Write a piece that gives your reader a snapshot of an experience in your life in which you learned something about yourself.

Write a piece that gives your reader a snapshot of an experience in your life in which you learned something about yourself. This is a very “open” prompt so you can take the essay in almost any direction you want. But be sure to ground your writing in real, sensory, situational details. This means that if you are writing about a person, place, or experience, make your reader feel, see, hear, taste, touch, smell what you experienced. Try to minimize dialogue, although a little bit may be appropriate. Additionally, try to keep the telling of your story to one or two short scenes or descriptions of events, rather than ranging all over the place, trying to describe many different events in succession.
Think about an experience that you yourself had that was an important learning experience for you. That should be the guiding principle for your writing.
Don’t feel like you have to blatantly state what it is you learned at the end of your personal essay. Get right into the telling of the story, no lengthy introduction is needed.