<p>I’m worried that my geographical background will hurt me when applying to colleges because I wasn’t born in America. I was born and raised in a far away Communist state called Berkeley, California. </p>
<p>But in all seriousness, I’m worried that I could be impacted negatively when applying to college because I’m from (all be it not willingly) the San Francisco Bay Area. Almost every school I’m applying to is out of state, such as Vanderbilt, Emory, Notre Dame, BC, Wake Forest, and etc. </p>
<p>From personal experience, I can understand why a college would want to take applicants from the Bay Area. But that just makes me personally more worried that my attempt to get into college will be rather short-lived.</p>
<p>Eh, actually, I doubt it’ll hurt you at most of those schools. See, when you’re in Tennessee, or Georgia, or Indiana, or whatever, everyone is not FROM California. Most of your schools aren’t, I don’t think, schools that get vast numbers of California applicants (not sure about BC - the Boston-area colleges seem to get a lot of California expats in my experience), so you shouldn’t be too overrepresented in the applicant pool. And these are not state schools, so most probably don’t have a special preference for in-state applicants.</p>
<p>Coming from the most populated state in the country may impact you somewhat. However, it’s not something you can do anything about so forget about it.</p>
<p>The most recent numbers indicate that only 6% of Vanderbilt students are listed as residents of “the west” (does not include Texas or other southwest states, so it is probably mostly California, with some Washington thrown in).</p>
<p>I don’t think CA is over-represented at Vanderbilt. I don’t know about the other schools; if you surf around the admissions pages of the schools you are interested in, you can generally come across “admitted student profiles”, which often includes geographic origin.</p>