with the possibility that personal success might depend to any significant extent on chance. As E. B. White once wrote, “Luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men.”

My having cheated death does not make me an authority on luck. But it has motivated me to learn much more about the subject than I otherwise would have. In the process, I have discovered that chance plays a far larger role in life outcomes than most people realize. And yet, the luckiest among us appear especially unlikely to appreciate our good fortune. According to the Pew Research Center, people in higher income brackets are much more likely than those with lower incomes to say that individuals get rich primarily because they work hard. Other surveys bear this out: Wealthy people overwhelmingly attribute their own success to hard work rather than to factors like luck or being in the right place at the right time.

That’s troubling, because a growing body of evidence suggests that seeing ourselves as self-made—rather than as talented, hardworking, and lucky—leads us to be less generous and public-spirited. It may even make the lucky less likely to support the conditions (such as high-quality public infrastructure and education) that made their own success possible.

Happily, though, when people are prompted to reflect on their good fortune, they become much more willing to contribute to the common good.

Psychologists use the term hindsight bias to describe our tendency to think, after the fact, that an event was predictable even when it wasn’t. This bias operates with particular force for unusually successful outcomes.

In his commencement address to Princeton University’s 2012 graduating class, Michael Lewis described the series of chance events that helped make him—already privileged by virtue of his birth into a well-heeled family and his education at Princeton—a celebrated author:

One night I was invited to a dinner where I sat next to the wife of a big shot of a big Wall Street investment bank, Salomon Brothers. She more or less forced her husband to give me a job. I knew next to nothing about Salomon Brothers. But Salomon Brothers happened to be where Wall Street was being reinvented—into the Wall Street we’ve come to know and love today. When I got there I was assigned, almost arbitrarily, to the very best job in the place to observe the growing madness: They turned me into the house derivatives expert.

On the basis of his experiences at Salomon, Lewis wrote his 1989 best seller, Liar’s Poker , which described how Wall Street financial maneuvering was transforming the world.

All of a sudden people were telling me I was a born writer. This was absurd. Even I could see that there was another, more true narrative, with luck as its theme. What were the odds of being seated at that dinner next to that Salomon Brothers lady? Of landing inside the best Wall Street firm to write the story of the age? Of landing in the seat with the best view of the business? … This isn’t just false humility. It’s false humility with a point. My case illustrates how success is always rationalized. People really don’t like to hear success explained away as luck—especially successful people. As they age, and succeed, people feel their success was somehow inevitable.

Our understanding of human cognition provides one important clue as to why we may see success as inevitable: the availability heuristic. Using this cognitive shortcut, we tend to estimate the likelihood of an event or outcome based on how readily we can recall similar instances. Successful careers, of course, result from many factors, including hard work, talent, and chance. Some of those factors recur often, making them easy to recall. But others happen sporadically and therefore get short shrift when we construct our life stories.

Little wonder that when talented, hardworking people in developed countries strike it rich, they tend to ascribe their success to talent and hard work above all else. Most of them are vividly aware of how hard they’ve worked and how talented they are. They’ve been working hard and solving difficult problems every day for many years! In some abstract sense, they probably do know that they might not have performed as well in some other environment. Yet their day-to-day experience provides few reminders of how fortunate they were not to have been born in, say, war-torn Zimbabwe.

Our personal narratives are biased in a second way: Events that work to our disadvantage are easier to recall than those that affect us positively. My friend Tom Gilovich invokes a metaphor involving headwinds and tailwinds to describe this asymmetry.

When you’re running or bicycling into the wind, you’re very aware of it. You just can’t wait till the course turns around and you’ve got the wind at your back. When that happens, you feel great . But then you forget about it very quickly—you’re just not aware of the wind at your back. And that’s just a fundamental feature of how our minds, and how the world, works. We’re just going to be more aware of those barriers than of the things that boost us along.

That we tend to overestimate our own responsibility for our successes is not to say that we shouldn’t take pride in them. Pride is a powerful motivator; moreover, a tendency to overlook luck’s importance may be perversely adaptive, as it encourages us to persevere in the face of obstacles.

And yet failing to consider the role of chance has a dark side, too, making fortunate people less likely to pass on their good fortune.

The one dimension of personal luck that transcends all others is to have been born in a highly developed country. I often think of Birkhaman Rai, the Bhutanese man who was my cook when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal. He was perhaps the most resourceful person I’ve ever met. Though he was never taught to read, he could perform virtually any task in his environment to a high standard, from thatching a roof to repairing a clock to driving a tough bargain without alienating people. Even so, the meager salary I was able to pay him was almost certainly the high point of his life’s earnings trajectory. If he’d grown up in a rich country, he would have been far more prosperous, perhaps even spectacularly successful.

Being born in a favorable environment is an enormous stroke of luck. But maintaining such an environment requires high levels of public investment in everything from infrastructure to education—something Americans have lately been unwilling to support. Many factors have contributed to this reticence, but one in particular stands out: budget deficits resulting from a long-term decline in the United States’ top marginal tax rate.

A recent study by the political scientists Benjamin Page, Larry Bartels, and Jason Seawright found that the top 1 percent of U.S. wealth-holders are “extremely active politically” and are much more likely than the rest of the American public to resist taxation, regulation, and government spending. Given that the wealthiest Americans believe their prosperity is due, above all else, to their own talent and hard work, is this any wonder? Surely it’s a short hop from overlooking luck’s role in success to feeling entitled to keep the lion’s share of your income—and to being reluctant to sustain the public investments that let you succeed in the first place.

And yet this state of affairs does not appear to be inevitable: Recent research suggests that being prompted to recognize luck can encourage generosity. For example, Yuezhou Huo, a former research assistant of mine, designed an experiment in which she promised subjects a cash prize in exchange for completing a survey about a positive thing that had recently happened to them. She asked one group of participants to list factors beyond their control that contributed to the event, a second group to list personal qualities and actions that contributed to it, and a control group to simply explain why the good thing had happened. After completing the survey, subjects were given an opportunity to donate some or all of their reward to charity. Those who had been prompted to credit external causes—many mentioned luck, as well as factors such as supportive spouses, thoughtful teachers, and financial aid—donated 25 percent more than those who’d been asked to credit personal qualities or choices. Donations from the control group fell roughly midway between those from the other two groups.

Experiments by David DeSteno, a psychologist at Northeastern University, offer additional evidence that gratitude might lead to greater willingness to support the common good. In one widely cited study, he and his co-authors devised a clever manipulation to make a group of laboratory subjects feel grateful, and then gave them an opportunity to take actions that would benefit others at their own expense. Subjects in whom gratitude had been stoked were subsequently about 25 percent more generous toward strangers than were members of a control group. These findings are consistent with those of other academic psychologists. Taken together, the research suggests that when we are reminded of luck’s importance, we are much more likely to plow some of our own good fortune back into the common good.

In an unexpected twist, we may even find that recognizing our luck increases our good fortune. Social scientists have been studying gratitude intensively for almost two decades, and have found that it produces a remarkable array of physical, psychological, and social changes. Robert Emmons of the University of California at Davis and Michael McCullough of the University of Miami have been among the most prolific contributors to this effort. In one of their collaborations, they asked a first group of people to keep diaries in which they noted things that had made them feel grateful, a second group to note things that had made them feel irritated, and a third group to simply record events. After 10 weeks, the researchers reported dramatic changes in those who had noted their feelings of gratitude. The newly grateful had less frequent and less severe aches and pains and improved sleep quality. They reported greater happiness and alertness. They described themselves as more outgoing and compassionate, and less likely to feel lonely and isolated. No similar changes were observed in the second or third groups. Other psychologists have documented additional benefits of gratitude, such as reduced anxiety and diminished aggressive impulses.

Economists like to talk about scarcity, but its logic doesn’t always hold up in the realm of human emotion. Gratitude, in particular, is a currency we can spend freely without fear of bankruptcy. Indeed, if you talk with others about their experiences with luck, as I have, you may discover that with only a little prompting, even people who have never given much thought to the subject are surprisingly willing to rethink their life stories, recalling lucky breaks they’ve enjoyed along the way. And because these conversations almost always leave participants feeling happier, it’s not hard to imagine them becoming contagious

This essay is adapted from Robert H. Frank’s new book, Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy .

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10 Personal Statement Essay Examples That Worked

What’s covered:, what is a personal statement.

• Essay 1: Summer Program
• Essay 2: Being Bangladeshi-American
• Essay 3: Why Medicine
• Essay 4: Love of Writing
• Essay 5: Starting a Fire
• Essay 6: Dedicating a Track
• Essay 7: Body Image and Eating Disorders
• Essay 8: Becoming a Coach
• Essay 9: Eritrea
• Essay 10: Journaling
• Is Your Personal Statement Strong Enough?

Your personal statement is any essay that you must write for your main application, such as the Common App Essay , University of California Essays , or Coalition Application Essay . This type of essay focuses on your unique experiences, ideas, or beliefs that may not be discussed throughout the rest of your application. This essay should be an opportunity for the admissions officers to get to know you better and give them a glimpse into who you really are.

In this post, we will share 10 different personal statements that were all written by real students. We will also provide commentary on what each essay did well and where there is room for improvement, so you can make your personal statement as strong as possible!

Please note: Looking at examples of real essays students have submitted to colleges can be very beneficial to get inspiration for your essays. You should never copy or plagiarize from these examples when writing your own essays. Colleges can tell when an essay isn’t genuine and will not view students favorably if they plagiarized. 

Personal Statement Examples

Essay example #1: exchange program.

The twisting roads, ornate mosaics, and fragrant scent of freshly ground spices had been so foreign at first. Now in my fifth week of the SNYI-L summer exchange program in Morocco, I felt more comfortable in the city. With a bag full of pastries from the market, I navigated to a bus stop, paid the fare, and began the trip back to my host family’s house. It was hard to believe that only a few years earlier my mom was worried about letting me travel around my home city on my own, let alone a place that I had only lived in for a few weeks. While I had been on a journey towards self-sufficiency and independence for a few years now, it was Morocco that pushed me to become the confident, self-reflective person that I am today.

As a child, my parents pressured me to achieve perfect grades, master my swim strokes, and discover interesting hobbies like playing the oboe and learning to pick locks. I felt compelled to live my life according to their wishes. Of course, this pressure was not a wholly negative factor in my life –– you might even call it support. However, the constant presence of my parents’ hopes for me overcame my own sense of desire and led me to become quite dependent on them. I pushed myself to get straight A’s, complied with years of oboe lessons, and dutifully attended hours of swim practice after school. Despite all these achievements, I felt like I had no sense of self beyond my drive for success. I had always been expected to succeed on the path they had defined. However, this path was interrupted seven years after my parents’ divorce when my dad moved across the country to Oregon.

