Reply to S/O: revealing health conditions in college app

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Look at the current thread on revealing ADHD in applications.

If essays are focused on career & major choices, the medical condition seems relevant.  Be careful about reviewing the tone so your child comes across as genuine and gives an impression as a whole candidate.

Be honest.  Are you hoping that this is your child's hook to get in because she had to work harder?  If so, keep in mind that some people have to work harder for other reasons (parents are not in the know, no money for tutoring, dyslexia, etc).  Only share information that makes AO impressed that your daughter is a hard worker and has a meaningful career plan vs. "overcoming" something.[/quote]

NP here. If her child has a significant chronic illness/disability, she didn’t “overcome” something, she actually overcame something. FFS. Parents get posters falling over themselves with sympathy when their kids overcome cancer, but anything else, and it had better “relate to their major.”[/quote]

I am PP being quoted and I feel the same about cancer.  I value personal medical privacy and I don't like to share my personal business with randoms in order to obtain something of value to me.  If it's relevant I agree with divulging.  But if one has passed through the fire, it's not always relevant to talk about it. Randoms include admissions officers, essay readers, etc.  If I wouldn't talk to a new friend or prof about it naturally at the new school, why would I want some random essay reader rating my life experience/hardship and how I wrote about it against others.

I guess I'm a bit harsh.  Sorry if I struck a nerve.  But I do believe this.[/quote]

NP: PP, I hear what you're saying, and I take no offense, but fyi with many chronic illnesses, one never actually "passes through the fire." Disease management might grow more intuitive, but it's as if, once your house is no longer burning down, have to spend the rest of your life managing a brush fire that never goes out and that could set the home ablaze all over again. Type 1 diabetics for example (my kid is one) make literally hundreds of extra decisions every day, and they're 24/7 fending off two different versions of potentially fatal health emergencies.

So it's a really tricky thing for a kid with chronic disease to figure out how much to talk about it, and to articulate what they want to say. For my own kid, who was diagnosed in high school after a hospitalization, learning to manage the disease was the defining experience of her high school experience. It will be a massive part of college and the rest of her life. But she also didn't want her application to be "about" her sickness, because while she has the disease, she is so much more than a kid with the disease.

Her decision was to state the facts pretty simply in the additional information section, and then to write her essay and supplementals about different things entirely -- joyful things, aspirational things, which feel more like the core of who she is at her best.[/quote]

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