Here's my essay! I struggled a lot throughout high school due to a rough childhood, so I wanted to highlight my personal growth in my essay! Any feedback would be appreciated :D
Essay A
Many people who visit Orange County, California are likely to describe it as a paradise, and with that being said, growing up here was a privilege in itself. Although I love being within miles of the beach and living in such a beautiful area, I feel that I had a much different experience growing up here than others. I went to school in a predominately wealthy part of town, and I stood out against my upper-middle class peers. My parents divorced when I was very young, and after the divorce, both of my parents were very poor for many years. My mother was unemployed and an alcoholic, and even though my father had a job, he was unable to afford many things for my two older sisters and I. We spent our nights sleeping on air mattresses and living out of suitcases, always moving from one house to the next. It was experiences like these that led me to growing up in an environment that helped shape me into the devoted, caring, and driven individual that I am today.
At my mother's house, there was frequent drinking, drug use, and chaos. Even though I enjoyed school and wanted to do well, it was very hard to focus with such an unstable home life. My mother never stressed the importance of school and hardly checked my grades. In my Freshmen year of high school, the night before a math test, my mother's boyfriend got sent to jail for a DUI and domestic violence. This made our situation even worse for some time because he provided for my mother and my sisters financially. I vividly remember counting coins with my mother and sisters very late at night so that my mother would have enough money to buy us food for the next day. As my life at home got worse, so did my grades.
Although my past hindered my ability to focus on school for most of my childhood, I was not going to let it define my future. After high school, I enrolled in a community college and began to surround myself with people who inspire me and motivate me to do better. I began going to counseling and started to use my own goals as motivation. When I was a child, I felt trapped and never thought I would be the happy, self-motivating person I am today. As a Sociology major, I know that the environments that children are in can either help them or hold them back. I also know that people are able to take what they have and learn from their experiences. Knowing this, I have since become grateful for the lessons that my rough childhood has taught me. It may have been unfortunate at times, but it made me appreciate hard work and has given me a reason be to be very optimistic. I know that no matter what happens in your past, you can always strive to have a brighter future.
You clock in with 496 words. There is room for a portion of the essay that I suggest you develop. Explain how you worked your way back to becoming a whole person. What was that struggle like for you? You mentioned counseling and and using your goals as a motivation. Tell us about those goals and how your past experiences helped you realize what direction you wanted to take your life in. The overall essay is quite touching emotionally and informative. But it can use further development towards the concluding part. Instead of speaking about what you will learn or what you already know in relation to sociology, talk to us about how your past experiences have strengthened you and helped create the strong person you are now. Tell us how you overcame these obstacles in better detail. That will give us an idea of the world you came from and how you developed into this independent yet caring person of today. Remember, you can always cut back on your back story in favor of telling us more about its effect on you. How did the arrest of your mother's boyfriend affect your lives? Where you a better person somehow when he was around? All of these experiences build up to create your personality. So don't just give an overview, take us into that world. The word count can be brought down later on in editing. It is hard to edit a paper that still has a lot more to say because it has said so little at the moment. There is more to your story than you have told. So tell it in a way that you are comfortable with so we can help you polish your application essay :-)
