Have You Ever Felt Pressure to âSell Your Painâ?
What do you think of application prompts that ask young people to talk about overcoming adversity? Are they valuable, or limiting?
  Credit.Dominic Kesterton
May 20, 2021, 7:52 a.m. ET
Have you ever applied for something that asked you to talk or write about a time you overcame adversity? If so, did you feel pressure to share your challenges in a way that felt uncomfortable or inauthentic? In what ways might prompts like this be valuable? In what ways might they be limiting?
In a guest essay for The Times, Elijah Megginson, a high school senior, describes the pressure he felt to write a college essay on this topic â and explains why he chose not to. âI knew what I went through was tough and to overcome those challenges was remarkable,â he said, âbut was that all I had to offer?â
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