I remember opening my email one morning—my hair was still half-wet from a rushed shower—and discovering the prompt: “Describe a significant challenge or hardship you’ve faced, and how you overcame it.” I actually laughed out loud, and not in a funny way. More like, “Great, now I have to spill my guts to total strangers.” Because that’s basically what the adversity essay is: a personal confessional about when life knocked you down and you had to wobble back up.

Truth be told, I wasn’t excited about it. Who wants to poke around in their own failures? But if you think about it, med schools deal with students who’ll soon face high-stakes scenarios every day—exhausting clinical shifts, emotional patients, unexpected outcomes. They need to know you can handle the pressure. It’s logical, even if it feels a little invasive.

Picking a Story Worth Telling

I spent a few days just flipping through mental snapshots of rough moments I’d experienced. Could I talk about that humiliating exam meltdown back in undergrad? Or the time I nearly dropped out of an extracurricular program because of a huge family responsibility that left me short on time and patience? Eventually, I decided to focus on the test fiasco—my reason being that it genuinely shook my confidence. The memory of stumbling out of that test room with an “Oh no” sinking feeling still feels vivid, even though it’s been a while.

I’d never done so poorly on a major exam in my life, and it caught me totally off guard. For the first few days, I handled it badly: ignoring the fact that I bombed, hoping maybe the professor made a mistake. (Spoiler alert: no mistake.) My parents tried to be supportive, but all I wanted to do was cocoon in my hoodie and pretend the outside world didn’t exist.

Turning It Around—Slowly

At some point, I realized that if I wanted to pursue medicine, I had to step up my game and figure out where I went wrong. That realization led me to re-engineer my study habits—something I’d never bothered to do because I’d always been able to scrape by on memory and guesswork. I changed my daily routine, devoted a certain number of hours to each subject, and did something terrifying: I asked a classmate for help. I’d always been the “I can do it alone” type, but apparently that only works until you crash and burn.

Honestly, it was humbling. But it also taught me that learning to say “I don’t know” is a strength, not a weakness. In medicine, from what I hear, you can’t survive by bluffing or hiding ignorance—patients’ lives depend on you asking the right questions and seeking advice when you need it. So, ironically, failing that exam became the moment that taught me humility and sparked a willingness to collaborate.

Why Admissions Committees Care

Sure, they want to know you can keep your cool when your shift is hour 18 and you’re running on coffee fumes. But more importantly, if you’ve faced adversity, you might have a deeper sense of empathy. Patients are vulnerable people, right? If you’ve been vulnerable yourself, you might connect better with them, or at least understand the panic and confusion they’re feeling. Plus, it shows you can adapt. If you never adapt, you’ll get stuck the minute med school gets rough (which everyone says it does).

Embracing the “Small” Struggles, Too

A friend once told me, “I feel like I haven’t had a big enough adversity. My life’s been okay—how do I compete with people who’ve had actual tragedies?” The thing is, adversity doesn’t have to be an earthquake-level event. Sometimes a smaller but genuinely rattling experience is enough, as long as you explain what it did to you and how you changed. If, for instance, you froze on a public-speaking stage and had to battle your way through that fear, that might have given you grit or compassion you’ll carry into med school. It’s about whether it shaped you, not whether it’s the saddest story in the room.

Wrapping It All Up

For my essay, I ended up writing an honest account of how that exam failure knocked me off my pedestal, forced me to reevaluate my approach to learning, and made me realize collaboration is a tool, not a crutch. I didn’t try to dramatize it. I just told the truth: that I was scared, I took steps to recover, and I came out wiser (and a little humbler). I think that’s all admissions folks want: a real glimpse into how you handle life’s curveballs. After all, medical training is basically a marathon of curveballs.

(Note: Every school has specific guidelines for secondary essays—word counts, deadlines, that sort of thing—so do check each place you apply to. This is just my personal take.)