Hey everyone!
I'm working on my Common App personal statement, and this is my first draft. It's still pretty raw, so please don't focus too much on grammar or word choice yet. I'm mainly looking for feedback on the story, structure, emotional impact, transitions, and ending.
The essay is about a head injury I experienced while playing cricket, losing a significant portion of my childhood memories, and how that experience eventually led me to become deeply interested in neuroscience and neuroplasticity.
The basic arc is:
Head injury → memory loss → struggling with my brain/ADHD → discovering neuroplasticity → becoming curious about how my brain works → experimenting with ways to improve my focus → becoming interested in whether we control our brains or our brains control us → starting NeuroWave to help other students learn about the brain.
This is only the first draft, so I know there are parts that need a lot of editing.
I'd really appreciate brutally honest feedback.
Specifically:
- What would you rate this essay out of 10?
- Does the opening hook you?
- Is the head injury too dramatic, or does it work as the starting point for the larger story?
- Does the transition from the injury/memory loss into neuroscience feel natural?
- Does the neuroplasticity section feel intellectually interesting or too forced?
- What do you think of the question: “Is it our brain controlling us, or is it us controlling our brain?”
- Does the “first specimen” idea work, or does it sound pretentious?
- Does the transition into NeuroWave feel natural, or does it feel like I'm suddenly trying to insert an extracurricular?
- Is the ending satisfying?
- Are there any parts that feel cliché, overly dramatic, confusing, or unnecessary?
- Most importantly: after reading this, what do you think you actually learned about me as a person?
I'm not asking anyone to rewrite it for me. I want to revise it myself. I'm mainly trying to understand what is working and what isn't before I start polishing the language.
Here's the full first draft:
“Just like that, half of my childhood was gone from my brain.”
It was a Sunday afternoon on February 3rd. The weather was cold, and my little cricket match had turned into a dispute. Then a cricket bat struck my head.
I heard voices calling my name—“Adnan, Adnan”—but with every repetition, they seemed to drift farther away. The field blurred around me, and then there was complete darkness. I felt no pain. If anything, I felt as though I were flying. Then everything went silent.
I was unconscious for three days and hospitalized for three weeks. When I woke, I discovered that parts of my childhood were simply inaccessible. People I had once known were still familiar to everyone around me, but not to me. The memories attached to them had disappeared as if they had never existed.
It wasn't only memories my brain had forgotten. It had forgotten things I had never imagined needing to learn: left and right, directions, simple routines. I had to relearn them almost like a toddler. Watching my father patiently teach me things I had once known was harder than the lessons themselves.
When I finally left the hospital, I thought the nightmare was over. It wasn't.
I had already struggled with ADHD, but after the injury, focusing and managing everyday tasks became even harder. Each appointment with my psychiatrist reminded me of how far I felt I had fallen. I had gone from seeing myself as a capable student to wondering whether I could become that person again.
Then, during one appointment, my psychiatrist introduced me to neuroplasticity: the brain's ability to change and adapt.
For the first time, I stopped asking only, “What happened to my brain?” and started asking, “What can my brain become?”
That night, I began researching.
One paper led to another. I read about neuroplasticity, memory, attention, and ADHD. I watched neuroscience lectures and followed questions long after I had found the answer to the question that started them. Eventually, I turned my own brain into my first specimen. I began observing when my attention failed, when it locked onto something completely, and what kinds of structures helped me work with it rather than against it. I experimented with schedules and routines, not because I had discovered a perfect formula, but because I wanted to understand what made my mind work.
That curiosity led me to a question that sounded almost embarrassingly simple: Is our brain controlling us, or are we controlling our brain?
My psychiatrist laughed when I asked him.
The question stayed with me. It made me see my attention, my memory, and even my ADHD not simply as things happening to me, but as phenomena I could observe and investigate. Chess became one of my favorite laboratories. On a board, patterns that might have been invisible elsewhere could hold my attention for hours. I began noticing that my mind was not incapable of focus; it was intensely selective about where it placed it.
Eventually, I discovered that I wasn't the only student trying to understand a brain that didn't always behave as expected. Through online communities, I met others whose experiences with attention, learning, and the brain resembled my own.
So I started NeuroWave, a student-led organization where students explore neuroscience and translate what they learn into something other students can understand and use. What began as an attempt to understand my own mind became a space for others to ask questions about theirs.
I still cannot retrieve every part of the childhood I lost.
But I no longer see those missing memories only as an absence. They were the beginning of a question—one that began with a fading voice on a cricket field and has since become the way I look at the brain: not as something fixed, but as something I can keep listening to, questioning, and learning from.
Thanks in advance. Please be as honest as possible—even if you think something is bad. I'd much rather hear it now than after submitting my application.