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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Nonsense. Compelling narratives, in literature, film/tv, and in college essays, need a hardship to overcome. That’s not to say that the hardship needs to be a tragedy but “the everyday” is generally somewhat mundane.[/quote]

Just what an admissions officer wants: 5,000 essays on the "hardship" of not making the lacrosse team.

You have this exactly backwards. The best essay most high schoolers (who have not dealt with true hardships in life) can write are reflections on mundane things.

Pick up one of those collections of "best" college essays, and what will strike you is how the topics are really quite ordinary. Two I still remember from a collection I read many years ago  are (1) a girl who wrote about her father's death--but she didn't write about the experience of losing him per se, she wrote a narrative about the year anniversary of his death and how she put on her father's old coat to go wear to the cemetery and how it felt to dig her hands deep into the pockets of it and (2) a boy who wrote on the topic of "the best advice he'd ever received," which for him was when he was a young kid standing in the middle of the street and a car pulled up and the driver yelled, "move your ass!" and how that advice--to get moving--was really the best. :-D These are the types of essays that are memorable. [/quote]

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