I missed my dad’s close presence, but I loved my new sense of freedom. My parents’ separation allowed me the space to explore my own strengths and interests as each of them became individually busier. As early as middle school, I was riding the light rail train by myself, reading maps to get myself home, and applying to special academic programs without urging from my parents. Even as I took more initiatives on my own, my parents both continued to see me as somewhat immature. All of that changed three years ago, when I applied and was accepted to the SNYI-L summer exchange program in Morocco. I would be studying Arabic and learning my way around the city of Marrakesh. Although I think my parents were a little surprised when I told them my news, the addition of a fully-funded scholarship convinced them to let me go.

I lived with a host family in Marrakesh and learned that they, too, had high expectations for me. I didn’t know a word of Arabic, and although my host parents and one brother spoke good English, they knew I was there to learn. If I messed up, they patiently corrected me but refused to let me fall into the easy pattern of speaking English just as I did at home. Just as I had when I was younger, I felt pressured and stressed about meeting their expectations. However, one day, as I strolled through the bustling market square after successfully bargaining with one of the street vendors, I realized my mistake. My host family wasn’t being unfair by making me fumble through Arabic. I had applied for this trip, and I had committed to the intensive language study. My host family’s rules about speaking Arabic at home had not been to fulfill their expectations for me, but to help me fulfill my expectations for myself. Similarly, the pressure my parents had put on me as a child had come out of love and their hopes for me, not out of a desire to crush my individuality.

As my bus drove through the still-bustling market square and past the medieval Ben-Youssef madrasa, I realized that becoming independent was a process, not an event. I thought that my parents’ separation when I was ten had been the one experience that would transform me into a self-motivated and autonomous person. It did, but that didn’t mean that I didn’t still have room to grow. Now, although I am even more self-sufficient than I was three years ago, I try to approach every experience with the expectation that it will change me. It’s still difficult, but I understand that just because growth can be uncomfortable doesn’t mean it’s not important.

What the Essay Did Well

This is a nice essay because it delves into particular character trait of the student and how it has been shaped and matured over time. Although it doesn’t focus the essay around a specific anecdote, the essay is still successful because it is centered around this student’s independence. This is a nice approach for a personal statement: highlight a particular trait of yours and explore how it has grown with you.

The ideas in this essay are universal to growing up—living up to parents’ expectations, yearning for freedom, and coming to terms with reality—but it feels unique to the student because of the inclusion of details specific to them. Including their oboe lessons, the experience of riding the light rail by themselves, and the negotiations with a street vendor helps show the reader what these common tropes of growing up looked like for them personally. 

Another strength of the essay is the level of self-reflection included throughout the piece. Since there is no central anecdote tying everything together, an essay about a character trait is only successful when you deeply reflect on how you felt, where you made mistakes, and how that trait impacts your life. The author includes reflection in sentences like “ I felt like I had no sense of self beyond my drive for success, ” and “ I understand that just because growth can be uncomfortable doesn’t mean it’s not important. ” These sentences help us see how the student was impacted and what their point of view is.

What Could Be Improved

The largest change this essay would benefit from is to show not tell. The platitude you have heard a million times no doubt, but for good reason. This essay heavily relies on telling the reader what occurred, making us less engaged as the entire reading experience feels more passive. If the student had shown us what happens though, it keeps the reader tied to the action and makes them feel like they are there with the student, making it much more enjoyable to read. 

For example, they tell us about the pressure to succeed their parents placed on them: “ I pushed myself to get straight A’s, complied with years of oboe lessons, and dutifully attended hours of swim practice after school.”  They could have shown us what that pressure looked like with a sentence like this: “ My stomach turned somersaults as my rattling knee thumped against the desk before every test, scared to get anything less than a 95. For five years the painful squawk of the oboe only reminded me of my parents’ claps and whistles at my concerts. I mastered the butterfly, backstroke, and freestyle, fighting against the anchor of their expectations threatening to pull me down.”

If the student had gone through their essay and applied this exercise of bringing more detail and colorful language to sentences that tell the reader what happened, the essay would be really great. 

Table of Contents

Essay Example #2: Being Bangladeshi-American

Life before was good: verdant forests, sumptuous curries, and a devoted family.

Then, my family abandoned our comfortable life in Bangladesh for a chance at the American dream in Los Angeles. Within our first year, my father was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. He lost his battle three weeks before my sixth birthday. Facing a new country without the steady presence of my father, we were vulnerable — prisoners of hardship in the land of the free. We resettled in the Bronx, in my uncle’s renovated basement. It was meant to be our refuge, but I felt more displaced than ever. Gone were the high-rise condos of West L.A.; instead, government projects towered over the neighborhood. Pedestrians no longer smiled and greeted me; the atmosphere was hostile, even toxic. Schoolkids were quick to pick on those they saw as weak or foreign, hurling harsh words I’d never heard before.

Meanwhile, my family began integrating into the local Bangladeshi community. I struggled to understand those who shared my heritage. Bangladeshi mothers stayed home while fathers drove cabs and sold fruit by the roadside — painful societal positions. Riding on crosstown buses or walking home from school, I began to internalize these disparities. During my fleeting encounters with affluent Upper East Siders, I saw kids my age with nannies, parents who wore suits to work, and luxurious apartments with spectacular views. Most took cabs to their destinations: cabs that Bangladeshis drove. I watched the mundane moments of their lives with longing, aching to plant myself in their shoes. Shame prickled down my spine. I distanced myself from my heritage, rejecting the traditional panjabis worn on Eid and refusing the torkari we ate for dinner every day. 

As I grappled with my relationship with the Bangladeshi community, I turned my attention to helping my Bronx community by pursuing an internship with Assemblyman Luis Sepulveda. I handled desk work and took calls, spending the bulk of my time actively listening to the hardships constituents faced — everything from a veteran stripped of his benefits to a grandmother unable to support her bedridden grandchild.

I’d never exposed myself to stories like these, and now I was the first to hear them. As an intern, I could only assist in what felt like the small ways — pointing out local job offerings, printing information on free ESL classes, reaching out to non-profits. But to a community facing an onslaught of intense struggles, I realized that something as small as these actions could have vast impacts. Seeing the immediate consequences of my actions inspired me. Throughout that summer, I internalized my community’s daily challenges in a new light. I began to stop seeing the prevalent underemployment and cramped living quarters less as sources of shame. Instead, I saw them as realities that had to be acknowledged, but could ultimately be remedied. I also realized the benefits of the Bangladeshi culture I had been so ashamed of. My Bangla language skills were an asset to the office, and my understanding of Bangladeshi etiquette allowed for smooth communication between office staff and its constituents. As I helped my neighbors navigate city services, I saw my heritage with pride — a perspective I never expected to have.

I can now appreciate the value of my unique culture and background, and of living with less. This perspective offers room for progress, community integration, and a future worth fighting for. My time with Assemblyman Sepulveda’s office taught me that I can be a change agent in enabling this progression. Far from being ashamed of my community, I want to someday return to local politics in the Bronx to continue helping others access the American Dream. I hope to help my community appreciate the opportunity to make progress together. By embracing reality, I learned to live it. Along the way, I discovered one thing: life is good, but we can make it better.

This student’s passion for social justice and civic duty shines through in this essay because of how honest it is. Sharing their personal experience with immigrating, moving around, being an outsider, and finding a community allows us to see the hardships this student has faced and builds empathy towards their situation. However, what really makes it strong is that they go beyond describing the difficulties they faced and explain the mental impact it had on them as a child: Shame prickled down my spine. I distanced myself from my heritage, rejecting the traditional panjabis worn on Eid and refusing the torkari we ate for dinner every day. 

The rejection of their culture presented at the beginning of the essay creates a nice juxtaposition with the student’s view in the latter half of the essay and helps demonstrate how they have matured. They use their experience interning as a way to delve into a change in their thought process about their culture and show how their passion for social justice began. Using this experience as a mechanism to explore their thoughts and feelings is an excellent example of how items that are included elsewhere on your application should be incorporated into your essay.

This essay prioritizes emotions and personal views over specific anecdotes. Although there are details and certain moments incorporated throughout to emphasize the author’s points, the main focus remains on the student and how they grapple with their culture and identity.  

One area for improvement is the conclusion. Although the forward-looking approach is a nice way to end an essay focused on social justice, it would be nice to include more details and imagery in the conclusion. How does the student want to help their community? What government position do they see themselves holding one day? 

A more impactful ending might look like the student walking into their office at the New York City Housing Authority in 15 years and looking at the plans to build a new development in the Bronx just blocks away from where the grew up that would provide quality housing to people in their Bangladeshi community. They would smile while thinking about how far they have come from that young kid who used to be ashamed of their culture. 

Essay Example #3: Why Medicine

I took my first trip to China to visit my cousin Anna in July of 2014. Distance had kept us apart, but when we were together, we fell into all of our old inside jokes and caught up on each other’s lives. Her sparkling personality and optimistic attitude always brought a smile to my face. This time, however, my heart broke when I saw the effects of her brain cancer; she had suffered from a stroke that paralyzed her left side. She was still herself in many ways, but I could see that the damage to her brain made things difficult for her. I stayed by her every day, providing the support she needed, whether assisting her with eating and drinking, reading to her, or just watching “Friends.” During my flight back home, sorrow and helplessness overwhelmed me. Would I ever see Anna again? Could I have done more to make Anna comfortable? I wished I could stay in China longer to care for her. As I deplaned, I wondered if I could transform my grief to help other children and teenagers in the US who suffered as Anna did.

The day after I got home, as jet lag dragged me awake a few minutes after midnight, I remembered hearing about the Family Reach Foundation (FRF) and its work with children going through treatments at the local hospital and their families. I began volunteering in the FRF’s Children’s Activity Room, where I play with children battling cancer. Volunteering has both made me appreciate my own health and also cherish the new relationships I build with the children and families. We play sports, make figures out of playdoh, and dress up. When they take on the roles of firefighters or fairies, we all get caught up in the game; for that time, they forget the sanitized, stark, impersonal walls of the pediatric oncology ward. Building close relationships with them and seeing them giggle and laugh is so rewarding — I love watching them grow and get better throughout their course of treatment.

Hearing from the parents about their children’s condition and seeing the children recover inspired me to consider medical research. To get started, I enrolled in a summer collegelevel course in Abnormal Psychology. There I worked with Catelyn, a rising college senior, on a data analysis project regarding Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). Together, we examined the neurological etiology of DID by studying four fMRI and PET cases. I fell in love with gathering data and analyzing the results and was amazed by our final product: several stunning brain images showcasing the areas of hyper and hypoactivity in brains affected by DID. Desire quickly followed my amazement — I want to continue this project and study more brains. Their complexity, delicacy, and importance to every aspect of life fascinate me. Successfully completing this research project gave me a sense of hope; I know I am capable of participating in a large scale research project and potentially making a difference in someone else’s life through my research.

