Disadvantaged Student Essay

[MedicalMomma81]

After reading a bunch of threads on whether or not to check yes or no on the "are you a disadvantaged student?" question I decided to go with yes. Now I am struggling to make a compelling essay. I have the points I'm comfortable with sharing in there, but I'm hemming and hawing with whether or not to go forward with it. Will some one read the rough draft/stream of consciousness I have come up with, and tell me if I should try to change it into something, or scrap it

......I was raised in a hard working middle class family. I was raised primarily by my mother. My parents divorced when I was 5 years old, leaving her with little income to raise my sister and I. I was taught that hard work was the only way to succeed. My mother could have qualified for assistance, but chose instead to just work harder in order to provide for us. The importance of an education was never stressed. I will be the first person in my family to graduate from college. As an adult I have used this same hard work and determination instilled by my mother to over come my own personal struggles. raising a daughter on my own, to working, achieving good grades, going to school full time......

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[Indianarn]

After reading a bunch of threads on whether or not to check yes or no on the "are you a disadvantaged student?" question I decided to go with yes. Now I am struggling to make a compelling essay. I have the points I'm comfortable with sharing in there, but I'm hemming and hawing with whether or not to go forward with it. Will some one read the rough draft/stream of consciousness I have come up with, and tell me if I should try to change it into something, or scrap it

......I was raised in a hard working middle class family. I was raised primarily by my mother. My parents divorced when I was 5 years old, leaving her with little income to raise my sister and I. I was taught that hard work was the only way to succeed. My mother could have qualified for assistance, but chose instead to just work harder in order to provide for us. The importance of an education was never stressed. I will be the first person in my family to graduate from college. As an adult I have used this same hard work and determination instilled by my mother to over come my own personal struggles. raising a daughter on my own, to working, achieving good grades, going to school full time......

I was in the same situation and thought of using disadvantaged student. I criteria bothered me and wasn't clear enough, so I called AACOMAS. What they told me was this was particularly for African Americans, Hispanics, and Native American/ Native Alaskans. If you are not one of them, you don't count. I hope this makes it clear. Just to let you know, I wasn't and didn't use it; still got IIs and got in. Good luck.

 

[QofQuimica]

I completely disagree with whomever told you that you couldn't qualify for disadvantaged status unless you were a URM. They are absolutely not the same thing. Disadvantaged status takes into consideration many other factors besides race/ethnicity that might interfere with an applicant's ability to assemble a competitive application, including low socioeconomic status, decreased educational opportunities, and other extreme life stresses. So while disadvantaged status is less well-defined than URM status, and while it tends to disproportionately favor URMs because overall they come from lower socioeconomic strata compared to whites or Asians, it is not correct to consider a URM who grew up in an upper middle class household with two professional parents as disadvantaged. To use some extreme examples of disadvantaged non-URMs, would you try to argue that an Iraqi, Burmese, or Afghan refugee whose family fled civil war in their home country wasn't disadvantaged? Or the child of a West Virginian coal miner who was the first in their family to earn a high school diploma, let alone attend college? Or a peasant Chinese or Indian immigrant who moved to the US as a teenager without knowing a word of English but still managed to excel in college as a traditional student in spite of the language and cultural barriers? Most would agree that such people personify the rags-to-riches American dream.

Maybe the best way to think about disadvantaged status is that it measures "distance traveled." In other words, if you have had to overcome greater obstacles to get to the same point of applying to medical school compared to the stereotypical middle to upper middle class medical school applicant, then you have grounds for considering yourself as disadvantaged. My advice is that if you think you may be considered disadvantaged, you should answer "yes" on the application, fill out the essay, and let the adcoms decide how much weight to give to your story. FWIW, I would definitely consider someone like the OP who qualified for public assistance and was the first person in their family to attend college as having claim to some consideration for disadvantaged status, regardless of their URM status.

 

[Pose]

I checked "yes" on AMCAS because of similar circumstances, and my disadvantaged essay was very short at around three paragraphs. I mostly summarized the state of my childhood, and the challenges it presented. There was no style to my essay, and I did not write about how it made me a stronger person, though I don't necessarily see anything wrong with including that information if you aren't already writing about it in your PS. But in any case, I would definitely answer "yes," and I see nothing wrong with the ideas you have written here.