Ostrich or Mea Culpa? Obstacles or Opportunities?

How can I write an effective personal statement for Ivy League admission justifying my average marks in my sophomore year?

My parents divorced - dad went overseas for a year; mum was never home. I was basically living alone and had to cook, do the groceries, clean the house. I usually only began my school work after 8pm.

Do I still have a chance to get into Yale given that I am now in the top 2% of my senior class?

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I was asked to answer this question on the website Quora.com.

Here is my standard response to questions about essay topics: you can write, with a few exceptions, on any topic and do a great job, or you can write on almost any topic and do a terrible job. It is almost never the topic itself that will help or hurt. It is the approach that matters.

In your case, it would be helpful for you to brainstorm about how you might write on this subject matter in ways that will permit you to introduce yourself and the world you come from. It seems to me that you should be looking at the 2^nd prompt on the Common Application since all the Ivies (and almost all selective schools) accept the Common Application:

2. The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?

Given what you have said in your question, the obstacle you faced was not really low grades; rather,  your family situation in caused you to take on added responsibilities and you experienced an academic setback. If you think of how you will respond to this prompt in these terms it seems to me you could write an effective essay.

I will add, however, that given your background, you may well want to get in a bit about being from Australia. If the school you attend is more stringent about grades than those in the US—where there is rampant grade inflation—then you need, or your counselor needs to address this somewhere in your application. What I mean by this is that you are in a position where you will be looked at as adding diversity to a campus because of your background but you low grades may not be as big an issue if your school is tougher when awarding high grades.  It might well end up you might decide, instead of focusing on grades you could focus on your overall background in order to answer prompt 1.

1. Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story

I would, in the end, encourage you to try to brainstorm on both these prompts and after that to see which one you really want to write about.

You have a chance to mention your grades on the ‘anything else we should know’ section of the Common Application, so you do not need to write about in your essay. On the other hand, you have had to overcome an obstacle and that could well be a compelling story to demonstrate your character.

These are just two things I would mention, given what you have very briefly shared about yourself, but I do not pretend to have the ‘right’ answer here. I hope that you will try to couple of different approaches when attempting to convey your character and background.

And you should be proud of yourself for doing so well after some tough times.