Talking about privilege is tricky. The tone of the essay can turn preachy or one-sided. These are the worst kind of narratives.
Preachy works sometimes when the subject matter is closely tied to the identity of the applicant.
For example, an applicant displaced by war preaches about politics, incentives of warmongers, and how the world should be; it doesn’t come across as the applicant advising the admissions team.
The worst essays will have no transformational elements in their story, or the reflection of the problem is clearly biased based on certain preferences.
For the Stanford Privilege to Serving the Vulnerable What Matters Essay, the applicant starts the narrative with the challenges of living in the shadows of a public figure. The conversations in private parties around trivial artifacts became a motivation to pursue a career that deals with grassroots issues.
Such motivations might seem trivial, but by capturing an example of what it means to lose privacy, I was able to build empathy for the applicant. But I didn’t dwell on that one motivation.
I wanted to show her evolution in thinking about business as a tool for good in war zones and the power of science and math even while serving the UN in a non-scientific role.