Hi everyone. I am a high school junior in the IB program in central FL, and I currently have a 4.0 unweighted GPA and a 4.54 weighted GPA. My dream schools include Brown (I’m a legacy), Williams, and Swarthmore.
Here is my question: How appropriate would it be to write a college admissions essay about the effects of gun violence on my life?
A little more about me: My friend was one of the students killed at MSD on 2/14/18. Following the shooting, I was able to attend March For Our Lives in Washington, DC, and also participate in a roundtable a few days later with then FL Senator Bill Nelson. I hosted a town hall that April with a focus on gun violence, and the speakers were candidates up for election in the 2018 midterms. In addition, I was at a baby naming in a synagogue just down the road from the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh during the shooting in October, and was put on lockdown. I am planning on hosting another town hall this spring about gun violence.
Would my experiences with gun violence and its repercussions be an interesting topic to write an admissions essay about, or would it be considered as nearly exploiting gun violence in my favor?
David Hogg is going to Harvard after a gap year. He did not have “trouble with his applications”. If it is a topic you care about and you can make the essay revealing about yourself (per the tips mentioned above), I think it is fine.
^ But this might be a case of “exception proves the rule”. Write about your connection to school shootings AND get mocked by Laura Ingraham. David Hogg took the gap year to avoid settling for one of his safeties.
Here’s the thing: you have 650 words. You need to use each and every word to sell your application.
You can use just about any topic as the backdrop. But make sure the essay is not about gun violence, not about what happened to your friend, what happened to you. None of those essays sell you as a college applicant. Each has you as a passive almost-participant.
An essay about how you changed as a result of gun violence, about how you plan to live your life as a result, about how you plan to keep other kids safe-- those are all active topics that sell you
Super on-point post from @bjkmom. The ‘topic’ is just a vehicle for getting things across about you. As an analogy, like eggs benedict’s main job is to be a vehicle for hollandaise sauce: both are rich with yummy goodness, but one is the vehicle and the other is the whole point of the thing in the first place).
Happily, you have a lot to work with, as you are already acting on the changes that those experiences brought out in you. Try to take your thinking to the next level: base layer- this happened; next layer- how you processed it; next layer- what you did with that; next (& most crucial) layer: what you take from those 3 layers as to what is important to you / about you / about how you are looking to interact with the world in the next phase of your life.