Anna’s diagnosis inspired me to begin volunteering at FRF; from there, I discovered my desire to help people further by contributing to medical research. As my research interest blossomed, I realized that it’s no coincidence that I want to study brains—after all, Anna suffered from brain cancer. Reflecting on these experiences this past year and a half, I see that everything I’ve done is connected. Sadly, a few months after I returned from China, Anna passed away. I am still sad, but as I run a toy truck across the floor and watch one of the little patients’ eyes light up, I imagine that she would be proud of my commitment to pursue medicine and study the brain.

This essay has a very strong emotional core that tugs at the heart strings and makes the reader feel invested. Writing about sickness can be difficult and doesn’t always belong in a personal statement, but in this case it works well because the focus is on how this student cared for her cousin and dealt with the grief and emotions surrounding her condition. Writing about the compassion she showed and the doubts and concerns that filled her mind keeps the focus on the author and her personality. 

This continues when she again discusses the activities she did with the kids at FRF and the personal reflection this experience allowed her to have. For example, she writes: Volunteering has both made me appreciate my own health and also cherish the new relationships I build with the children and families. We play sports, make figures out of playdoh, and dress up.

Concluding the essay with the sad story of her cousin’s passing brings the essay full circle and returns to the emotional heart of the piece to once again build a connection with the reader. However, it finishes on a hopeful note and demonstrates how this student has been able to turn a tragic experience into a source of lifelong inspiration. 

One thing this essay should be cognizant of is that personal statements should not read as summaries of your extracurricular resume. Although this essay doesn’t fully fall into that trap, it does describe two key extracurriculars the student participated in. However, the inclusion of such a strong emotional core running throughout the essay helps keep the focus on the student and her thoughts and feelings during these activities.

To avoid making this mistake, make sure you have a common thread running through your essay and the extracurriculars provide support to the story you are trying to tell, rather than crafting a story around your activities. And, as this essay does, make sure there is lots of personal reflection and feelings weaved throughout to focus attention to you rather than your extracurriculars. 

Essay Example #4: Love of Writing

“I want to be a writer.” This had been my answer to every youthful discussion with the adults in my life about what I would do when I grew up. As early as elementary school, I remember reading my writing pieces aloud to an audience at “Author of the Month” ceremonies. Bearing this goal in mind, and hoping to gain some valuable experience, I signed up for a journalism class during my freshman year. Despite my love for writing, I initially found myself uninterested in the subject and I struggled to enjoy the class. When I thought of writing, I imagined lyrical prose, profound poetry, and thrilling plot lines. Journalism required a laconic style and orderly structure, and I found my teacher’s assignments formulaic and dull. That class shook my confidence as a writer. I was uncertain if I should continue in it for the rest of my high school career.

Despite my misgivings, I decided that I couldn’t make a final decision on whether to quit journalism until I had some experience working for a paper outside of the classroom. The following year, I applied to be a staff reporter on our school newspaper. I hoped this would help me become more self-driven and creative, rather than merely writing articles that my teacher assigned. To my surprise, my time on staff was worlds away from what I experienced in the journalism class. Although I was unaccustomed to working in a fast-paced environment and initially found it burdensome to research and complete high-quality stories in a relatively short amount of time, I also found it exciting. I enjoyed learning more about topics and events on campus that I did not know much about; some of my stories that I covered in my first semester concerned a chess tournament, a food drive, and a Spanish immersion party. I relished in the freedom I had to explore and learn, and to write more independently than I could in a classroom.

Although I enjoyed many aspects of working for the paper immediately, reporting also pushed me outside of my comfort zone. I am a shy person, and speaking with people I did not know intimidated me. During my first interview, I met with the basketball coach to prepare for a story about the team’s winning streak. As I approached his office, I felt everything from my toes to my tongue freeze into a solid block, and I could hardly get out my opening questions. Fortunately, the coach was very kind and helped me through the conversation. Encouraged, I prepared for my next interview with more confidence. After a few weeks of practice, I even started to look forward to interviewing people on campus. That first journalism class may have bored me, but even if journalism in practice was challenging, it was anything but tedious.

Over the course of that year, I grew to love writing for our school newspaper. Reporting made me aware of my surroundings, and made me want to know more about current events on campus and in the town where I grew up. By interacting with people all over campus, I came to understand the breadth of individuals and communities that make up my high school. I felt far more connected to diverse parts of my school through my work as a journalist, and I realized that journalism gave me a window into seeing beyond my own experiences. The style of news writing may be different from what I used to think “writing” meant, but I learned that I can still derive exciting plots from events that may have gone unnoticed if not for my stories. I no longer struggle to approach others, and truly enjoy getting to know people and recognizing their accomplishments through my writing. Becoming a writer may be a difficult path, but it is as rewarding as I hoped when I was young.

This essay is clearly structured in a manner that makes it flow very nicely and contributes to its success. It starts with a quote to draw in the reader and show this student’s life-long passion for writing. Then it addresses the challenges of facing new, unfamiliar territory and how this student overcame it. Finally, it concludes by reflecting on this eye-opening experience and a nod to their younger self from the introduction. Having a well-thought out and sequential structure with clear transitions makes it extremely easy for the reader to follow along and take away the main idea.

Another positive aspect of the essay is the use of strong and expressive language. Sentences like “ When I thought of writing, I imagined lyrical prose, profound poetry, and thrilling plot lines ” stand out because of the intentional use of words like “lyrical”, “profound”, and “thrilling” to convey the student’s love of writing. The author also uses an active voice to capture the readers’ attention and keep us engaged. They rely on their language and diction to reveal details to the reader, for instance saying “ I felt everything from my toes to my tongue freeze into a solid block ” to describe feeling nervous.

This essay is already very strong, so there isn’t much that needs to be changed. One thing that could take the essay from great to outstanding would be to throw in more quotes, internal dialogue, and sensory descriptors.

It would be nice to see the nerves they felt interviewing the coach by including dialogue like “ Um…I want to interview you about…uh…”.  They could have shown their original distaste for journalism by narrating the thoughts running through their head. The fast-paced environment of their newspaper could have come to life with descriptions about the clacking of keyboards and the whirl of people running around laying out articles.

Essay Example #5: Starting a Fire

Was I no longer the beloved daughter of nature, whisperer of trees? Knee-high rubber boots, camouflage, bug spray—I wore the garb and perfume of a proud wild woman, yet there I was, hunched over the pathetic pile of stubborn sticks, utterly stumped, on the verge of tears. As a child, I had considered myself a kind of rustic princess, a cradler of spiders and centipedes, who was serenaded by mourning doves and chickadees, who could glide through tick-infested meadows and emerge Lyme-free. I knew the cracks of the earth like the scars on my own rough palms. Yet here I was, ten years later, incapable of performing the most fundamental outdoor task: I could not, for the life of me, start a fire. 

Furiously I rubbed the twigs together—rubbed and rubbed until shreds of skin flaked from my fingers. No smoke. The twigs were too young, too sticky-green; I tossed them away with a shower of curses, and began tearing through the underbrush in search of a more flammable collection. My efforts were fruitless. Livid, I bit a rejected twig, determined to prove that the forest had spurned me, offering only young, wet bones that would never burn. But the wood cracked like carrots between my teeth—old, brittle, and bitter. Roaring and nursing my aching palms, I retreated to the tent, where I sulked and awaited the jeers of my family. 

Rattling their empty worm cans and reeking of fat fish, my brother and cousins swaggered into the campsite. Immediately, they noticed the minor stick massacre by the fire pit and called to me, their deep voices already sharp with contempt. 

“Where’s the fire, Princess Clara?” they taunted. “Having some trouble?” They prodded me with the ends of the chewed branches and, with a few effortless scrapes of wood on rock, sparked a red and roaring flame. My face burned long after I left the fire pit. The camp stank of salmon and shame. 

In the tent, I pondered my failure. Was I so dainty? Was I that incapable? I thought of my hands, how calloused and capable they had been, how tender and smooth they had become. It had been years since I’d kneaded mud between my fingers; instead of scaling a white pine, I’d practiced scales on my piano, my hands softening into those of a musician—fleshy and sensitive. And I’d gotten glasses, having grown horrifically nearsighted; long nights of dim lighting and thick books had done this. I couldn’t remember the last time I had lain down on a hill, barefaced, and seen the stars without having to squint. Crawling along the edge of the tent, a spider confirmed my transformation—he disgusted me, and I felt an overwhelming urge to squash him. 

Yet, I realized I hadn’t really changed—I had only shifted perspective. I still eagerly explored new worlds, but through poems and prose rather than pastures and puddles. I’d grown to prefer the boom of a bass over that of a bullfrog, learned to coax a different kind of fire from wood, having developed a burn for writing rhymes and scrawling hypotheses. 

That night, I stayed up late with my journal and wrote about the spider I had decided not to kill. I had tolerated him just barely, only shrieking when he jumped—it helped to watch him decorate the corners of the tent with his delicate webs, knowing that he couldn’t start fires, either. When the night grew cold and the embers died, my words still smoked—my hands burned from all that scrawling—and even when I fell asleep, the ideas kept sparking—I was on fire, always on fire.

This student is an excellent writer, which allows a simple story to be outstandingly compelling. The author articulates her points beautifully and creatively through her immense use of details and figurative language. Lines like “a rustic princess, a cradler of spiders and centipedes, who was serenaded by mourning doves and chickadees,” and “rubbed and rubbed until shreds of skin flaked from my fingers,” create vivid images that draw the reader in. 

The flowery and descriptive prose also contributes to the nice juxtaposition between the old Clara and the new Clara. The latter half of the essay contrasts elements of nature with music and writing to demonstrate how natural these interests are for her now. This sentence perfectly encapsulates the contrast she is trying to build: “It had been years since I’d kneaded mud between my fingers; instead of scaling a white pine, I’d practiced scales on my piano, my hands softening into those of a musician—fleshy and sensitive.”

In addition to being well-written, this essay is thematically cohesive. It begins with the simple introduction “Fire!” and ends with the following image: “When the night grew cold and the embers died, my words still smoked—my hands burned from all that scrawling—and even when I fell asleep, the ideas kept sparking—I was on fire, always on fire.” This full-circle approach leaves readers satisfied and impressed.

There is very little this essay should change, however one thing to be cautious about is having an essay that is overly-descriptive. We know from the essay that this student likes to read and write, and depending on other elements of her application, it might make total sense to have such a flowery and ornate writing style. However, your personal statement needs to reflect your voice as well as your personality. If you would never use language like this in conversation or your writing, don’t put it in your personal statement. Make sure there is a balance between eloquence and your personal voice.

Essay Example #6: Dedicating a Track

“Getting beat is one thing – it’s part of competing – but I want no part in losing.” Coach Rob Stark’s motto never fails to remind me of his encouragement on early-morning bus rides to track meets around the state. I’ve always appreciated the phrase, but an experience last June helped me understand its more profound, universal meaning.

