Growth Mindset and College Application Essays
Yesterday was a snow day for schools. So I bundled up with the kids and went to the bike park, turned sledding hill nearby. While watching my 6-year-old daughter make her way down the hill, I bumped into someone I hadn’t seen in a while. We got to talking about our kids and how to help them pursue their interests. The topic of a growth mindset came up.
She told me about how her 12-year-old daughter has taken to baking lately. She made some cupcakes the other day, and they didn’t turn out. Her daughter immediately concluded that she wasn’t good at baking and was going to give up. Her mother, an elementary school teacher, took this as a teaching opportunity. She began telling her daughter about the importance of having a growth mindset.
The American psychologist Carol Dweck once said, “The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (or especially) when it’s not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset.”
This is a really important concept when it comes to life, in general, and writing college application essays. Teens who write about times that they failed but didn’t give up (even if every bone in their body said otherwise) and kept persisting show key qualities college admission officers are looking for in their student community, namely resilience, the ability to persevere in the face of adversity, focus, effort, and passion, to name a few.
To learn about how to develop a growth mindset, watch Carol Dweck’s talk here. Some of the best college application essays I’ve read have to do with teens learning from failure and turning them into learning opportunities - to learn about themselves and how strong they are.
So, how did this mother explain the growth mindset to her daughter? She gave the example of the bakers in Is it Cake? a show they watch as a family. She reminded her that these bakers worked really hard to make cakes look like objects (e.g., footballs, suitcases, movie popcorn in a box, etc.) - they had to make and re-make their creations hundreds of times before they perfected it.
