Start Your Essay?
What do you think of when you think of the word “challenge”? Do you think of a professional project? A class? Do you think of a family situation? A hurdle in your faith? Do you think of a health issue? Writing a personal essay about a challenge can resonate with readers and show your personal growth.
If you are an international candidate, perhaps what comes to mind is the “language barrier.” Whatever it is, there is a way to approach writing about challenges that can set you apart.
Table of Contents:
Selection of the Topic and Positioning
What first comes to mind as a possible topic is often the best topic, and one thing to keep in mind is this – how will the topic align with the rest of your personal statement? Will the challenge you talk about in your essay writing be something that is reflected in your overall packet? For example, if you are a business applicant, will you be describing a challenge in a professional situation that is referenced on your resume? If you are a Chinese applicant, is your essay about overcoming personal challenges of learning English? It’s great if your essay helps the reader to understand your overall packet.
Put the Reader in the Picture and Stay Humble
Your reader is in a hurry. Keep it simple. Use your opening paragraph to concisely explain the nature of the challenge and the particular setting. Keep it to four or five sentences. And keep in mind that your reader may not be familiar with the academic or professional setting that you are talking about in your essay about overcoming personal challenges, which means that it is a good idea to avoid any type of academic or professional “jargon” in personal story essay, because this can make you come across as someone who is trying to sound important.
Here is the thing: In your “how to overcome challenges” essay, you’re going to have to convince the reader of how you overcame something, which is a form of promoting yourself. But as you have already learned in the process of developing your essays, promoting yourself can backfire very easily because nobody likes someone who toots her or his own horn. So you are walking a razor’s edge. Just stay humble, and you’ll be fine.
No problem. Everyone loves a good story of overcoming obstacles. No pun intended.
Don’t Overdo It
In fact, “downplaying” the challenge can be another effective strategy in this personal essay. This conveys to the reader that you realize that the challenge you are talking about is not a big deal in the overall scheme of things, but it is something that has given you some self insight, which is what you want to share with the reader. Writing tips like these can help your essay feel authentic.
Again, this writing about challenges almost always has to take the form of self-promotion. So how are you going to stay humble? Just don’t take yourself too seriously in this essay.
How to Write About a Challenge Without Mistakes
When discussing overcoming obstacles in your admission essay, it’s essential to watch out for some pitfalls that may make things worse:
- Don’t exaggerate much. Making the challenge seem bigger than it is can make it less believable. Try to keep a tone and emphasize the impact instead of exaggerating the difficulty too much.
- Try to avoid using clichés such as “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Since relying on those phrases takes time to express the experience, it’s best to describe everything in your own words to make it more personal and avoid sounding generic.
Overcoming Personal Challenges in Your Essay: Emotionality
Authenticity plays a role in writing personal statement about a challenge that stirs the heartstrings of your audience, and it is essential to truly resonate with them on an emotional level. Here are a few writing tips for making an emotional connection:
- Speak from the heart. Be transparent because readers connect more with real-life stories and emotions:
Essay examples: “When I first moved abroad, I often felt like an outsider. I’d walk down busy streets, wondering if I’d ever feel truly at home in a place where even going to the doctor felt like a great challenge.”
- Show your progress. Highlight how you have grown through confronting this obstacle. Emotional connection frequently arises from development thus discuss the insights gained and the impact you felt:
Essay examples: “I still remember my palms sweating as I tried to greet my classmates in broken Spanish. The embarrassment felt physical, but that moment pushed me to learn, one sentence at a time.”
- To connect with your audience effectively, focus on the details (don’t overdo it though). Your narrative storytelling process should focus on authenticity and growth through your personal insights and vivid descriptions:
Essay examples: “Moving away for college forced me to confront who I am when no one’s watching. Without the familiarity of home, I learned to stand on my own, gradually discovering the independence I never knew I had.”
The Language Barrier
Let’s say that you want to write about the challenge of overcoming the language barrier. Think of it this way:
Technically the challenge was this:
- The language barrier
The challenge behind the challenge was this:
- My pride (the ego’s constraints in a new language)
- My fear (of never conquering the new language, if that would be true for you then or even now)
- The culture (if the language was not the problem at all, which is often the case)
- The timing (if you just were not ready for it)
- The setting (I was in the city, I’d been in the country all my life, for example)
- I was homesick (this can work but don’t let it get too negative)
- I was sick (but did not realize it, another not uncommon scenario)
Conclusion
The thing to do is to take a personal approach to set yourself apart. The way to do this is to consider what the challenge was “behind” or “underlying” your particular challenge with the language. By using this approach you can develop a how to overcome challenges essay that focuses on a psychological perspective, which works very well in response to this prompt.
We all regularly overcome various challenges. This fact tempts people to think that describing it in an admission essay is a piece of cake, but this assumption is wrong. If you need someone to assist you in presenting your experience, you can turn to our essay proofreading service.
Another tricky prompt can be “Discuss a time you failed.” Learn how to tackle it!