Stark, as we affectionately call him, has coached track at my high school for 25 years. His care, dedication, and emphasis on developing good character has left an enduring impact on me and hundreds of other students. Not only did he help me discover my talent and love for running, but he also taught me the importance of commitment and discipline and to approach every endeavor with the passion and intensity that I bring to running. When I learned a neighboring high school had dedicated their track to a longtime coach, I felt that Stark deserved similar honors.

Our school district’s board of education indicated they would only dedicate our track to Stark if I could demonstrate that he was extraordinary. I took charge and mobilized my teammates to distribute petitions, reach out to alumni, and compile statistics on the many team and individual champions Stark had coached over the years. We received astounding support, collecting almost 3,000 signatures and pages of endorsements from across the community. With help from my teammates, I presented this evidence to the board.

They didn’t bite. 

Most members argued that dedicating the track was a low priority. Knowing that we had to act quickly to convince them of its importance, I called a team meeting where we drafted a rebuttal for the next board meeting. To my surprise, they chose me to deliver it. I was far from the best public speaker in the group, and I felt nervous about going before the unsympathetic board again. However, at that second meeting, I discovered that I enjoy articulating and arguing for something that I’m passionate about.

Public speaking resembles a cross country race. Walking to the starting line, you have to trust your training and quell your last minute doubts. When the gun fires, you can’t think too hard about anything; your performance has to be instinctual, natural, even relaxed. At the next board meeting, the podium was my starting line. As I walked up to it, familiar butterflies fluttered in my stomach. Instead of the track stretching out in front of me, I faced the vast audience of teachers, board members, and my teammates. I felt my adrenaline build, and reassured myself: I’ve put in the work, my argument is powerful and sound. As the board president told me to introduce myself, I heard, “runners set” in the back of my mind. She finished speaking, and Bang! The brief silence was the gunshot for me to begin. 

The next few minutes blurred together, but when the dust settled, I knew from the board members’ expressions and the audience’s thunderous approval that I had run quite a race. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough; the board voted down our proposal. I was disappointed, but proud of myself, my team, and our collaboration off the track. We stood up for a cause we believed in, and I overcame my worries about being a leader. Although I discovered that changing the status quo through an elected body can be a painstakingly difficult process and requires perseverance, I learned that I enjoy the challenges this effort offers. Last month, one of the school board members joked that I had become a “regular” – I now often show up to meetings to advocate for a variety of causes, including better environmental practices in cafeterias and safer equipment for athletes.

Just as Stark taught me, I worked passionately to achieve my goal. I may have been beaten when I appealed to the board, but I certainly didn’t lose, and that would have made Stark proud.

This essay effectively conveys this student’s compassion for others, initiative, and determination—all great qualities to exemplify in a personal statement!

Although they rely on telling us a lot of what happened up until the board meeting, the use of running a race (their passion) as a metaphor for public speaking provides a lot of insight into the fear that this student overcame to work towards something bigger than themself. Comparing a podium to the starting line, the audience to the track, and silence to the gunshot is a nice way of demonstrating this student’s passion for cross country running without making that the focus of the story.

The essay does a nice job of coming full circle at the end by explaining what the quote from the beginning meant to them after this experience. Without explicitly saying “ I now know that what Stark actually meant is…” they rely on the strength of their argument above to make it obvious to the reader what it means to get beat but not lose. 

One of the biggest areas of improvement in the intro, however, is how the essay tells us Stark’s impact rather than showing us: His care, dedication, and emphasis on developing good character has left an enduring impact on me and hundreds of other students. Not only did he help me discover my talent and love for running, but he also taught me the importance of commitment and discipline and to approach every endeavor with the passion and intensity that I bring to running.

The writer could’ve helped us feel a stronger emotional connection to Stark if they had included examples of Stark’s qualities, rather than explicitly stating them. For example, they could’ve written something like: Stark was the kind of person who would give you gas money if you told him your parents couldn’t afford to pick you up from practice. And he actually did that—several times. At track meets, alumni regularly would come talk to him and tell him how he’d changed their lives. Before Stark, I was ambivalent about running and was on the JV team, but his encouragement motivated me to run longer and harder and eventually make varsity. Because of him, I approach every endeavor with the passion and intensity that I bring to running.

Essay Example #7: Body Image and Eating Disorders

I press the “discover” button on my Instagram app, hoping to find enticing pictures to satisfy my boredom. Scrolling through, I see funny videos and mouth-watering pictures of food. However, one image stops me immediately. A fit teenage girl with a “perfect body” relaxes in a bikini on a beach. Beneath it, I see a slew of flattering comments. I shake with disapproval over the image’s unrealistic quality. However, part of me still wants to have a body like hers so that others will make similar comments to me.

I would like to resolve a silent issue that harms many teenagers and adults: negative self image and low self-esteem in a world where social media shapes how people view each other. When people see the façades others wear to create an “ideal” image, they can develop poor thought patterns rooted in negative self-talk. The constant comparisons to “perfect” others make people feel small. In this new digital age, it is hard to distinguish authentic from artificial representations.

When I was 11, I developed anorexia nervosa. Though I was already thin, I wanted to be skinny like the models that I saw on the magazine covers on the grocery store stands. Little did I know that those models probably also suffered from disorders, and that photoshop erased their flaws. I preferred being underweight to being healthy. No matter how little I ate or how thin I was, I always thought that I was too fat. I became obsessed with the number on the scale and would try to eat the least that I could without my parents urging me to take more. Fortunately, I stopped engaging in anorexic behaviors before middle school. However, my underlying mental habits did not change. The images that had provoked my disorder in the first place were still a constant presence in my life.

By age 15, I was in recovery from anorexia, but suffered from depression. While I used to only compare myself to models, the growth of social media meant I also compared myself to my friends and acquaintances. I felt left out when I saw my friends’ excitement about lake trips they had taken without me. As I scrolled past endless photos of my flawless, thin classmates with hundreds of likes and affirming comments, I felt my jealousy spiral. I wanted to be admired and loved by other people too. However, I felt that I could never be enough. I began to hate the way that I looked, and felt nothing in my life was good enough. I wanted to be called “perfect” and “body goals,” so I tried to only post at certain times of day to maximize my “likes.” When that didn’t work, I started to feel too anxious to post anything at all.  

Body image insecurities and social media comparisons affect thousands of people – men, women, children, and adults – every day. I am lucky – after a few months of my destructive social media habits, I came across a video that pointed out the illusory nature of social media; many Instagram posts only show off good things while people hide their flaws. I began going to therapy, and recovered from my depression. To address the problem of self-image and social media, we can all focus on what matters on the inside and not what is on the surface. As an effort to become healthy internally, I started a club at my school to promote clean eating and radiating beauty from within. It has helped me grow in my confidence, and today I’m not afraid to show others my struggles by sharing my experience with eating disorders. Someday, I hope to make this club a national organization to help teenagers and adults across the country. I support the idea of body positivity and embracing difference, not “perfection.” After all, how can we be ourselves if we all look the same?

This essay covers the difficult topics of eating disorders and mental health. If you’re thinking about covering similar topics in your essay, we recommend reading our post Should You Talk About Mental Health in College Essays?

The short answer is that, yes, you can talk about mental health, but it can be risky. If you do go that route, it’s important to focus on what you learned from the experience.

The strength of this essay is the student’s vulnerability, in excerpts such as this: I wanted to be admired and loved by other people too. However, I felt that I could never be enough. I began to hate the way that I looked, and felt nothing in my life was good enough. I wanted to be called “perfect” and “body goals,” so I tried to only post at certain times of day to maximize my “likes.”

The student goes on to share how they recovered from their depression through an eye-opening video and therapy sessions, and they’re now helping others find their self-worth as well. It’s great that this essay looks towards the future and shares the writer’s goals of making their club a national organization; we can see their ambition and compassion.

The main weakness of this essay is that it doesn’t focus enough on their recovery process, which is arguably the most important part. They could’ve told us more about the video they watched or the process of starting their club and the interactions they’ve had with other members. Especially when sharing such a vulnerable topic, there should be vulnerability in the recovery process too. That way, the reader can fully appreciate all that this student has overcome.

Essay Example #8: Becoming a Coach

”Advanced females ages 13 to 14 please proceed to staging with your coaches at this time.” Skittering around the room, eyes wide and pleading, I frantically explained my situation to nearby coaches. The seconds ticked away in my head; every polite refusal increased my desperation.

Despair weighed me down. I sank to my knees as a stream of competitors, coaches, and officials flowed around me. My dojang had no coach, and the tournament rules prohibited me from competing without one.

Although I wanted to remain strong, doubts began to cloud my mind. I could not help wondering: what was the point of perfecting my skills if I would never even compete? The other members of my team, who had found coaches minutes earlier, attempted to comfort me, but I barely heard their words. They couldn’t understand my despair at being left on the outside, and I never wanted them to understand.

Since my first lesson 12 years ago, the members of my dojang have become family. I have watched them grow up, finding my own happiness in theirs. Together, we have honed our kicks, blocks, and strikes. We have pushed one another to aim higher and become better martial artists. Although my dojang had searched for a reliable coach for years, we had not found one. When we attended competitions in the past, my teammates and I had always gotten lucky and found a sympathetic coach. Now, I knew this practice was unsustainable. It would devastate me to see the other members of my dojang in my situation, unable to compete and losing hope as a result. My dojang needed a coach, and I decided it was up to me to find one.

I first approached the adults in the dojang – both instructors and members’ parents. However, these attempts only reacquainted me with polite refusals. Everyone I asked told me they couldn’t devote multiple weekends per year to competitions. I soon realized that I would have become the coach myself.

At first, the inner workings of tournaments were a mystery to me. To prepare myself for success as a coach, I spent the next year as an official and took coaching classes on the side. I learned everything from motivational strategies to technical, behind-the-scenes components of Taekwondo competitions. Though I emerged with new knowledge and confidence in my capabilities, others did not share this faith.

Parents threw me disbelieving looks when they learned that their children’s coach was only a child herself. My self-confidence was my armor, deflecting their surly glances. Every armor is penetrable, however, and as the relentless barrage of doubts pounded my resilience, it began to wear down. I grew unsure of my own abilities.

Despite the attack, I refused to give up. When I saw the shining eyes of the youngest students preparing for their first competition, I knew I couldn’t let them down. To quit would be to set them up to be barred from competing like I was. The knowledge that I could solve my dojang’s longtime problem motivated me to overcome my apprehension.

Now that my dojang flourishes at competitions, the attacks on me have weakened, but not ended. I may never win the approval of every parent; at times, I am still tormented by doubts, but I find solace in the fact that members of my dojang now only worry about competing to the best of their abilities.

