my common app essay

eboverli
Sat, 07 Jul 2007 22:58:47 +0000

A range of academic interests, personal perspectives, and life experiences adds much to the educational mix. Given your personal background, describe an experience that illustrates what you would bring to the diversity in a college community, or an encounter that demonstrated the importance of diversity to you.

I know the prompt says I need to talk about “an experience” indicating that I should concentrate on one event, but I think I could write a much better essay about the culmination of my life.

I’m writing about my diverse life. I’m making sure to mention my Mexican step-grandfather, my paiute step-grandfather, aunts, uncles, and cousins, my afghani brother, and my panamanian aunt. I’m also making sure to mention my republican step-mother, democrat mother, independent father, and libertarian step-father, and I’m also mentioning the religious diversity in my family: my athiest mother, my agnostic/deist father, my ghost dance paiute family, and my finatically christian step-mother and grandparents. I’m pretty sure that I can convince them that the white, blond haired girl is the most diverse applicant they have ever dreamed of. I also want to discuss that so much diversity in my family made me a unique individual and forced me to choose my own religion and political party (and to an extent my ethnicity) at a young age, which encouraged abstract and complex thought to be brought to the forefront of my life at a time when most kids only still hadn’t developed basic ideas about their identity.

So my question is, do you think it will hurt me that I am not following the prompt to a t.