My college application essay was about mental health
Today, I am confident, self-assured, and unapologetic. I unconditionally accept myself for who I am. I know who I am, and I’m proud of it.
I will never know the exact reason why I was accepted to Harvard. I didn’t have perfect test scores or a perfect GPA, and I never conducted groundbreaking scientific research or founded a nonprofit organization or became a world-famous musician. But I did write a college admissions essay that was honest, vulnerable, and unflinching. I wrote my college admissions essay about my struggle with mental health.
The college admissions essay is the ideal opportunity to showcase the unique parts of your personality and formative experiences that made you the person you are today. Many people choose to write about obstacles or difficulties they encountered — such as the death of a loved one, growing up in poverty, or experiencing a life-changing illness or injury — and how their experience with adversity made them stronger. For some people, however, their struggles were not external. For some, their experience with mental health was what defined their personal growth.
In my college admissions essay, I wrote about the mental health struggles I experienced in middle school. Born and raised in a low-income household in Queens, I attended public school until I was 12 years old. With the assistance of a program called Prep for Prep that helps low-income students of color such as myself attend prestigious private schools on full scholarships, I transferred to an expensive private school on the Upper East Side for middle and high school.
This experience profoundly shocked me. Back in public school, my classmates were the children of low-income or middle-class immigrants from all over the world. Now, my classmates were the children of billionaires, businessmen, and old-money families that had been prominent in the United States for hundreds of years. Nearly everyone was white and wealthy and immaculately dressed. For the first time in my life, I became hyper-aware of my identity as a woman of color and a low-income individual. And I saw the extravagant ways in which my classmates lived their lives — their massive closets, designer clothing, lavish penthouse parties — and I slowly realized I could never be one of them.
The transition to this new school triggered an internal battle with my mental health that persisted for an entire year in eighth grade. I wanted so badly to fit in, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t. And I was too young to really understand why. I thought that the reason why I couldn’t fit in was there was something deeply, horribly wrong with me — the way I looked, the way I acted, the way I dressed. I spent a whole year hating myself and trying desperately to become someone I was not — someone that maybe my classmates could accept. I changed my name, altered my appearance, and adopted mannerisms that weren’t mine. In an environment where I felt I could not be myself, I tried to become someone else.
I chose to write about this experience in my college admissions essay because it radically shaped me into the person I am today. For an entire year, I was my own worst enemy. While there were external factors that triggered this experience, it was mostly happening in my own head. My biggest nemesis was not my fellow classmates, but rather my self-hatred and my low self-esteem. But this experience of self-loathing helped me grow into the person I am today. Today, I am confident, self-assured, and unapologetic. I unconditionally accept myself for who I am. I know who I am, and I’m proud of it.
Nian is a content creator at Mascot. She recently graduated from Harvard College.
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