Covering any transformational stories, especially poverty narrative, requires offering the right context. If we get indulgent in one interesting angle, the overall impact of the What Matters Stanford GSB Essay will go down.
For the applicant – a Uruguan native, the struggle was the lack of a mentor at home as his mother did 2-3 jobs as a single parent.
The neighborhood had all the bad influences that could have taken the applicant to the wrong path. But the intervention of a mentor and the after-school program in Math & Soccer gave him an outlet to channel his intellectual curiosity and his restless energy.
I have also captured in a line, the temptation to join the friends in the neighborhood and resist the learning from the mentor. It is a reflection of the rebellious thinking of teenagers.
A similar reflection is required if you captured any event from your childhood when your values were different or your thinking was limited. Such reflections improve the believability of your story and your motivations. A lot of applicants hide such reflections, fearing that the admissions team might consider such thinking to persist even now. Obviously, you must be strategic in not sharing any biases that you had growing up. It could be something that was propagated in your family or culture.
The founding of the educational non-profit to offer affordable STEM education is the applicant’s contribution to addressing inequality in education.