I am going to apply to Stanford, Harvard, and MIT in the future. My mom banned me from seeing my dad right before high school. It played a major part of my life and tennis career but I feel not including it?
Try that last sentence again. What are you really asking?
Also, what grade are you in now?
I think AdComms regard “hardship” as situations where you father is in prison or deported, and you had to work a job after school to help your minimum-wage earning mom put food on the table for your 5 siblings, and not a situation where you disappointed your private tennis coach by not making all your second serves.
1.For one I don’t have a damn private tennis coach. I can not afford one. I do tennis at my school.
2. I do work a minimum wage job as of this summer .
What do you want to say in the essay? If you are using it as an excuse for your grades or performance, don’t. If you want to talk about how it made you feel, how you solved the problem, then okay, maybe (I still wouldn’t). If you want to talk about some outcome that really helped you overcome the loss (you explained how much it meant to you to your mother and she arranged visitation, or how you felt because your father didn’t fight for you but you overcame that by xxx, again maybe.
It’s just not clear what you are trying to achieve by the topic of the essay. If it is just emoting, or complaining, or explaining performance, I’d skip it talk about your job or your tennis skills or robotics or something else.
No this is not an appropriate topic for a college application. I can understand that it’s effected you a great deal, so I would talk about it with your guidance counselor who can make mention of it in their letter of recommendation as a stressful life circumstance that you are navigating (hopefully successfully). But for you to write about it focuses the admin people on your loss, your grief, your pain…not on what you want them to focus on, which is your strengths and your ability to contribute to the campus.
If you are indeed grieving the loss, and I can imagine you are since you’ve raised it here, then you should ask your mother to talk with a therapist. Or ask your guidance counselor for a recommendation about how to talk to your mother about this. Unfinished business has a way of taking up a lot of mental energy and it rarely goes away by ignoring it.
Sorry for responding late thanks for your guys feedback!
How was that a hardship? How has it shaped who you are now? If you can discuss it here, then we can tell you whether it’d be something worth discussing in a college essay or not.