Discover Oneself Through Writing Personal Narratives
“What do you love to do? Why?” “Share a memorable experience you’ve had, and why is it memorable?” These two questions, or some variation of them, are very typical essay prompts in school applications. They come up when you apply to private high schools, to colleges, and even to many selective summer programs. I ask my students these questions all the time as well, because they’re great questions when I try to know them.
The majority of students, however, hate to answer this question. Some don’t know what they actually love to do or find truly memorable, and others can’t quite articulate the reasons behind it. “I don’t know …” I get this answer a lot especially from students who are STEM-oriented. The funny thing is that, with some probing, the majority of students I’ve worked with actually come up with good answers. Some have great answers.
What makes a great answer? An honest and insightful answer that gets to the core of you, to what lies deep within you. It’s an answer that will not only make an impression on others but also become your own compass and your own battle hymn. It’s a story, an expression, or an image of yourself that sparks the light in you. As Oprah once said, "You have to know what sparks the light in you so that you, in your own way, can illuminate the world.”
I still remember a short essay I wrote when I applied to Stanford and got in. It was an experience that happened when I was only four years old, living with my parents in a remote area of China. That was in the 1970s and China was still very poor. Our home was in a dorm-like facility affiliated with the hospital my mom worked at and we would buy our meals from the cafeteria in the hospital. Each family was given a ration for meat dishes they could purchase each month. One day I told my mom I wanted to have chicken for dinner. “We’ve used up our ration. We can’t buy anymore,” my mom told me. “I will get it,” I said. So there I was, a little four-year-old, wobbling my way to the hospital cafeteria on my own with a bowl in my hands. My mom watched me from the window. A while later, I came back, with a chicken dish in the bowl! I must have moved the cafeteria worker. I spoke to my mom proudly, “Next time you want a chicken dish, I will get it again.”
I didn’t remember this experience in fact; my mom told me this story. But it somehow stuck with me and became one of my most memorable experiences. Playing it again and again in my mind strengthened this can-do spirit in me. And it must have been that can-do spirit – the enthusiasm to persuade others, the optimism in the goodness of others, and the willingness to try despite the odds – that carried me to apply to St. Paul’s School, a boarding school in Concord, NH, back in 1990. I became, to my knowledge, its first graduate from mainland China three years later, and that was how my adventures in the U.S. started.
Of course, there have been countless times my efforts didn’t pan out and I would admit that I shied away from taking risks for a long, long period. But that spirit never fully went away, and it came roaring back when I found a cause that I deeply believe in. It was the fuel that enabled me to start 7Cs Leadership Workshop. That is me. I see it and I embrace it. And that’s the power of a personal narrative and that’s why I think, from the perspective of an educator, personal narratives deserve their place as an important part of school applications in the U.S.
If you are willing to go on this journey with me, using personal narrative essay prompts as tools, considering the writing process as a journey to make sense of yourself and to discover what lies within you, I hope you’ll read the upcoming series of articles.