Now, as I arrive at a tournament with my students, I close my eyes and remember the past. I visualize the frantic search for a coach and the chaos amongst my teammates as we competed with one another to find coaches before the staging calls for our respective divisions. I open my eyes to the exact opposite scene. Lacking a coach hurt my ability to compete, but I am proud to know that no member of my dojang will have to face that problem again.

This essay begins with an in-the-moment narrative that really illustrates the chaos of looking for a coach last-minute. We feel the writer’s emotions, particularly her dejectedness, at not being able to compete. Starting an essay in media res  is a great way to capture the attention of your readers and build anticipation for what comes next.

Through this essay, we can see how gutsy and determined the student is in deciding to become a coach themselves. She shows us these characteristics through their actions, rather than explicitly telling us: To prepare myself for success as a coach, I spent the next year as an official and took coaching classes on the side.  Also, by discussing the opposition she faced and how it affected her, the student is open and vulnerable about the reality of the situation.

The essay comes full circle as the author recalls the frantic situations in seeking out a coach, but this is no longer a concern for them and their team. Overall, this essay is extremely effective in painting this student as mature, bold, and compassionate.

The biggest thing this essay needs to work on is showing not telling. Throughout the essay, the student tells us that she “emerged with new knowledge and confidence,” she “grew unsure of her own abilities,” and she “refused to give up”. What we really want to know is what this looks like.

Instead of saying she “emerged with new knowledge and confidence” she should have shared how she taught a new move to a fellow team-member without hesitation. Rather than telling us she “grew unsure of her own abilities” she should have shown what that looked like by including her internal dialogue and rhetorical questions that ran through her mind. She could have demonstrated what “refusing to give up” looks like by explaining how she kept learning coaching techniques on her own, turned to a mentor for advice, or devised a plan to win over the trust of parents. 

Essay Example #9: Eritrea

No one knows where Eritrea is.

On the first day of school, for the past nine years, I would pensively stand in front of a class, a teacher, a stranger  waiting for the inevitable question: Where are you from?

I smile politely, my dimples accentuating my ambiguous features. “Eritrea,” I answer promptly and proudly. But I  am always prepared. Before their expression can deepen into confusion, ready to ask “where is that,” I elaborate,  perhaps with a fleeting hint of exasperation, “East Africa, near Ethiopia.”

Sometimes, I single out the key-shaped hermit nation on a map, stunning teachers who have “never had a student  from there!” Grinning, I resist the urge to remark, “You didn’t even know it existed until two minutes ago!”

Eritrea is to the East of Ethiopia, its arid coastline clutches the lucrative Red Sea. Battle scars litter the ancient  streets – the colonial Italian architecture lathered with bullet holes, the mosques mangled with mortar shells.  Originally part of the world’s first Christian kingdom, Eritrea passed through the hands of colonial Italy, Britain, and  Ethiopia for over a century, until a bloody thirty year war of Independence liberated us.

But these are facts that anyone can know with a quick Google search. These are facts that I have memorised and compounded, first from my Grandmother and now from pristine books  borrowed from the library.

No historical narrative, however, can adequately capture what Eritrea is.  No one knows the aroma of bushels of potatoes, tomatoes, and garlic – still covered in dirt – that leads you to the open-air market. No one knows the poignant scent of spices, arranged in orange piles reminiscent of compacted  dunes.  No one knows how to haggle stubborn herders for sheep and roosters for Christmas celebrations as deliberately as my mother. No one can replicate the perfect balance of spices in dorho and tsebhi as well as my grandmother,  her gnarly hands stirring the pot with ancient precision (chastising my clumsy knife work with the potatoes).  It’s impossible to learn when the injera is ready – the exact moment you have to lift the lid of the mogogo. Do it too  early (or too late) and the flatbread becomes mangled and gross. It is a sixth sense passed through matriarchal  lineages.

There are no sources that catalogue the scent of incense that wafts through the sunlit porch on St. Michael’s; no  films that can capture the luminescence of hundreds of flaming bonfires that fluoresce the sidewalks on Kudus  Yohannes, as excited children chant Ge’ez proverbs whose origin has been lost to time.  You cannot learn the familiarity of walking beneath the towering Gothic figure of the Enda Mariam Cathedral, the  crowds undulating to the ringing of the archaic bells.  I have memorized the sound of the rains hounding the metal roof during kiremti , the heat of the sun pounding  against the Toyota’s window as we sped down towards Ghinda , the opulent brilliance of the stars twinkling in a  sky untainted by light pollution, the scent of warm rolls of bani wafting through the streets at precisely 6 o’clock each day…

I fill my flimsy sketchbook with pictures from my memory. My hand remembers the shapes of the hibiscus drifting  in the wind, the outline of my grandmother (affectionately nicknamed a’abaye ) leaning over the garden, the bizarre architecture of the Fiat Tagliero .  I dice the vegetables with movements handed down from generations. My nose remembers the scent of frying garlic, the sourness of the warm tayta , the sharpness of the mit’mt’a …

This knowledge is intrinsic.  “I am Eritrean,” I repeat. “I am proud.”  Within me is an encyclopedia of history, culture, and idealism.

Eritrea is the coffee made from scratch, the spices drying in the sun, the priests and nuns. Eritrea is wise, filled with ambition, and unseen potential.  Eritrea isn’t a place, it’s an identity.

This is an exceptional essay that provides a window into this student’s culture that really makes their love for their country and heritage leap off the page. The sheer level of details and sensory descriptors this student is able to fit in this space makes the essay stand out. From the smells, to the traditions, sounds, and sights, the author encapsulates all the glory of Eritrea for the reader. 

The vivid images this student is able to create for the reader, whether it is having the tedious conversation with every teacher or cooking in their grandmother’s kitchen, transports us into the story and makes us feel like we are there in the moment with the student. This is a prime example of an essay that shows , not tells.

Besides the amazing imagery, the use of shorter paragraphs also contributes to how engaging this essay is. Employing this tactic helps break up the text to make it more readable and it isolates ideas so they stick out more than if they were enveloped in a large paragraph.

Overall, this is a really strong essay that brings to life this student’s heritage through its use of vivid imagery. This essay exemplifies what it means to show not tell in your writing, and it is a great example of how you can write an intimate personal statement without making yourself the primary focus of your essay. 

There is very little this essay should improve upon, but one thing the student might consider would be to inject more personal reflection into their response. Although we can clearly take away their deep love and passion for their homeland and culture, the essay would be a bit more personal if they included the emotions and feelings they associate with the various aspects of Eritrea. For example, the way their heart swells with pride when their grandmother praises their ability to cook a flatbread or the feeling of serenity when they hear the bells ring out from the cathedral. Including personal details as well as sensory ones would create a wonderful balance of imagery and reflection.

Essay Example #10: Journaling

Flipping past dozens of colorful entries in my journal, I arrive at the final blank sheet. I press my pen lightly to the page, barely scratching its surface to create a series of loops stringing together into sentences. Emotions spill out, and with their release, I feel lightness in my chest. The stream of thoughts slows as I reach the bottom of the page, and I gently close the cover of the worn book: another journal finished.

I add the journal to the stack of eleven books on my nightstand. Struck by the bittersweet sensation of closing a chapter of my life, I grab the notebook at the bottom of the pile to reminisce.

“I want to make a flying mushen to fly in space and your in it” – October 2008

Pulling back the cover of my first Tinkerbell-themed diary, the prompt “My Hopes and Dreams” captures my attention. Though “machine” is misspelled in my scribbled response, I see the beginnings of my past obsession with outer space. At the age of five, I tore through novels about the solar system, experimented with rockets built from plastic straws, and rented Space Shuttle films from Blockbuster to satisfy my curiosities. While I chased down answers to questions as limitless as the universe, I fell in love with learning. Eight journals later, the same relentless curiosity brought me to an airplane descending on San Francisco Bay.

“I wish I had infinite sunsets” – July 2019

I reach for the charcoal notepad near the top of the pile and open to the first page: my flight to the Stanford Pre-Collegiate Summer Institutes. While I was excited to explore bioengineering, anxiety twisted in my stomach as I imagined my destination, unsure of whether I could overcome my shyness and connect with others.

With each new conversation, the sweat on my palms became less noticeable, and I met students from 23 different countries. Many of the moments where I challenged myself socially revolved around the third story deck of the Jerry house. A strange medley of English, Arabic, and Mandarin filled the summer air as my friends and I gathered there every evening, and dialogues at sunset soon became moments of bliss. In our conversations about cultural differences, the possibility of an afterlife, and the plausibility of far-fetched conspiracy theories, I learned to voice my opinion. As I was introduced to different viewpoints, these moments challenged my understanding of the world around me. In my final entries from California, I find excitement to learn from others and increased confidence, a tool that would later allow me to impact my community.

“The beauty in a tower of cans” – June 2020

Returning my gaze to the stack of journals, I stretch to take the floral-patterned book sitting on top. I flip through, eventually finding the beginnings of the organization I created during the outbreak of COVID-19. Since then, Door-to-Door Deliveries has woven its way through my entries and into reality, allowing me to aid high-risk populations through free grocery delivery.

With the confidence I gained the summer before, I took action when seeing others in need rather than letting my shyness hold me back. I reached out to local churches and senior centers to spread word of our services and interacted with customers through our website and social media pages. To further expand our impact, we held two food drives, and I mustered the courage to ask for donations door-to-door. In a tower of canned donations, I saw the value of reaching out to help others and realized my own potential to impact the world around me.

I delicately close the journal in my hands, smiling softly as the memories reappear, one after another. Reaching under my bed, I pull out a fresh notebook and open to its first sheet. I lightly press my pen to the page, “And so begins the next chapter…”

The structuring of this essay makes it easy and enjoyable to read. The student effectively organizes their various life experiences around their tower of journals, which centers the reader and makes the different stories easy to follow. Additionally, the student engages quotes from their journals—and unique formatting of the quotes—to signal that they are moving in time and show us which memory we should follow them to.

Thematically, the student uses the idea of shyness to connect the different memories they draw out of their journals. As the student describes their experiences overcoming shyness at the Stanford Pre-Collegiate Summer Institutes and Door-to-Door Deliveries, this essay can be read as an Overcoming Obstacles essay.

At the end of this essay, readers are fully convinced that this student is dedicated (they have committed to journaling every day), thoughtful (journaling is a thoughtful process and, in the essay, the student reflects thoughtfully on the past), and motivated (they flew across the country for a summer program and started a business). These are definitely qualities admissions officers are looking for in applicants!

Although this essay is already exceptionally strong as it’s written, the first journal entry feels out of place compared to the other two entries that discuss the author’s shyness and determination. It works well for the essay to have an entry from when the student was younger to add some humor (with misspelled words) and nostalgia, but if the student had either connected the quote they chose to the idea of overcoming a fear present in the other two anecdotes or if they had picked a different quote all together related to their shyness, it would have made the entire essay feel more cohesive.

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Explainer: does luck exist?

