“Discus an accomplishment or event, formal or informal, which marked your transition from childhood to adulthood within your culture, community, or family.”
When i entered high school my family moved to a school district that was very racist, sexist, homophobic… Pretty much any hateful thing you can think of, the school had it. Anyways, I want to write about witnessing all these kinds of hatred in my school and how it made me realize how different the world really is, how it made me more accepting of people from different backgrounds, how it introduced me to social activism and the rights of others, and how I tried to fix the situation by educating my peers.
However, since I’m white, I’m not sure if I’m qualified to write an essay on racism and xenophobia and such? All anecdotes in my essay are things that I observed in my school and things that other students told me about certain cultures, but I’m not sure if an admissions counselor will roll their eyes If they read an essay about social activism from a white girl. Or maybe I’m just paranoid because social activism is kind of a touchy subject? All the schools I’m applying to are liberal and my essay pretty much screams that I’m a liberal from the very first sentence, but is writing about political/social stuff a risky move, considering that there’s every chance that the person reading my essay could be a conservative? I don’t really talk about politics at all, but I talk about being pro-LGBT and being pro-feminist, etc, which are things that are more liberal.
Also, my teacher told me that we shouldn’t say anything bad about people or places in our essays, and my essay talks about the toxic comments from students and teachers and how I hated going to school there. Does that count as calling out the school for being so bad? I mention how the school did nothing to stop bullying and how a few teachers publicly humiliated students because of their religion or orientation. I want to describe the toxic environment but i don’t want to totally roast the school, you know? I also don’t ever say the schools name, but I stated the town in which I lived so all it would take is a simple google search to figure out which school I’m talking about.
Should I keep going with this essay topic, or is it a bad idea? Is it too risky, too cliche, or just a bad idea in general? Is it too cliche to write about this topic? Should I go for something more obscure and unique like the hotdog Stanford essay instead?? This is my first rough draft, so please be nice and provide constructive criticism, but please tell me if this isn’t something I should be writing about.