GAMSAT Essay Example Fear

This is a exemplar Part B essay on fear. When writing Part B essays, consider reflecting upon your own experiences in each body paragraph:

What did you use to think about fear?
How did fear impact your life? What did you discover about fear as you grew older?
What do you think about fear now?

This discursive essay uses a narrative to engage the reader. However, there are many ways you can start this – with a recount, analysis, argumentative stance. There are no rules as long as your ideas are clear!

You can use this framework for any Part B essay that you encounter, considering your past and current experiences regarding the topic. Previous GAMSAT topics have included pets, confidence, risk-taking, and ambition.

Read another GAMSAT Essay on Pets

‘How much I missed, simply because I was afraid of missing it.’

Fear was the only emotion that gripped me as I faced a crowd of educated experts, hands shaking over the play button of my first conference presentation. I felt like an imposter, an undergrad with less than a year’s worth of research experience playing dress up in a room full of academic giants. I make eye contact with my thesis supervisor. “Confidence” she mouths, followed by a fist pump of unwavering support. If I made a fool of myself today, I would also be making a fool of her.

I have many fears. There are general ones, like heights and ghosts. Then there are shallow (but equally frightening) ones, like maths tests and going bald. Some I have outgrown, but one has remained a constant companion in my life – the crippling fear of being exposed as a fraud. It stems possibly from self-doubt, and an overwhelming awareness of how much I don’t know. In hindsight, my fear during the presentation was slightly narcissistic and very unrealistic – how could I measure myself against people who have spent the equivalent of my entire lifetime becoming experts on this topic? Our fears are often so self-centred we only realise how trivial it is when we step back and look at it within the larger context.

My fear had an unyielding hold on my life. While running an optogenetic experiment on rodents to study stress, I think of how nice it would be to simply turn on a laser and switch off the fear centre in my brain. However, as I look at my rat with her fear centre inhibited, unfazed by a stimulus which should otherwise kick her flight response into overdrive, I also understood the value of fear. Biologically, fear exists as an evolutionary survival mechanism – so if something makes us fearful, our first response is to get away and to survive. However, this mechanism doesn’t translate well into most dangers of the modern world, where chances of being jumped by a lion in the wild are relatively low. As such, my fear of being outed as an imposter drove me away from countless opportunities and in my academics, led to burnout from constantly trying to address every gap in my knowledge. There isn’t much to be gained when your fear takes over every aspect of your life – rather than act in the best interest of my survival, my fear seemed to be hellbent on eating me alive.

The anxiety of not being prepared enough led to a high level of organisation, the anxiety of not knowing enough led to a habit of constantly learning new things and applying this knowledge where possible. Unknowingly, I had shed some of my fear by relying on the very coping mechanisms that used to run me dry. The fear was not overcome, rather, somewhere along the way I had understood that it came from a place of personal insecurity and by using my fear to overcome these insecurities had in a way dampened both. The extent of the hold a fear has on us is often lost when we understand why it came to be in the first place.

Following the conclusion of my presentation, I remember bracing myself for someone to ask a difficult question that would unmask my incompetence. “Well how could they?” my supervisor had laughed afterwards, “Your anxiety didn’t leave room for any misinterpretation in that presentation. Not a single loose thread.” The PowerPoint slides I had prepared for potential questions went unused, as in my fear of being exposed, I had come up with questions well beyond the scope of my project.

Questions for you: What are the main ideas presented? What could you do to incorporate your own experiences and personal voice?

Part B essays do NOT have to be bland, philosophical or embedded with complicated words. Incorporate your own personal voice and experiences into your writing to create a unique piece that is evocative and interesting to read!

Planning your own essay: What experiences have you had in having to choose and what were the consequences? What did you learn from them? This will form your three arguments. Comment them below and let me give you feedback! ⬇️