Cadets face numerous obstacles during their tenure at the U.S. Military Academy, which forces them to overcome those plights — whether personal, academic or physical — while building a character base ...

Share on Twitter Share on Facebook Share on Reddit Share on LinkedIn Share via Email To reflect on something is to give deep thought to experiences that may have left a profound effect on you. For the ...

Colleges will ask what about your experiences mattered to you and why. Write down the details now while they're fresh in your ...

Five years ago, I began my Common Application essay with the following sentence: “To quote Ferris Bueller, ‘Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it ...

Journalists chase, find and cover stories, and sometimes, they become one. From intriguing exposés to provocative thinkpieces and raw memoirs, the personal essay has long been a media staple, enjoying ...

Over the course of 2025, we published 48 Weekend Essays. Attempting to summarise all of them would be an act of self-indulgence even by our standards, so instead we’ve picked out six that neatly ...

I'm not gonna lie: the hardest thing to get printed on Bustle as a freelancer is a personal essay. That said, personal essays are also what I'm most in need of as our features editor. The reason ...

There’s a certain kind of personal essay that, for a long time, everybody seemed to hate. These essays were mostly written by women. They came off as unseemly, the writer’s judgment as flawed. They ...

A mark of a good writer, whether fiction, essay, or poetry, is the ability to unflinchingly illuminate the emotional issues that people often try to suppress. An exemplar is Phillip Lopate, long ...

Before I pioneered writing personal essays about quitting things, people simply quit things and maybe told their friends and family about it. They didn’t quit things as fodder for an overlong essay ...