<p>I have 2 common app essays and am unsure which would work better for BC?
1- A situation in my junior year when i was caught “cheating” by giving a friends a hw assignment to copy. The essay is not to bash the school, but rather to show how i learned a lesson and overcame the repercussions of the incident.
2- An essay about the first time I won a crtoss country race and how all my hard workover the summer taught me how dedication/hard work is necessary to suceed.</p>
<p>I believe the cheating essay is written stronger, but would a Jesuit College/BC frown upon the fact that i “cheated”?? Which essay am i better off using?</p>
<p>I would go for the first essay (i.e. "cheating). Frankly, there is so much more potential there for a human interest story. The running one is such a terrible cliche. I was friend to a huge number of track geeks in my high school and almost 2/3 of them wrote about their running experience. Furthermore, BC has a huge number of very athletic students who are either playing sports here or have played sports in high school. I can assure you that sport essays are a dime a dozen here.</p>
<p>I believe that, subconsciously, we like a good redemption story more than a triumph story. Even every sport movie has a redemption sub-plot in its somewhere. Our culture is a sucker for redemption (and the politicians know it too). I would not hesitate to write the cheating essay.</p>
<p>Dear eagle2009 : My first reaction was that you would have to be nuts to do an essay about a cheating situation - but after reading Reddune’s perspective and thinking the subject through, the topic is a great foundation to show who you are. The essay goes from “harmlessly helping a friend”, to “accused of cheating myself”, to “how it impacted others”, and closes with “lessons learned”. Maybe the lesson learned came full circle and you were not harmlessly helping your friend, but actually hurting him/her in more ways than one. The topic sounds like a wonderful mea culpa with some serious lessons for being in college.</p>