Admissions Essay

I think everyone has a different approach to answering questions like this. I thought of my admissions essays as my first interview, they were a way to express my unique life experiences and show that I would be a good fit for the program.

My approach to answering questions like this is to start by doing some free writing on each part of the question. Nothing formal, sometimes it may be as simple as bullet points. That way you have all your different thoughts in one place. You can then pick out the parts you think would make the strongest or most interesting essay and work to connect them.

I know that is not a very specific answer of how to write the essay but I hope it can give you some direction on where you may want to start.

Spend some time on the schools website and see what sort of stuff they emphasize. Are they focused on research? Developing nurse leaders? Driving policy? Giving back to the community? Just like a good cover letter, you want to figure out the mission statement and then focus your interests in the program and nursing within that framework. Also second doing some brain storming and outlining, rather than plunging into a narrative. Organizing your ideas first will give your essay more cohesiveness.

Remember that this question is going to be asked of hundreds of applicants, and the answers are all going to be very similar. The purpose of the essay is really not to see if you've got some deep, altruistic reason that you want to be a nurse. It's to assess your ability to communicate written information in a clear, grammatically correct, properly structured format. It doesn't really matter what you say. What matters is that you write in a way that demonstrates a good knowledge of the English language and understanding of the requirements of a professional essay. The admissions team will be looking for an structured essay that has an introduction, 3-4 body paragraphs, and conclusion. Something that has organized ideas and flows from one paragraph to another in a way that makes sense. Something that doesn't have typos, informal language, grammatical errors, run on sentences, etc. Something that shows you have a developed vocabulary without using a thesaurus for every other word. Something that shows you can make your point without spilling your whole life story or adding a lot of flowery, superfluous language. The content is less important.

Honestly, this is, like PP have said, like a job interview. Sometimes you need to embellish a little to sound good, but even though you want to express altrusim in your essay, you better have it too or you might not make a very good nurse.