Essay Q: CBS Personal Experience

[Chos]

Good morning everyone,

Anyone out there still vetting topics for the 'Personal Experience' question?

Essay 2: Describe a personal experience and how it has influenced who you are today. This essay should have a personal rather than a professional focus.

I'm a military guy transitioning in to private enterprise (seeking J-term as an entrepreneur).

I want to write about Fear (recognizing it, overcoming it, and executing visions by relentlessly executing attainable goals). My 'fear' (haha) is that this will be read by the adcoms as a 'professional' topic. Where any military topics would definitely be professional, I feel like my enterprise experiences could be fair game (especially since I'm applying to J-term)?

My outline looks like this:

Focus & Fear
Accepting fear and not letting it cripple you
Crossing the line - taking action
Everyone has ambition and ideas, but few overcome fear and execute on those ideas
Set goals and focus on executing them
Filter out the noise, manage the fear, execute

What do you guys think? This essay would have a private enterprise/business context, but again up until now my 'professional' career has been in the Air Force.

Thanks in advance!

Chos

[myEssayReview]

I think your fear is rational.This might be read by the AD Com as a professional topic since your story is eventually leading to realizing your professional goals.
The essay prompt is clearly asking you about a personal experience that has shaped your personality.So you want to reflect on a life -experience that has influenced your character and personality and made you who you are.

[Jon@Admissionado]

Hey Chos,
Sounds like it could be a very interesting essay. The question is: which story are you going to attach it to?

Because obviously you aren't just writing the essay for the essay's sake, but we also wanna think about what you can get out of it.

So, if you are telling me a story about being wing commander and leader i dunno how many planes on a super dangerous mission and the bullets are flying, etc. etc. well then, that is likely to be a mighty strong (and fascinating) story....