July 2026
LUMS Essay Examples: Strong vs Weak Excerpts
LUMS essays are typically built around a formative experience or personal challenge, not a subject-specific pitch. These annotated excerpts show what separates an essay that reads like every other application from one that actually holds a reader's attention.
The formative experience opening
Weak
"Throughout my life, I have faced many challenges that have shaped who I am today. One of the biggest challenges was when my grades dropped in O Levels. This experience taught me the importance of hard work and perseverance, values that I carry with me to this day."
This excerpt could be submitted by thousands of applicants unchanged. "Many challenges", "hard work and perseverance", "carry with me to this day" are all phrases a reader has seen hundreds of times this cycle alone. There is no specific moment, no specific decision, and no evidence that anything actually changed in how the applicant thinks.
Strong
"After my O Level results came back lower than expected, I made a spreadsheet tracking exactly which topics I lost marks on across every subject - not to feel better about it, but because I didn't actually know why it had happened. The pattern that emerged surprised me: it wasn't the hard topics I was losing marks on, it was the ones I'd assumed I already understood well enough to skip revising."
This works because it replaces the abstract claim ("perseverance") with a specific, almost mundane action - building a spreadsheet - that reveals how the applicant actually approaches a problem. The insight at the end (overconfidence on familiar material, not difficulty, was the real issue) is something only this applicant could have written.
The family business angle
Weak
"Growing up, I helped out at my family's textile business every summer. This experience gave me valuable exposure to the business world and taught me important skills like teamwork, communication, and time management that will help me succeed at LUMS."
This is a resume bullet point wearing an essay's clothes. "Valuable exposure", "teamwork, communication, and time management" are the kind of generic skills any part-time job could produce, and the essay never shows a single instance of any of them actually happening.
Strong
"My uncle extends credit to almost every retailer who buys from our textile stall, sometimes for months, with no paperwork beyond a notebook entry. I asked him once why he didn't just require payment upfront like the shop two stalls down. His answer - that the shop two stalls down had fewer repeat customers - was the first time I understood that what looked like financial risk to me was actually his main competitive advantage."
The strong version narrows to one specific exchange and extracts a genuine insight about incentives and trust from it. It doesn't claim any skills; it demonstrates a way of noticing and questioning things, which is what the essay is actually being read for.
Why LUMS
Weak
"LUMS is Pakistan's top university, known for its world-class faculty and beautiful campus. I want to attend LUMS because it will give me the best possible platform to achieve my goals and become a successful professional."
A reader at LUMS already knows LUMS is well regarded - telling them so adds nothing. "Achieve my goals" and "successful professional" are aspirations with no content behind them, and this paragraph could be submitted to any university in the country with a single word changed.
Strong
"I sat in on an economics lecture as a prospective student and watched the instructor get interrupted by a student challenging her model's assumptions - and instead of moving on, she spent ten minutes actually working through whether the challenge held up. That's a different kind of classroom than the ones I've been in, where the syllabus is treated as fixed and the goal is to reproduce it accurately on the exam."
This works because it's built from a specific, verifiable observation rather than a claim about the university's reputation. It shows the applicant has actually engaged with what LUMS is like as a place to learn, not just what LUMS is known for.
What all three strong versions have in common
Each strong excerpt replaces a general claim with one specific, small moment, and then extracts an insight from it that the applicant could not have had without living through it. None of them mention perseverance, passion, or hard work directly - those qualities are visible in the reasoning itself, not asserted in a sentence.
The test for your own draft is the same one that applies everywhere: could this paragraph have been written by a different applicant with a slightly different life story? If yes, it isn't doing its job yet.
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