You took a church trip to Tijuana. You built a house, played with the kids, painted a school. You couldn’t get over the kindness of the locals. You were appalled by the abject poverty, but struck that even amidst difficult circumstances, people were smiling and happy. Sound familiar?
Ask any admission reader about the Mission Trip Essay, and you’ll likely be met with a groan. There’s no topic I’ve encountered more often, and none that -- forgive me -- can be more banal when done wrong.
It’s not that your reactions aren’t honest and valid and important. There’s a reason mission trips are a staple -- they’re meant not simply to aid an underserved community, but to change the privileged participants for the better. So if you came home feeling permanently altered, hooray! The trip did its work.
However. The predictable success of the mission trip experience means it is not brilliant fodder for a college essay. It is really, really difficult to create a memorable personal statement when you’re treading such familiar ground.
If you’re dead set on writing about your mission trip, you’ll need to subvert the formula. Maybe you struggled with how little difference you were able to make in a few short days. Maybe you started to wonder if service tourism is its own form of exploitation. Maybe you discovered, upon returning home, that poverty exists not just in Mexico but in your very own hometown. Those are all essays I’d like to read.
In the spirit of “show, don’t tell,” here’s a further thought: instead of arguing that the mission trip has forever improved you, demonstrate how it did so. Have you gotten involved with volunteer projects in your community? Tried to reduce your own consumption of natural resources? Made time to chat with those you would have previously overlooked?
Know that when I turn to a Mission Trip Essay, I’m expecting the worst. This can be a tremendous opportunity -- because an essay that pushes beyond the obvious, one that shows true growth and depth of thought, will easily stand out from the pack. And you’ll have turned the most cliche of topics into something memorable.