Head of Neuroethics, Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health

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Neil Levy receives funding from the Australian Research Foundation and the Templeton Foundation.

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Some people seem born lucky. Everything they touch turns to gold. Others are dogged by misfortune.

It’s not just people who might be lucky or unlucky – it can be single acts. When the ball hits a post in soccer, the commentators often say the striker was unlucky. We sometimes argue whether an act was lucky or not. I might say your pool shot was lucky. “Not luck; skill”, you might reply.

Is any of this talk sensible? Is there really such a thing as luck? Do some people have more of it than others (just as some people are better at pool than others)? I think there is a perfectly reasonable way of making sense of talk about luck. But there is no such thing as luck. It isn’t a property, like mass, or an object. Rather, to talk about luck is to talk about how things might easily have gone.

This view entails that no-one has luck. We can’t truly say of someone they’re lucky, meaning they are the kind of person to whom lucky things can be expected to happen.

It has sometimes been suggested that luck exists only if a certain interpretation of quantum mechanics is true: if causality is not “deterministic”. If physical determinism is true then every event that occurs is entirely predictable (in principle), by someone who knows enough about the universe and its laws.

If indeterministic physics is true, then such predictability is not possible: no one, no matter how much they know, can predict every event that happens, even in principle.

I don’t know which interpretation of quantum mechanics is true, but it seems unlikely to me that we need to settle that debate to decide whether some things are lucky. It seems obvious to me that the person who was hit by lightning (on a clear day, if you like) was unlucky, and the person who wins the lotto is lucky.

Here’s how I understand luck. I think something is lucky (or unlucky) for a person if two things are true of it: it matters (somehow) to them, and it might easily not have happened. The second condition needs some explanation.

To say that something might easily not have happened is to say that, given how things were at the time just before, the event might well not have occurred. We might think of this in terms of replaying the event. If I set up the pool table again and ask you to retake the shot, we can discover whether your shot was luck or skill. We will need to do it a few times: you might get lucky twice, but you very unlikely to be lucky ten times in a row.

If every time you try (roughly) the same shot, you sink it I will have to concede: that’s skill, not luck. But if you can’t do it again, you were lucky the first time. Similarly, someone was unlucky to be hit by lightning if it is true that were they to be in similar conditions again, they (probably) would not be hit by lightning. If, on the other hand, lightning is so prevalent around here that any time anyone goes out they get hit, then they weren’t unlucky.

If this is right, there can’t be lucky or unlucky people. At least, there can’t be people who have the property of having lucky events happen to them. Whether I am lucky in doing something depends on how skillful I am at doing things like that. If I’m really good at it, then I am less lucky at succeeding than if I am bad at it.

So, roughly, the more often something happens to someone, the less luck is involved. Of course someone can be lucky or unlucky twice: lightning can strike twice. But the person who is lucky twice, or more, is not a lucky person: their past luck doesn’t give us any reason to expect luck in their future.

There is one way in which we can say that someone is lucky or unlucky. Rather than compare an event to what we would expect to happen, given roughly the same circumstances, we might compare a person’s circumstances or their traits to what is statistically normal for a group. Using this kind of measure, we can say that someone born severely handicapped is unlucky and someone born into wealth is lucky.

What is the relevant group for this kind of comparison? I don’t think there is a single right answer here: it will depend on the context and our aims. For some purposes, a narrower group might be relevant, and for some, a broader. This entails that the same person might be said to be both lucky and unlucky.

Think of the contemporary Australian who loses her job, through no fault of her own. We might say she is unlucky, comparing her to other contemporary Australians. But compared to humanity as a whole, she might be lucky if she remains able to feed and house herself.

This same kind of context sensitivity and relativism is characteristic of luck in events as well. The same event can be lucky and unlucky for a person. Think of someone who misses her flight and takes another one, which then crashes. She is unlucky to be involved in a plane crash, given that she might easily have been on the earlier flight. But if she is the only survivor, she might be lucky, given that everyone else died.

That’s why we can find ourselves saying of someone who has broken three ribs and both legs that they are lucky.

Neil Levy is the author of Hard Luck: How Luck Undermines Free Will and Moral Responsibility.

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Superman and Me — The Use Of Tone In Superman And Me By Sherman Alexie

The Use of Tone in Superman and Me by Sherman Alexie

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Published: Sep 1, 2020

Words: 888 | Pages: 2 | 5 min read

Sherman's Use of Literary Tone to Capture Readers Attention

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These Are the 8 Habits of Highly Lucky People

Why optimism and flexibility are vital to success in anything..

Posted January 26, 2016 | Reviewed by Gary Drevitch

I co-wrote this post with my daughter Josiana (aka Shoshana) Farber, who is studying psychology at the University of Toronto.

Were you born under a lucky star? Does luck follow you around? Do others consider you a “lucky son of a ….?” In the movie, A Knight's Tale , a young boy asks his impoverished father, “Can a man really change his stars?” The father answers affirmatively and many years later, that boy (now played by Heath Ledger) has become a successful jouster and knight.

So which is it: Are lucky people born that way, are they pre-ordained somehow, or do they make their own luck? Different cultures have put faith in a variety of lucky charms and symbols.

• Sailors: The albatross
• Chinese: Bamboo
• Thai: White elephant
• Japanese: Maneki-Neko
• Irish: Four-leaf clover
• English: Horseshoe
• Native Americans: Dreamcatcher
• Germans, Italians, Russians, Turks: Ladybug
• Americans: Rabbit’s foot

Do these symbols make a person lucky, or is there more to the story? Over the years, many people have considered me to be a lucky person. I don’t see it that way. While I have been successful in many ways, I believe it's been more a matter of motivation , planning, inspired action, and a good amount of sweat. Rather than rubbing that rabbit’s foot (it wasn’t very lucky for the rabbit), here are eight practical ways to change your luck:

1. Be Mindful.

Mindfulness is being non-judgmentally alert and aware of what’s going on around you as well as inside you—how you’re thinking and feeling. Mindfulness occurs on a moment-by-moment basis. When you are operating mindlessly, on auto-pilot, you are unlikely to observe opportunities or take advantage of a situation. One important key to happiness , and a key factor in becoming lucky, is developing a mindfulness mindset. How will you find that $10 bill caught in the sewer grate, or know whether to throw down rock when your opponent has a clear predilection for scissors, if you don’t have a keen sense of situational awareness?

2. Be proactive.

"Lucky" people make things happen. They are proactive rather than reactive. They make their future. And when you can take responsibility for your words, actions, and behavior, you have more control of your destiny. There are three kinds of people: Those who make things happen; those who watch things happen; and those who wonder what just happened. Yes, you might get lucky and a $100 bill might fly in through your window while you’re sitting on the couch, but your luck of finding some money on the street would improve if you were outside walking in the first place. A colleague may appear to be lucky when she tells you that she got eight new clients today; until you find out that she started working two hours before you and skipped her lunch break. She also took that online course on “completing the sale” that you thought wouldn’t be worth it.

3. Be opportunistic.

Successful people are opportunists. They have the ability to take advantage of novel and often concealed opportunities when they arise. Many people are blind to opportunities because they don’t notice them or because they are inflexible and stuck in their ways. People who practice opportunism see opportunities all around them and are able to use them to their advantage. Being an opportunist involves being mindfully aware; being flexible enough to change your original plans; and being open-minded enough to take advantage of these new opportunities. We often think of people who have traveled extensively throughout the world as being “lucky.” The truth is that most people have had many opportunities to travel at different times in their lives, yet have not taken advantage of them. They may have felt like they didn't have the money, needed to work, wanted to start their career , or didn’t want to leave family or friends behind. While there were many possible reasons at the time for not going, years later these reveal themselves as mere excuses for not taking advantage of opportunities.

4. Be insightful.

There are two types of knowledge—explicit and implicit (or tacit ). Explicit knowledge is the kind people gain from reading books and going to school—factual stuff. Implicit knowledge is what we achieve through observing and experiencing—things you really can’t teach. Both types of knowledge are important to help guide decisions or choose particular pathways. A hunch may be an uninformed guess—worth as much as flipping a coin—or it may be based on in-depth explicit and implicit knowledge—and insight! We all have insight to varying degrees, yet some are better than others at being open to hearing those inner voices. Making use of this knowledge depends on your ability to access this information and trust in yourself. Having insight involves integrating explicit and implicit knowledge with an understanding of social situations and emotions, both yours and others'. Insightful people have higher emotional and social intelligence —being able to “read” people and understand unspoken issues in a social situation. Lucky people seek knowledge and experiences and make the best use of their insight.

5. Be flexible.

Life is dynamic—always changing. Heraclitus said, “You can’t step in the same river twice.” The truth is that you can’t even step in the same river once, because even as you step in, it is changing. Appreciating the dynamics of life and being able to go with the flow provides enormous advantages to finding new ways of doing things or getting places or creating opportunities. Lucky people are flexible and take advantage of new situations. I’m flying Milwaukee to Hawaii via Chicago. There are huge storms in Milwaukee that temporarily close the airport. Even though our bags have been checked in, the airline offers to bus us into Chicago instead of flying. We decide to go on the bus. Some of our friends would rather take their chances with the airline since they are already comfortably located in the airport. We arrive in Chicago and then catch our flight to Hawaii. Our friends end up stuck in Milwaukee and don’t make it into Hawaii until the next day—when they arrive and exclaim, “Boy, were you lucky to get here yesterday!”

6. Be optimistic .

The optimist believes that this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist is afraid that this might be true! I stop at a restaurant with my friend. He complains, “Look at this cup of coffee, it’s half-empty!” I respond, “Oh, that’s too bad, they gave me one that is half-full.” We both received the same amount of coffee. But I certainly sound like the lucky one. Luck isn’t limited to objective findings; one person’s poison is another’s cure. In other words, if an optimist and a pessimist both win the same prize in a lottery, only the optimist will appear to be lucky. Optimism helps you see the advantages in any given situation. Lucky people with an optimistic outlook are better able to identify the silver lining in any given situation.

7. Think out of the box.

It’s not enough to be flexible and to accept changes as they occur. To truly enhance your ability to be lucky, take advantage of alterations in your schedule and changes in your plans. Lucky people think out-of-the-box. A hiker is isolated in the wilderness for days with his arm stuck between two rocks. Another day and he’ll die without food and water. He makes it out alive by cutting off his own arm to free himself. Was he lucky? A pessimist might say that he wasn’t—he lost his arm. An optimist would say that he was—most people would have died in that situation. How did he become lucky? Out-of-the-box thinking. It isn’t always painful; often it involves looking for loopholes and looking at situations from multiple perspectives. Two companies are competing with similar products. The one that thinks out-of-the-box with an innovative redesign or a novel marketing strategy is the one who will appear to be lucky.

