Writing about hardship without performing it

There's a persistent belief that scholarship essays require a dramatic hardship story. Committees read a lot of these and the ones that land aren't the most extreme — they're the most reflective.

If you write about something difficult, the essay should spend more time on what you did and what you understand now than on the difficulty itself. The hardship is context; your response is the subject.

And if your life hasn't included a dramatic hardship, don't invent proximity to one. An honest essay about something ordinary you care about deeply outperforms a manufactured struggle every time.