<p>If I answer the second honors program supplement question (b. “Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.” - A. Einstein. Describe your most interesting mistake.) with a description of my procrastination for this particular essay, will that be a bad idea or do you think the adcoms will find this interesting? Or has this been done before?</p>
<p>If I were you, I wouldn’t explicitly say that it’s about my procrastination. For example, if I procrastinated by playing around with programming instead of doing math hw, I would write something like “I got a zero on my math hw once because I lost track of time when I discovered a breakthrough in programming blahblah.” Something like that.</p>
<p>So you mean to kind of use a euphemism for “procrastination?” I’m sorry, I don’t quite understand.</p>
<p>I think it’s both a bad idea (remember, you want to convince them you are a person who has what it takes to succeed) and probably done to death.</p>
<p>The quote is about taking risks–trying something new, and some of these things work out (and therefore weren’t a mistake) and some don’t (so, in retrospect, that must have been a mistake).</p>
<p>“I shoulda started this essay earlier, but my mistake was that I didn’t, and now I’m writing it at 3 a.m.” is not as compelling as “I tried to [something] and it [failed in some spectacular and interesting way], but from that I learned to be a better [something].”</p>
<p>Well I’m not going to say I waited until like 3am to write it by more about my struggles with procrastination, how it is a weakness of mine, and how I have gone about tackling it and not resorting to it. </p>
<p>But if you think it is a bad idea I won’t write about that…</p>
<p>So does everyone overall find it to be a bad idea?</p>
<p>Will a poor honors program supplemental essay hurt my chances of being admitted to GWU itself?</p>
<p>you’re completely missing the point of that essay prompt. how do you know the outcome of the mistake before you get accepted or not? i’d write about something else.</p>
<p>Well I meant that I was going to write about how I have procrastinated before and how I have attempted to change this habit and how it has affected me… But, since everyone seems to be against the idea, I have written about a different mistake.</p>
<p>Good choice. The prompt asked you to talk an interesting mistake, with the implication that it should have arisen in the context of trying something new. Procrastination isn’t interesting at all, and it isn’t a mistake that arose in the context of trying something new.</p>
<p>^
Yeah. I ended up writing about an accident/mistake and overcoming fears associated with it afterwards…</p>