POZ Community Forums
Main Forums => Living With HIV => Topic started by: aupointillimite on December 11, 2011, 09:03:33 pm
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Hi everyone!
I feel bad for being absent for months and then swooping back in asking for advice, but I'm in a bit of a bind, and I need some perspective. I will try to be around more; I have missed all of you a great deal.
Here's my quandary:
I'm going to be applying to UW Seattle and Temple's health information management programs in the next year. I have some craptacular grades from my first try at college (I'm talking booze-fueled crash and burn failed everything for two semesters craptacular), but I've managed to actually that around in the past couple of years.
The UW has one of those personal statement essay questions for their application in which I can talk about a personal hardship and how I've matured because of it. It's a pretty standard question.
Some part of me would like to write about being HIV positive for uh... almost seven years (!) now, as I think it might be a little more poignant than "Hi, I'm pushing 30, and I finally realized that I don't want to be a mid-level employee in an insurance company without a degree for the next two presidential administrations."
But the other part of me thinks that disclosing my HIV status on a college application- even to a liberal university in Seattle- might be a really dicey thing to do. I know there's other stuff I could write about, but it would be a bit more forced and really wouldn't feel as authentic.
Wow, I sound like a self-involved undergrad already, so I guess I'm halfway home.
I'm really at an impasse with this. I know I've been turning this over in my head too much lately, and I'd appreciate a fresh perspective.
Thank you!
(Again, I have missed you all, and I hope you're doing well!)
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Hey I'm actually finishing my grad degree, and I'm also in Seattle.
If you mention that you are HIV positive thats fine but why are you mentioning it? If its because you now want to help others with the disease by doing xxxxx with the skills that your program at the udub will offer you, then ok. Talk about how you are going to give back tothe community. What are you going to do with it. Have a purpose. Help others.
At the UW you are expected to do something to help others. Tell them how your going to do it. If you menton it on your essay just for simpathy, you wont get it.
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At the UW you are expected to do something to help others. Tell them how your going to do it. If you menton it on your essay just for simpathy, you wont get it.
That's exactly what I was thinking. I do want to go into health care, and I feel like poz people have a really valuable and unique insight into patient perspectives on accessing the health care system, and I did want to focus on that.
I really don't want to go the sympathy route. Mostly because I'd probably choke on my own vomit if I tried to write a pity party essay ;)