8. Be resilient.

Transform limiting problems into motivating challenges. Take advantage of new situations. Several of history’s most famous inventors found out thousands of ways to not do something before they finally figured out something that worked. Were they lucky? Most people would think so. Obviously, these individuals were very bright—but there are a lot of bright people in the world. What made these people different was their resilience —the fortitude to continue to pursue their dreams , goals, and aspirations in the face of adversity. As Thomas Edison said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” There are splatters and bouncers. Splatterers crush when they fall, while bouncers are resilient. Be a bouncer!

Follow me on Twitter and on instagram @ Neil.Farber, and visit me on Facebook and at my website.

Neil Farber, M.D., Ph.D., is an adjunct Professor of Psychology at Arizona State University. He is a retired physician, life coach, hypnotherapist, researcher and the author of Throw Away Your Vision Board.

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33 Writing Prompts about Luck

Plenty of students hold onto a lucky object. Maybe it’s a rabbit’s foot that they carry (ew!), or a special pair of socks to wear on test day. Either way, they know the panic that happens if they forget their lucky object!

It’s something they might feel, but how often do they actually know what luck is and what it means to be lucky?

The truth is that every culture has some form of belief about luck, but it can still be difficult to define. So, it’s important for students to understand what luck is, why people believe in luck, and how much they can rely on luck in their daily lives.

How To Use These Prompts About Luck

There are different ways to use these writing prompts.

Students can either use them to write out one or several responses by themselves, allowing for quiet contemplation about the topic, or they can answer them in a group setting.

This group discussion will allow for students to better understand ideas that may be different from their own.

One prompt can be used a day, allowing for the unit to extend over a period of time, or several prompts can be taken on at once. This allows so flexibility, based on whatever else the class may need to accomplish.

The 33 Prompts:

• How would you define luck?
• What does it mean to be unlucky?
• Are you a lucky or unlucky person? How do you know?
• Some people say it’s better to be lucky than good. What does this mean? Do you agree with it?
• Can you think of a time in your life when you were lucky? What happened?
• How does being lucky make you feel? Why?
• Who is the luckiest person you know? Why?
• Samuel Goldwyn and Thomas Jefferson are among the people who may have said, “The harder I work, the luckier I get.” What does this saying mean?
• Can you create your own luck? How?
• Leprechauns are mythical creatures known for being lucky. Why do you think they’re so lucky, and how does it help them?
• Are you an unlucky person? How do you know?
• Some people believe in lucky numbers. Do you? Why or why not? 
• What are some good luck charms in your life? How did they become good luck charms?
• Do you consider believing in luck to be superstitious? Why or why not?
• The number 13 is considered to be an unlucky number. Do you know why, or do you avoid the number 13 for any reason?
• Have you ever seen a black cat? Did anything unlucky happen to you?
• Is it possible to create your own luck? If so, how?
• Different cultures consider certain animals to be lucky or unlucky. Why do you think this is, and can you name some of those animals?
• Do you like games that you win by being lucky or skilled? Why?
• Have you ever been unprepared in school, but gotten lucky and succeeded anyway? If so, what happened? Is this a good way to go through school?
• Can you affect luck as it is occurring? How would you do so?
• Four leaf clover are seen as lucky. Do you know why? Have you ever found a four leaf clover?
• One object commonly seen as good luck is a face up penny. Have you ever found one? If so, were you lucky after finding it?
• Is luck real? Or is it just an excuse we use for different things that happen? Defend your answer.
• Does money make someone lucky? Why or why not?
• What is one lucky thing you would like to have happen to you? Why?
• What is an unlucky thing that happened to you? How do you know that it was caused by bad luck?
• What does the phrase, “If I didn’t have bad luck, I’d have no luck” mean?
• Does being positive relate to being lucky? Why?
• What are some reasons a person may be luckier than others?
• What are some superstitions around luck that you believe in? Why do you believe those?
• Can not getting what you want actually be lucky? How?
• What characters from books and movies are lucky? How do you know? Do you like these characters?

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Writing Resource: Personal Statements

Prep-work: know your audience.

What does the prompt ask me to focus on or cover?

What do I know about the program I’m applying to? What values do they seem to have based on their website?

What do I know about the field or research area I’m going into? What things (experiences, research, interests, qualities) do I think this discipline values?

Imagining the work I would do in the career I’m hoping to get into, what does that work involve? What things would I need to do on a day-to-day basis?

Brainstorming Stories to Tell

Brainstorm as many stories as you can to start with, because this will give you more options and ideally keep you from feeling stuck or over-committed to the first thing you write! Stories that you might tell include, but are not limited to, the following areas:

• Heritage Stories: moments of interest that help explain your family, where you’re from, your cultural heritage, or some other important aspect of your identity;
• Academic Stories: moments in which you were intrigued or inspired to keep studying a particular thing; these could be about a paper you wrote, a group project you participated in, a specific book that inspired you, or any academic project or small moment in which you asked questions and pursued ideas;
• Mentorship Stories: similar to academic stories, mentorship stories highlight key people who’ve inspired you in some way. They may have seen your talent or they may have simply been encouraging even when you didn’t have any talent! But these stories should be about moments of inspiration that likewise encouraged you to pursue a topic, work, a project, etc.
• Stories of Struggle: are moments during which you struggled with something. This is an interesting category if done well, but they can be very tricky…  you want to avoid the cliched “overcoming” narrative (i.e., I struggled but overcame X.). When done well, stories of struggle can highlight grappling with ideas, experiences, and values and ideally offer complex solutions—not easy answers!

Story Writing Tips

• “Show” AND “Tell”: strong story-telling involves a balance between “showing,” or descriptive writing that places us in the moment or scene, and “telling,” writing that names your feelings and what happened from your point of view (for example, “I learned a lot…”). While both types of writing are valuable, for personal statements, it can help to try to “show” first and then only “tell” in limited moments that come afterwards.
• Be specific! Use details, adjectives, descriptions, and find ways to pack meaning in!
• Focus on moments—tiny, small interactions, as opposed to “my time in my undergraduate” or “that year of my life”

A Good Personal Statement Will….

Explain why a particular school is a good fit for a student,  in more than just a “fit” paragraph.

“Fit” means establishing—by showing—that you’ll fit into the research, culture, and interests of the department and campus community. “Fit” should, ideally, be articulated throughout the statement, and involves more than merely naming professors students would like to work with. Think about the resources available at a particular school—do any of these resources make the school an especially good fit? Think about the values a department or field seems to have—how do your experiences and work already enact those values?

• Other, non-professor ways to articulate fit : Unique archival/library holdings; Research Centers/Societies; Interdisciplinary Programs; Study-abroad opportunities; Labs doing interesting work in your field; Public-service components for work; Reading groups in your area; Interest in local community-based projects; interest in other projects the department is already involved in.

Draw on specific elements of a student’s undergraduate career  to explain why he/she is ready to pursue the life of a scholar. Students need to describe how their specific experiences have prepared them for graduate school and reaffirmed their decision to enter the type of career that graduate school will prepare them for.

• Examples of relevant experience : Working on an Honor’s Thesis or Capstone Project; Tutoring; Teaching Assistantships; Lab Research; Summer Research Internships; Community Outreach; work relevant to your field
• Template:  “My experiences ___________, ____________, and ____________ have already allowed me to see what the life of a scholar-teacher will be like; I feel ready to take that next step, as a graduate student at ______ university.)
• Goal:  Articulate the values in these work. For instance, your experiences tutoring highlight your commitment to… collaborative learning, teaching, helping others improve their writing, seeing writing as essential to critical thinking, etc. Don’t just say: “Through tutoring, I learned a lot.” Be precise about what you learned.

Have a clear direction, but still indicate openness to intellectual growth and change.

• Phrases to use : developing/evolving/growing/changing/progressing
• Sample template : “Given my background in X and Y, I can envision my research developing in several directions while at _____. Perhaps I will choose to __; or, perhaps, studying with ________, I will choose to ___________.

Indicate not simply what a school will provide a student, but also what a student will bring to a school.

This is especially important when articulating why you want to work with specific professors! Try to frame statements in terms of potential contributions.

• Sample Template:  “I could contribute to Professor X’s work on _______. Or, perhaps, given my interest in ____ and ____, I could help Professor B with her new work on _____.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Language that seems naïve, tentative, or overly supplicative..

Words to avoid:  Luck, love, hope, passionate

• “I have always loved _____.”
• “I am passionate about X”
• “Although I do not have a background in ___, I know ____ could fill in those gaps.”
• “If I were fortunate enough to have _____ decide to work with me….”
• “I hope to study ____, if I am lucky enough to be admitted to ____.”

Language that seems overly grandiose, pompous, or entitled.

• “When attending X school, I will quickly _______.”
• “My theory of V, articulated in my undergraduate honor’s thesis, has overturned Kant’s well-known theory of ____.”
• “Professor X will undoubtedly provide invaluable mentoring on my project, which I know will enable it to grow. I, in turn, look forward to helping improve her ___ project, which, though brilliant, has two major flaws:…”

Too many words:

The common word limit for personal statements is typically one thousand words, or roughly two single-spaced pages of size-twelve-font type.

Things you can cut:

• Information repeated elsewhere (e.g., in a supplemental essay)
• Information that rehashes what is said on a C.V.
• Personal anecdotes about how one got interested in the field. (Often, this is the first paragraph of an essay, and often, it is too long).

A Link to a PDF Handout of this Writing Guide

I Was Lucky to Be Alive Essay Example

• Pages: 5 (1284 words)
• Published: March 24, 2017
• Type: Essay

I was lucky to be alive. That was the first thing that struck me when I stirred and started to regain my consciousness. The realization that I am indeed alive was wondrous. My entire being was bursting with happiness and deep relief. A swarm of worried looking faces swirled around me as I dared to open my eyes to steal a glance of where I am. My head was throbbing in pain as I feel the weight of the bandage crushing on my head. I tried to get myself up but apparently it was impossible. Mum was sobbing and crying in agony. I wondered why. And then I screamed when all of my memories came flooding back in a flash.

It was just like any other typical day. Or so I thought. I made my way to the office as usual. I continu

ed working until late night. I glanced at my intricately designed watch and saw that it was a quarter to one in the morning already. I stifled a yawn as I made my way to my car through a dark and deserted alleyway. I heard someone's footsteps matching mine. I felt queasy and uneasy as wariness made its way to my heart. All of my senses was alerted at once. Absentmindedly,I tried to reassure myself that nothing was wrong and perhaps it was just me imagining things.

I quickened my pace and to my utmost horror,the footsteps behind me became more irregular and rushed as if the person behind was trying to catch up with me. I quickly got myself into the car in a swift movement and locked the door. My hands were tremblin

with fear and drenched in sweat as I fumbled for the car keys. From the rear-view mirror I saw the stranger catching us. I ignited the car engine and sped away. As I drove my car on the highway,I caught sight of a black Porsche tailing me. I slammed on the pedal as hard as I could as I was more determined than ever to get rid of that stranger.

