Creative Thinking, Admission Essay Example

By definition, creative thinking has no borders. It can change a nation or it can change an individual’s life. All that is needed is a mode of thinking that literally “creates”, and goes beyond real or imagined limits.

An example comes to me from my own experience. A few years ago gas prices rose dramatically, at least doubling what people had long been used to pay. Friends and family members adjusted as, I think, the majority of people did; they budgeted, they tried to cut down on driving for recreation reasons, and they paid the higher rates.

One man I knew, however, was in a particular dilemma because of this issue. He had just secured a six-month consulting job in a city nearly two hours distant, and one he could not reach by public transportation. He needed the job desperately, but he also calculated the costs as they were now facing him, and the reality was that this transportation expense greatly lessened the appeal of the job. If he took it and drove to it, he would be breaking even, at best, and the job had been pursued to allow him breathing space in the near future.

Unwilling to concede defeat, however, he was determined to find a way to meet his original goals. He expanded his thinking to accommodate other possibilities; that is, since certain factors were out of his control, he opened his mind to creative solutions. It occurred to him that he himself was part of the problem, in that he was coming from a fixed location. If he could alter that and set himself up where transportation would not be a huge expense, everything could proceed as planned. He then used the Internet and social connections to investigate living arrangements in the immediate vicinity of the job. In a matter of a week, he found a roommate situation which seemed ideal for his needs. He then sublet his own apartment, and was able to perform the consulting job with virtually no additional expense.

This stays with me as an example of how “creative thinking” is not necessarily an artistic effort. It can also be a simple use of imagination, and a willingness to examine all possibilities, to achieve very practical ends.