Throughout the 4 years, I attended the Urban Assembly School for Wildlife Conservation for my secondary education, I have noticed the racial bias when applying for private universities. As a hispanic female, the probability of being accepted to a prestigious college is very low chance. Not only is my race and gender a contributing factor of being admitted, but the social economic status of paying a ridiculous amount of money to obtain an education. Also, my high school did not offer an abundance of opportunities compared to a private school. Since, it’s a public school located within the Bronx, it lacked the resources and budget to provide preparation for college readiness.

As a freshman in high school, the only thing I worried about was my grades. I thought that my academic status would appeal to the admission committee, to have the slightest chance to even be considered. My productivity and commitment was rewarded, because I had the opportunity to participate in the STEP program at Fordham University. The STEP program is for underrepresented minority’s and economically disadvantaged students to become interested in science,technology,mathematics and engineering fields. When I was accepted in this program, I felt that females are starting to gain recognition in male dominated fields. This motivated me to seek other opportunity’s offered to minorities. With this in mind, I had the privilege of partaking in Civics Day, which allows groups of students from the 5 boroughs to present a solution for their community. My group and I decided to address the issue of lack tutoring within the school. Since, our school did not have access to many resources, we decided to create peer tutoring. The concept of peer tutoring is to have upperclassman with high grades in a particular subject to help fellow students understand the material. The judges were so impressed by our idea, that we won the Creative Mind Award. The purpose of this award is to introduce a topic that was outside the box compared to other students solutions. Even though, I did not attend the best nor worst high school at the time, it allowed me to voice my opinion in regards to some issues.

However, when senior year came and the college application process began, I noticed the difficulty of writing an admission essay. I started to compare my writing’s to those on the internet. There was a massive difference in content and terminology used. I thought,wow, my paper could never be written to such a magnitude. These students that were accepted to prestigious universities wrote a novel within two pages. I began to feel discourage and to make matters worst, they all had a score of a 1400 or above on the SAT. I saw the discrepancy between social economic status. None of my fellow classmates had came from middle class or wealthy upbringings. Or the chance of traveling abroad in those pretentious academies. I understood that because of their parents money, they had unlimited access to everything. At the end of the day, it did not matter how much I accomplished, because the admissions would only be interested in those students that can fully pay the tuition. It’s not about the passion or the potential, is all about the money.

Although, I knew the circumstances, I decided to test my luck. I wanted to see for myself, if my 98 G.P.A and the 8 programs I participated in could get me accepted into NYU. It was the most tedious and stressful process, I had ever experienced. There was supplemental essay that asked, “What motivated you to apply to NYU and more specifically, why you have applied or expressed a particular interest in the campus, program or area of study?” I had spent hours and days to write a paragraph to answer this question. I believed that this small introduction was a selling point for NYU. How can you write in a way to deeply express yourself, but not sound redundant. The same thing occurred when writing the admission essay. As, I was struggling to write, there was something about NYU that caught my interest during the application process. They had a larger percentage of female students then male students;the percentage of minority that attended the school was about 20%. In addition, it offered HEOP a program to cover the tuition cost of the university for economically disadvantaged students, and did not discriminate if you had a criminal record. All of these resources available provided the opportunity for anyone to be accepted to such a reputable college. Due, to these favorable circumstances, I was accepted to NYU for the class of 2022.