I knew straightaway that his intentions could not be pure. My mind reeled as I contemplated on a sudden twist of a series of events. How is this even possible? I am merely nothing but just a young lady trying to make a living. Why am I being followed? Are they aware of something else that makes me suspicious? How long have this been going on? I pressed the diamond shaped button on my watch and waited on for help to come. This watch of mine has a GPS setting which will alarm the headquarters if something goes awry. The stranger kept tailing my car regardless of my many attempts to thwart and mislead him.

I thought,this guy may not be easy to fool and shake off but he would not know the roads as well as me! I was trained to memorize every single detail of the map of Wellington in case when my cover was blown,I can still have more than one escape routes to turn to. I made a sudden turn to a shortcut that was barely obvious due to the overwhelming size of pine trees beside the road. I rejoiced and triumphed over my victory for a nanosecond when I saw that I

had lost him but the victory was short-lived. The big smile I had on earlier was wiped off my face when I saw two more oncoming cars appearing out of nowhere.

Both cars were cornering me side by side and the black Porsche reappeared from behind. This time the stranger made his intentions clearly by banging on the bumper at the back of my car. I swore hastily under my breath as it was clear to me that I was being attacked from three sides,left,right and behind and so the only thing that I can do is just to keep moving forward. I lurched backwards when that damned Porsche collided into my bumper again. This time I was fired up when I saw a smug smile which turn the features of his face ugly and distorted.

I knew what they were actually after but there is no way that I will let them have it. I stared at the suitcase beside me. My mission is to ensure that the contents of the suitcase are to be protected from the hands of the enemy at all costs,even if I was to bring it along with me to my grave. All right then fellas,I will give you what you want if that is what you want so badly. I took out an exact duplicate of the suitcase earlier from underneath the driver seat and flung it out of the window with all my might towards the barrels of oil beside the road.

The three cars skidded to a halt immediately upon seeing what I did. The people scrambled out of the car and made their way towards the suitcase as

they was so focused and dead set on getting it. Little did they know that I was faking defeat. The suitcase that I have thrown contained a mini digital bomb that is going to explode in approximately 180 seconds. I slammed on the accelerator as hard as I could hoping that the decoy would serve its purpose and buy me some time to escape from the horrifying scene that was going to unfold afterwards.

Before I knew it,the earth underneath began to tremble and all of a sudden everything behind my car burst into flames. My car and I were thrown off balance. It was like one of those scenes where the car seems to be flying upwards in a slow motion except that this is for real. A deafening sound can be heard. My ears were trembling so hard due to the vast impact of the explosion. My car did a back flip and all of a sudden I was seeing things upside down. Blood was gushing out from my forehead. I squirmed in pain. I cannot move at all. I can feel my bones cracking. My vision was starting to get blurry and it took me a huge effort to focus.

I grabbed the suitcase and held on tight to it for dear life with every ounce of strength left in me. The last thing that was going on my mind was me pleading 'God,please take good care of my mum for me no matter what happens. 'And then everything went pitch black. As I gazed upon the sight of my dear mother who had suddenly looked so old and fragile helplessly,it dawned on me

that I was the very reason for her misery. I felt a deep sense of remorse and regret for causing her to be worried about me. The sight of her sunken eyes and the wrinkles on her forehead makes me feel so sad.

I wondered whether the choices and sacrifices that I have made were worth risking my life for. I am truly sorry mum for causing you so much pain,but I had to fulfill my duty and keep my identity a secret for the safety of our country. How I wish that I could tell you everything and cry out loud in your warm embrace and comforting arms but perhaps it is much more better for you to not know anything. I glanced at my comrade as he gave me a knowing look. Just in case you were wondering,yes,I am an undercover agent. I was Agent M15,but now I am known as Alyssa Lee,secretary of Brookefield Company.

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Essay on Who Am I for Students and Children

500+ words essay on who am i.

In this world, many people surround us. Though we all apparently look similar, yet we all are unique in our own ways. The uniqueness gives us an identity. I am a teenage girl. I am like most teenage girls but I am also different from others. Those differences make me who I am.

I am a girl in mid-teenage. From childhood, I always loved to interact with people. I like to know people and make friends. I am a social person and go out with my friends and family. Also, I like to visit new places. Nature attracts me. Therefore, whenever I get the vacation I always insist on my friends and family for a getaway in nature’s lap.

Travelling gives me immense pleasure. I always capture beautiful moments and places in my camera. Whenever I am sad, I revisit my photo album to look at the beautiful places and moments. The thought of those happy moments and beautiful places makes me happy.

I am serious and disciplined about my studies and read many books other than my textbooks. Reading autobiographies and detective storybooks are what I like. I am involved in extra curriculum activities. I am learning music and love to sing.

Also, I listen to all genres of music but Hindustani classical , semi-classical, Bollywood songs are my favorite. Melodious songs are close to my heart. I always participate in musical and cultural events organized in my school. I also take part in the inter-school competition and have been a winner at an inter-school competition a couple of times. Those are cherishable and proud moments of my life.

Every person is a mix of good and bad qualities. I am not an early riser by nature. I understand that waking up early is very important to become productive. Still, during my holidays I take the liberty of waking up late.

I am an ambitious person and a dreamer. My dream is to become a teacher. I think a teacher is a big motivator and guide. I would like to motivate people and guide them to do good for society.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Me in several roles

While growing up I have realized that I am an individual but I play several roles throughout the day. As per these roles, my behavior and attitude keep altering. This variation adds various shades in my personality.

In my home firstly, I am a daughter. I try to listen and follow what my parents teach me. When I do well in studies, they become proud. Yet when I do not obey them, they scold me. I get lots of love, care and attention from my parents.  I also care, love, and respect them. My parents are my first identity in this world.

Secondly, I am a sister. I have an elder brother. He takes care of me and guides to follow the path to success. My brother is also my friend. We spend quality time together playing, laughing at jokes together, and watching our favorite cartoon shows. The love, care, the fight makes a beautiful bond between us.

Thirdly, I am a student. Our teachers always try to guide us to realize our path of life. They want us to be sincere in studies and build a successful career . They also instill in us the values of a good human being. I try to be a sincere and obedient student and always do my homework and do well in studies. I also respect my teachers and am an obedient student. My teachers are patient and they always guide me to overcome my mistakes.

Fourthly, the role that we all love is that of a friend. I have many friends. I love moving out and spending time with my friends. We help each other in times of need. We live happy moments together. Friendship is very beautiful. I love to make my friends feel special, and never miss wishing them on their birthdays.

Conclusion             

Life is full of experiences. Every moment we meet different people and face different situations. In this course of life, we not only get to know different people, but we also get to know ourselves in different ways.

As we grow, our likes dislike interest changes. Our perception and outlook toward life also change with time and experience. Thus, the search to the answer to the question of who I am is a lifelong process.

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• Class 2 I Am Lucky Poem

I am Lucky Poem Class 2

A sense of self-worth is a very crucial quality that all of us should develop and maintain. It fills us with confidence and lets us take better decisions. Given I am Lucky poem for Class 2 is an amazing children rhyme that highlights the importance of self-esteem and gratitude.

I am Lucky Poem Class 2 is an interesting poem in the CBSE English curriculum where the kid feels lucky to be what he/she is. This poem focuses on self-worth. Given below is I am Lucky poem summary. You can also download the poem in a colourful pdf format and let your kid learn it anytime, anywhere. 

Download I Am Lucky Poem PDF

I am Lucky Poem Summary

The poem I am Lucky has 25 short lines. Here the narrator, a kid, is expressing his/her happiness to be what he/she is. The kid tells that he/she would have been thankful even if he/she were a butterfly because it has wings, or a myna because it can sing, or even a fish in the sea because in can giggle with delight.

The kid goes on to say that he/she would have been happy and thankful even if he/she were an elephant because it can raise its trunk, or a kangaroo because it can hop high, or even an octopus because it has 8 arms. 

Just like everything has a unique characteristic, the kid is special too. He/she feels lucky to be just that. He/She doesn’t want to be anything or anyone else, but himself/herself. 

The poem builds upon the idea of self-worth in kids. Self-worth is very important for every human being. It makes you feel more confident. 

Poems are cherished by one and all. They put forth a better way to express yourself. Class 2 poems are based on the thought process of kids of Class 2 in general. We find topics related to school, emotions, birds, animals, etc.  English Poem for Class 2 covers a huge variety of genres with exciting lines and good moral values. Click on the linked article to explore other children rhymes for standard 2. 

We hope that your kid loved reading this poem and its summary. You can also check our website and access lots of such interesting kids learning resources for your kid like brain-tickling general knowledge questions, intriguing worksheets, essays on most frequently asked topics, children stories, easy trivia questions, etc. 

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Kennebunk car thefts: Stolen Jeep recovered in Saco, returned to owner

KENNEBUNK, Maine — A local woman has her Jeep Renegade back after reporting it stolen from her Day Street residence last weekend.

Heather Smith, the owner of the vehicle, said it was not damaged in any way during the three days it was missing.

“I am very lucky to have it turn up undamaged and with nothing missing,” Smith said.

Smith said the person who spotted her missing Jeep and reported it found had read a Seacoastonline news article about the theft.

Deputy Police Chief Eric O’Brien confirmed that someone saw the missing Jeep parked at an apartment complex on Beach Street in Saco on Tuesday and reported it to the local authorities at around 8:30 p.m.

O’Brien said no one has been arrested in the case.

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The theft was not an isolated incident but instead was one of a few vehicle-related offenses in Kennebunk last weekend, Police Chief Bob MacKenzie said earlier this week.

Police received a report of a suspicious vehicle parked along the side of the road on Chamberlain Way at around 4:40 a.m. on Saturday, according to MacKenzie. The police learned later that morning that the vehicle had been stolen out of Wells.

Chamberlain Way and Day Street, where Smith resides, are close to each other in the York Street area, prompting police to believe the two vehicle thefts last weekend could be related.

When asked if he thought the incidents involved the Felony Lane Gang, a known gang of car thieves with a presence in Maine, O’Brien replied, “Most likely not.”

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Several people in the Day Street-Chamberlain Way area reported car burglaries that took place last Friday night into Saturday morning, according to MacKenzie. In some instances, cash was stolen, he added.

All burglarized vehicles had been unlocked, MacKenzie said. In a social media post last weekend, the police department urged people always to lock their vehicles.

“Don’t make things easy for a burglar,” the KPD wrote.

Anyone who has information that could help police locate the suspect or suspects involved in last weekend’s vehicle thefts and burglaries is asked to call Kennebunk Detective Steven Borst at (207) 985-2102, ext. 1319.

On Wednesday, Smith thanked everyone who kept an eye out for her Jeep while it was missing. She also urged people to take precautions to avoid having their vehicles stolen.

“Things like this can happen to anyone,” she said.