What are “Lived Experiences” vs “Exeriences”

[Anonymous]

Think of the difference between these:

In my experience, cheating men who offer excuse after excuse as to why now isn't the "right time" to leave their wives don't ever leave their wives for the Other Woman. If they'd wanted to, they would have the first year. Your odds aren't getting better with more time.

I would say this, as over the course of my life, I've had friends in this position a few times now, and... it never works out. However this:

In my lived experience, cheating men don't leave.

Very different. I would never say that - I've never had a man cheat on me (or at least, not that I know of). Lived experience is more immediate and directly.

[Anonymous]

AOs will get sick and tired of reading about made up sorry ass stories lol

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:AOs will get sick and tired of reading about made up sorry ass stories lol

Your life is your life. Write about it however you want. They want to get a feeling for how you will be on campus with the other students.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:AOs will get sick and tired of reading about made up sorry ass stories lol

Your life is your life. Write about it however you want. They want to get a feeling for how you will be on campus with the other students.

getting a feeling from something that anybody could have written lol

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:AOs will get sick and tired of reading about made up sorry ass stories lol

Your life is your life. Write about it however you want. They want to get a feeling for how you will be on campus with the other students.

Who wants a campus full of mopey kids waxing on about their trauma and competing for a gold in the trauma Olympics? Or kids that think they are oh so special, different and unique and full of themselves. What a bummer it would be to be in a dorm with a bunch of Debbie Downers.

[Anonymous]

Why can't the question just say 'tell us about yourself'? The focus on lived experience seems to narrow it to hardship stories.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Why can't the question just say 'tell us about yourself'? The focus on lived experience seems to narrow it to hardship stories.

DP. +1 A ton of time dedicated on this thread to slicing and dicing the distinction between experience and lived experience. I agree that if you "experience" something it is lived and not in theory so the point of calling out a "lived experience" seems contrived. For the purposes of college admissions, the more direct request would be just "tell us about yourself". That could be approached many ways - either from a hardship perspective if that's the case, or not.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:isn't lived experiences redundant? Colleges should be encouraging students to be clear, concise writers by avoiding such phrases.

No, it’s not redundant. Read the thread. Plenty of explanations.

Do you have an example of a personal experience that is not a lived experience?

Lived experience refers to experiencing something yourself rather than obtaining knowledge about something passively, ie through media or secondhand.

Writing about a non-lived experience in a college essay would be ridiculous. Agree with the person above who said the word "lived" is redundant.

An "experience" is going on a mission trip to "help" people in poorer countries. Lived experience is actually growing up in those conditions. You're welcome.

The meaning is exactly the same if you take out the word lived. It’s unnecessary to make the point.

The meaning of "exactly the same" is the same if you take out the word "exactly" . It's unnecessary to make the point. Look who's the snowflake lib now!

lol!

Snowflake and lib are redundant. Keep trying.

Nothing left of your argument. Nothing left but word games.

But you like word games. Which is why some of you are so desperately trying to split hairs here. If you actually had an interesting story to tell you wouldn't need to call it a lived experience. The experience would speak for itself.

"Lived experience" is a defined term, distinct from experience.

https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100109997

"Personal knowledge about the world gained through direct, first-hand involvement in everyday events rather than through representations constructed by other people." Also "In phenomenology, our situated, immediate, activities and encounters in everyday experience, prereflexively taken for granted as reality rather than as something perceived or represented;" and also "From Althusser's structuralist Marxist perspective, all human activity, which he emphasized is not a given or pure ‘reality’, but a ‘peculiar relationship to the real’ which is ‘identical with’ ideology."

"Lived experience" = Marxist nonsense. Therefore when they ask you about your "lived experience" they are asking you to generate the sort of Marxist nonsense that your Marxist professors will want to hear. This is good practice for you! If you are not a Marxist who is capable of parroting the party line, you really won't fit in at an elite university. Probably you should go to trade school.

[Anonymous]

If I were an admissions officer, I would be sick to death of hearing these manufactured sob stories. Spare me.

[Anonymous]

Are “lived experience” essays common this year?

Or has it switched to tell us about your community and your place in it?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If I were an admissions officer, I would be sick to death of hearing these manufactured sob stories. Spare me.

I was a reader for a national scholarship last year and almost half of the applicants wrote about being gay or trans or nonbinary. I swear I am not making this up. It was just weird and definitely felt off, whether the kids were lying or deluded or whatever. Must be a weird time to be a high school teacher now.

[Anonymous]

I am a ghost. Can I write about my dead experience?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:An experience is something you did once (a vacation, a summer job, a robbery, a championship game).

Your lived experience is your experience of life in your world on a day to day basis (preacher's kid, farmer's daughter, lawyer's kid, foster child, only white kid in a majority black high school, individual with a disability or child of a disabled parent, 6th generation Harvard crew offspring who really wants to go to Princeton, child whose parents don't speak English, expat kid who was moved from country to country from birth and has no Passport for a place that feels like home).

One is an event; the other is an enduring life circumstance (which can change or may have).

Is “being athletic” or “musical prodigy” lived experience?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If I were an admissions officer, I would be sick to death of hearing these manufactured sob stories. Spare me.

The prior trend was manufactured “works of charity” where students paid thousands of dollars to go build houses in a third-world country with 20 of their friends.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I am a ghost. Can I write about my dead experience?

On this zombie thread, sure, write about your undead unlived experience.