no!!! it can only hurt you
You need to talk to your current guidance counselor to see what is on your transcript.
Yep! Find out from your current counselor whether any info about the suspension from the old school will be supplied to colleges, on either transcript. Let them guide you in dealing with it. You may yet want to say something about your lower grades freshman year, but there’s no need to volunteer anything about substance use or disciplinary action, if colleges won’t know otherwise. If they will know, then coordinate with your counselor so that what you say complements what they will say, and vice versa.
Congrats on doing so well the last couple of years!
Thank you so much. It really does mean a lot, especially the last sentence.
Have your current counselor say something about how you overcame an obstacle in Freshman year to become the student you are today… Your transcript will speak for itself!
Highlight another part of you in your essay of who you are today… Do you know how many AOs read essays about overcoming this or that. It’s not unique. Make your essay stand out from the rest in a positive light
Good Luck.
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You are not defined by who you were three years ago. Don’t think about what you left behind, think about what you are going toward. What motivates you now? You saw something worth changing for. Write about that. As a reader, that is the truly exciting part of the story.
Even if the suspension can’t be scrubbed from your file (and please do try), if you think about it, your success story explains everything they need to know. Your strength of character. Your goal. Your drive. Those are what an AO is going to care about. Not some specific bad behaviors when you were 14. No need to shine a light on the negative.
Why you will be a great addition to a campus isn’t because you were suspended or did drugs but don’t anymore. It is because of who you have become. Think of it like sales. If a company is selling a new and improved model of a car, they don’t ever mention the problems the old model had in their advertising. They focus on the features that makes the new model great. Exact same thing.
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You need to find out whether the suspension is on your record. Talk to the guidance counselor at the school where it happened.
If no, it is not on your record, don’t mention it at all.
If yes, it is on your record, then the GC can explain, and you can also explain BRIEFLY and straightforwardly in the supplementary essay on the Common App, and yes make sure to say that you learned from it, have abstained since then, and that your academics have improved steadily.
I believe the Common App no longer asks about disciplinary actions, so check that out to make sure or maybe someone here can confirm.
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It looks that there is consensus that the OP shouldn’t write about the suspension. Is there any hard data on this (like AO saying “don’t do this”), or is that based just on assumptions?
I am not saying that the assumptions are wrong, just curious. The topic sounds interesting to me, and I would like to read that essay rather than what the student did in the summer, but I am not an AO.
Not only the suspension, but bringing it on campus which is how I’m assuming the OP got caught, is a really bad look for admissions officers. They’ll have thousands of applicants that didn’t do that and showed better judgement in 9th grade and that’s who they’ll accept. There’s some kind of myth that college will accept the 2.7 to 3.8 to 4.0 over someone that got 3.9 to 4.0 to 4.0. If it’s not on the transcript, don’t bring it up as others have said. Let the colleges think you struggled freshman year because of adapting to high school.
Applicant A: 2.7 3.8 4.0 discipline issues, suspension
Applicant B: 3.9 4.0 4.0 no discipline issues
You don’t have to be an Einstein to figure out who’s getting in.