<p>i had leukemia when i was 12, for 2 months. now i'm perfectly healthy and leukemia doesnt affect me in any way.</p>
<p>should i use this story? will it get me into a better college just because i survived cancer?</p>
<p>Your story is quite irrelevant.
It’s the way you present it that matters.
Any sob story, no matter how big or small, if used correctly, can make a real good essay.
By the same token, just because you have a huge crisis one in every one million people experience doesn’t mean you’ll get into any one university by writing an essay on it.</p>
<p>Sob stories? No.</p>
<p>Challenges and hardships that have taught you about life and caused you to grow as a person? Yes.</p>
<p>The former and the latter could be the same stories, told differently, so it depends on how you present it. Though you need to tie it to your present self.</p>
<p>Sob stories are relevant only if you can show that you learned something from the experience and you have something to contribute to the university for having had that experience. </p>
<p>For instance, I taught in the inner city for a while (usual stuff…impoverished immigrant kids, drug addict parents, me getting injured by students on occasion, etc) and used the experience in some of my essays to a particular school. My focus was on the experience challenging my perceptions of myself, my education thus far, what it meant to be American, what it meant for good-intentioned people to go into programs like I did, and examining negative and positive aspects of the experience. I got accepted, so I figure the important thing is to make it relevant to what you can bring to the university.</p>