<p>I am a Canadian IB student who is seeking to apply to Ivy League’s and other U.S. universities. Yet I have no idea on where to start for my common app. </p>
<p>To sum myself up: </p>
<p>My parents are divorced. I struggled with clinical depression, which had significant impact on my grades from grade 10-grade 11. I lived by myself often, for months at a time throughout my high school life (9 months, etc). I have a ton of extracurriculars and I’m a strong HIV and AIDS advocate because I am a bisexual teen. </p>
<p>Would it be too risky to talk about my sexual orientation? Or does that depend on the university? </p>
<p>Is it too “typical” if I talk about my family life? </p>
<p>People always advocate avoiding controversial topics. But if you spin it in the right way, it could work in your favor. Just try not to make it one of those “my journey to become a better person” or “overcoming an obstacle” essays since those are cliche. Again, talking about your clinical depression may be sensitive, but if written in the right way, I believe it can work in your favor.</p>
<p>I think your sexuality would be a good topic, since it would show how you can bring a diverse aspect of yourself to the college campus. I don’t think it’s that risky unless you’re applying to a Catholic university (lol). Clinical depression would work well as a topic if you can detail how you overcame it or how it’s positively affected your life perspective. Your life as a whole sounds like it has serious but interesting topics. Just make sure you don’t turn your essay into a 500 word cliche. Good luck!</p>
<p>I ask because it would not be a good idea to apply to Notre Dame or Brigham Young. Schools like those tend to more conservative, therefore, hostile toward homosexuality.
(based on what I heard).</p>
<p>Now back to you,noodle. Right now, your orientation seems like a big part of your life, but it still is just a part. There is so much more that makes up the whole of you. With much respect to Martin Luther King, do you want to be judged by the content of your character or the ‘color’ of your orientation?</p>
<p>How the OP wants to be judged has no bearing on how an admissions officer will judge the OP. I want to be judged by the merit of my soul, yet I am judged by my race. The question here is whether an admissions officer at a religious school would judge the OP. And I think that yes, a school with a strong religious background would look upon sexual orientation at the detriment of the OP.</p>
<p>I would talk about the HIV/AIDS activism, and maybe mention how your sexual orientation inspired it, but I wouldn’t dwell on it too much. Personally, I don’t think your orientation increases your value to the school in any way. Sure, you bring “diversity”, but it’s not the kind of diversity they can point to on a chart to make themselves look good, like having a lot of minority students, and it’s not the kind of diversity which truly makes the student body more interesting, like having people who have lived in another country or play the didgeridoo. Of course, maybe I’m a rarity in not caring about a person’s sexual orientation, and admissions officers actually will care, but I doubt it.</p>
<p>I am actually in favor of bisexual/homosexual people who are open and write about it, I dont think I’ve ever rejected an essay like that, Since most are well written if written at all, they always go to the higher ups</p>
<p>Thank you everyone for the replies - it means a lot to me.</p>
<p>I was originally thinking of writing about depression instead of focusing on my sexuality. For a lot of admission officers, I assume they’d think - oh get over yourself, you’re 17, you’re confused. </p>
<p>I understand they’re all super controversial topics and I would really have to write an excellent essay that won’t jeopardize my chances.</p>
<p>@overachiever01, I am applying to: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, UC Berkeley, Dartmouth, Middlebury, UPenn, Chicago, and possibly the three colleges and Duke. </p>
<p>Since I’m Canadian, I don’t want to apply to too many US universities. McGill University in Canada is also ranked 17th in the world and is very good, so I plan to attend McGill if I do not get accepted to U.S. universities.</p>
<p>Out of those topics I would like to know more about why you lived alone for those stretches of time; that is definitely unusual and probably had a large influence on your development. About sexual orientation, if I were reading essays I wouldn’t want to hear about heterosexuals writing about their boyfriend/girlfriend/love life either. I think you run into TMI there :)</p>