Someone told me that writing hardships are too typical
But I seriously had 7 surgeries in foot and I did 2 varsity sports and encouraged me to study medical field
Topics are only cliche because people make them that way. Dont write the cookie cutter sports essay( we were losing the game, but I came back and won, this showed me to be a hard worker bla bla bla…). I went through a similar thing with sports and surgeries and that made me want to be in the med field as well. I think I may talk more about the things that I saw at the doctors office/what inspired me and less about the amazing sports comeback(which hasn’t happened just yet:)
Also do not spend mass amounts of time talking about how much your life sucked. Use a paragraph to explain, but then move on to describing how that impacts you today/ changed you for the better or whatever you want to say.
I was born with the illness and I was hindered from doing sports since I was young but I always wanted too. Doctors also encouraged me and etc. unlike others hospitals were a place relief for me. And I wanna talk about how I was able to overcome my hardships through sports at high school and how it was a huge jump because I was scared of acceptance from others
You can mention the negative, but don’t shine too much of it. Focus more on the outcome and your journey to overcome your hardship. Everyone has their hardships.
Even cliched essay topics can be turned into wonderful essays. Write more about the mental struggle than the physical pain as 7 surgeries and recovery sums up the ordeal your body went through. If you focus on how you gained the mental toughness to get back to sports, that would make for a riveting essay.
Take your own question literally:
Can I write about (insert topic)
You can write about anything, but your topic in and of itself is not going to be what interests the AdComm. Your topic is the object, but you are the subject, and you are what matters.
As all the other posters have said, it depends what you do with your topic. The forumulaic ‘bad thing happened to me, it was hard, I overcame, I want to help the next person’ will be fine for many colleges.
If you are looking at more selective colleges they will expect you to take it to the next level: what does that mean for who you are today- not what career path, but you? can you transcend your singular experience and speak to a larger experience / community / understanding? That part is seriously hard work, and takes a lot of thinking (and usually a lot of drafts)- and separates an ok essay from an exceptional one.