Tuck students are encouraging, collaborative, and empathetic, even when it is not convenient or easy. Describe a meaningful experience in which you exemplified one or more of these attributes. (300 words)
The example you pick here will say a lot, so again the CHOICE of story is 90% of it. You need to dig deep to find a moment when you helped someone else… and doing so provided absolutely NO reward or advantage to you personally.
In fact, the coolest versions of this essay are the ones where you demonstrate one of the three listed traits to your own DISADVANTAGE. That’s how committed you were to these values. When have you RISKED something in order to encourage someone else, achieve a group success, or help someone in a difficult spot? When have you been pressured NOT TO HELP SOMEONE, but did so in spite of that pressure? If it’s easy to imagine someone else doing the thing you did… chances are good that it’s not a good enough story. Don’t tell us about the time you helped a disabled child “successfully get out of the way of an oncoming train.” Congrats, you did “as any feeling person would do.” Tell us instead about the time you helped a teammate pull something off that could have resulted in a promotion for THAT PERSON, and threatened YOUR OWN POSITION, but you did it anyway because doing so (in some bigger picture calculus, the human kind), FELT like the right thing to do… “consequences be damned.” “Judgment of others be damned.”
The correct essay here should have us mutter to ourselves, “Hm, were *I* in the your shoes, I’m not sure I would have had the guts/instinct/will to do the same, given all the circumstances.” That should be a solid litmus test. And if you can get someone to have THAT reaction, congrats, you’re on your way to draft with real potential.
This is always a fantastic litmus test: how you’d behave WHEN NO ONE’S LOOKING. It usually reveals your truest nature.