I am currently a sophomore. I don’t know whether or not I should talk about my life as a Nigerian immigrant and how it positively and negatively affected me, or if I should talk about my love for photography. Over the summer I will be planning a website in which I will be curating and sharing the photography of talented teenagers. I have also been into photography since the eighth grade so it is something that has impacted me greatly. I usually study other people’s photos and their skills drive me to want to be a better photographer. I don’t know if writing about my experience with photography and how it pushed me out of my comfort zone during high school is a strong enough topic. This topic could show admissions officers that I am willing to work hard at accomplishing things that I am passionate about and it could boost my application.
If I talk about my immigrant story, I could talk about how the new culture that we became a part of partly led to my parents separating; it resulted in my mother working two jobs and me feeling guilty sometimes for not being able to help her with finances because of my IB schedule and her not wanting me to fail my classes. This could show that I have motivating factors in my daily life that push me to be a better person instead of a victim of my environment.
But I think that the whole “immigrant experience” story might be a bit too cliché because many H.S. students who are immigrants apply to many top schools and use the same type of story for their essays.
Yo. Chill. You still have junior year left to gain new experiences, further explore your passion(s), and just develop yourself more as a person. By then, you may have an alternate topic to talk about, you may have different viewpoints on and/or additions to the topics listed above, and you will have better writing skills and a greater ability to properly integrate emotion into your writing.
I would advise you to start working on the essays the summer before senior year starts. Until then, keep kicking butt at high school and taking care of the other components that will also go in your application (grades, test scores, ECs, etc).
And to answer your question, I don’t see why you couldn’t appropriately integrate these two topics into one essay. And don’t be too scared of writing something “cliche”. IMO, as long as it’s not something annoyingly cliche (like going to an impoverished country to volunteer and gaining important values, or winning a sports trophy and learning the value of teamwork), it can work with the proper writing. My family immigrated from Ethiopia, and my cultural experience growing up in america was the center of my common app essay. I didn’t make it cliche, however; I injected bits and pieces of my own unique experience growing up like this, and I worked hard to polish the writing as much as possible. The book “On Writing the College Application Essay” helped me with this. For the most part, I left my passions I explored throughout high school for the supplemental essays. Got into Harvard and Stanford!
@AroundHere
people might have different point-of-views. Also, I’m not sure whether or not I should talk about my photography in a personal statement instead of the main essay.
What about writing about the above topics or something else. Rather than selecting by topic, write about the topic that gives you the opportunity to discuss both personal interest and illustrates writing and thinking skills.
Why not start off with the hardships of immigration and transition to photography?
Talk about the financial hardships and the divorce (and about how depressed you were), and then transition into how photography gave you hope and became your passion.
Why not talk about both and how your photography is influenced by your immigrant experience? I think that would be an interesting story. Or how your immigrant experience drove you to your place behind the camera and because you felt your story was important to tell, you found it important to tell the stories of others.
I concur with the above advice. Start by describing the hardships associated with immigration and the divorce. Then, talk about how photography served as a therapeutic outlet for you.
As someone who has published books that are first-person narratives, I can say with confidence that doing things with an eye to what you will eventually write about it can skew your experience, and that skewed experience may sound less genuine. Organic experiences are more likely to ring true to any reader. My suggestion is to ignore your essay until the end of your junior year. Between now and then focus of the two factors that will define your college options – your grades and your test scores.