Delaware: An accomplishment that took great effort

250 words

Describe an accomplishment that took a great deal of time and/or effort on your part. What motivated you to persevere when it got challenging? Who or what did you turn to for support, and how was that helpful?

What it’s really asking

Required only for test-optional and Honors College applicants. This is the grit prompt. UD wants one accomplishment that genuinely took sustained effort, the specific thing that kept you going when it got hard, and the specific people or resources you leaned on. All three parts (effort, motivation, support) need to show up.

Why they ask it

Standing in for a test score, this essay is UD's evidence that you can carry a hard, long task to completion. Vague determination does not prove that. The named turning point, the named source of support, and how it actually helped are what make your perseverance believable.

Three ways in

Pick a long arc

Choose an accomplishment that spanned months or years so 'a great deal of time' is obviously true.

Find the low point

Identify the exact moment you almost quit, and what specifically pulled you through it.

Name your support concretely

Say who or what you turned to, and explain how that help actually worked, not just that it existed.

✕ Weak opening

“One of my greatest accomplishments was never giving up on my goals, no matter how many obstacles stood in my way.”

✓ Strong opening

“By the fourth failed batch, my grandmother's bread recipe was just a sticky brick and a kitchen that smelled like burnt yeast. I almost threw the starter out.”

✦ Annotated example · Eleven months to a working irrigation timer. Written by EssayLens to teach, not a real applicant’s essay. Tap a highlighted line →

For eleven months, the most ambitious thing in my life was a plastic box of wires that refused to water my grandmother's tomatoes on schedule. ¹She had arthritis and could not manage the morning hose, so I decided to build her an automatic irrigation timer from a microcontroller, a moisture sensor, and a solenoid valve I bought used. I had never written a real program. ²The first version flooded a whole bed at 2 a.m. The second never turned on. The third watered correctly for nine days and then died in a rainstorm I had not waterproofed against. ³What kept me going was smaller than passion. It was that every failure narrowed the problem. A flood meant my timing logic was wrong, not my wiring. A dead board after rain meant the enclosure, not the code. ⁴I turned to the people who had already failed before me: a Reddit forum for hobbyist electronics, where I posted my schematics and got told, bluntly, that I had no flyback diode protecting the valve. They were right. ⁵On the eleventh month, the box watered the tomatoes at 6 a.m., skipped the days it had rained, and kept doing it without me. My grandmother did not understand the circuit. She understood that she got to keep her garden. ⁶I learned that perseverance, for me, is not stubbornness. It is being willing to be wrong faster than I am willing to quit.⁷

1Opens with a small, vivid, slightly funny stake. The modesty fits UD's taste for self-awareness over polish.
2Establishes a genuine motivation (a specific person, a real problem) and an honest skill gap, setting up grit you can trace.
3Three concrete, escalating failures give the 'great deal of effort' real texture instead of a vague 'it was hard.'
4Answers the 'what motivated you' half with something honest and unglamorous (the satisfaction of narrowing a problem), which reads as authentic rather than performed.
5Directly answers 'who did you turn to and how it helped,' with a specific resource and a specific, technical fix that proves she actually used it.
6The payoff returns to the original human motivation, closing the loop and keeping the accomplishment grounded in why it mattered.
7Ends on a self-aware definition of perseverance that is specific to her, not a generic platitude, which is precisely what UD rewards.

Stuck? Start here

What is one accomplishment that clearly took months or years, so the effort is obvious?
What was the exact moment I almost gave up, and what specifically kept me going?
Who or what did I lean on, and how did that help actually change things?

Before you submit

Does my accomplishment obviously involve sustained time and effort, not a one-day win?
Did I name a specific low point and the specific thing that motivated me through it?
Did I name a real source of support and show concretely how it helped?

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