Is the personal statement a good place to discuss poor freshman grades?
I didn’t have a death in the family. I wasn’t dyslexic and I wasn’t clinically depressed.
I had a 3.2. Reason being my interests weren’t the same as others and I always felt left out because what I loved isn’t like what others loved and when people it was difficult to manage and adapt to high school rigor. Sophmore year I got to a 3.7 and Junior year a 4.02.
Would this be an acceptable reason for bad freshman grades that I could discuss in my personal statement or is it not worth bringing up?
If your personal statement is about how you’ve grown up since freshman year, then this would be fine, and not all that uncommon.
If instead, you write about how you didn’t fit in before, and how you hated everybody, and still do but you came up with a master plan to play the game to get better grades so you can ultimately get revenge on all of them, well that might raise a few red flags…
I would suggest you have a talk with your GC about how to discuss your grade improvement. It might be a better place for the GC to mention it in his/her rec letter. Of course, a 3.2 as a freshman can mean very different things at different schools, so they can help put it in context.
Best of luck to you, and kudos for the turnaround/improvement.
As stated, those reasons don’t really sound great to discuss a lower freshman GPA. I agree with the above that if yoru essay is more about how you changed and adapted throughout high school, that’s better. The colleges will look at the upward trend, you have that in your favor. Honestly, I’m not sure that (given a lack of crisis situations such as a death or disease) you need to provide a reason…the fact that you brought things around speaks for itself.