UC Essay Prompt 1: Leadership Experience

Describe an example of your leadership experience in which you have positively influenced others, helped resolve disputes, or contributed to group efforts over time.  

If you consider leadership as your strength and have some interesting experiences as a leader, you must definitely choose this as one of the four essays to answer.

What is important to answer this prompt is that we focus on “leadership” as the main theme. Moreover, given the word limit of just 350 words it will be effective to pick ONE main example/experience to showcase leadership as a skill. It needn’t necessarily be a designated leadership position like being the president of a student club, but can be any experience where you took on the role of a leader.

While writing the essay, you need to clearly outline the leadership experience, explaining how you approached the leadership task and by highlighting on your ‘leadership style’. This can further be elaborated by writing about the ways in which you used your leadership skills to overcome the challenges faced and finally what the final outcome of your efforts was – positively influencing others, resolving disputes or contributing to group efforts?

Here is an outline that can be used to structure the essay:

• Start the essay by describing the situation
• How you handled the challenges one at a time – steps taken and defining    philosophy or inspiration behind the same
• Final outcome or result
• Why do you think you were an effective leader and what you learned about yourself through this experience
• Conclusion: How this leadership style will help in future endeavors as well.