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Wanted to get some feedback on a) Whether this is a quality topic, and b) What I can do to make an excellent PS out of it.

Starting in fifth grade, I was "homeschooled". I put that in quotation marks because what that meant for me* was that I was not schooled at all. So I'm wondering about writing my PS about how I was able to overcome that to excel in undergrad despite not having a HS education, not having any test scores or a HS transcript, etc., and about the steps I took to overcome those obstacles.

My concerns are twofold: that I will look like I'm trying to explain away poor performance (when in fact, my academic performance has been fantastic), or that my academic excellence will undercut what I'm trying to say about the degree of difficulty I faced.

What are your thoughts?

*I know many, many homeschoolers who have received great education and opportunities (actually, that would be every homeschooler I know except me and my siblings), so I don't intend to insinuate or for you to infer that homeschooling is a problem

My inclination would be to say that if well done, this could be a good PS. I would approach it from the angle of having suffered and overcome a form of neglect with consequences on your education rather than having been homeschooled (because IMO that’s a more accurate description of what happened, and avoids casting aspersions on legitimate homeschooling to boot).

Halp wrote:My inclination would be to say that if well done, this could be a good PS. I would approach it from the angle of having suffered and overcome a form of neglect with consequences on your education rather than having been homeschooled (because IMO that’s a more accurate description of what happened, and avoids casting aspersions on legitimate homeschooling to boot).

Thank you for the advice! I certainly do not want to cast any suspicion on to legitimate homeschooling at all. I think taking the neglect angle will be a great way to do that.

mysonx3 wrote:

Halp wrote:My inclination would be to say that if well done, this could be a good PS. I would approach it from the angle of having suffered and overcome a form of neglect with consequences on your education rather than having been homeschooled (because IMO that’s a more accurate description of what happened, and avoids casting aspersions on legitimate homeschooling to boot).

Thank you for the advice! I certainly do not want to cast any suspicion on to legitimate homeschooling at all. I think taking the neglect angle will be a great way to do that.

Yeah, you didn’t come off as trashing legit homeschool at all, but I do think it’s a legitimate concern.

One other piece of advice...personally, I find writing about personal adversity to be tricky because it’s difficult to describe in terms that don’t come off to some as overwrought. If I were writing this, I would probably try to focus more on stating facts (“My parents took me out of school at age X and thereafter, quite frankly, neglected my education. I did not attend school again until age Y. This led to challenges 1, 2, and 3. To overcome these challenges, I did such and such....”) over emotions (“My parents cruelly took me out of school at age X, and I was unbelievably hurt when reflecting on this in later years. To this day, I am very angry about it, and so is everyone I tell...”). Those are crude examples, but you get the idea. This isn’t an ironclad rule at all, but I think it’s often more effective to let the facts of the personal adversity generate a certain emotional response in the reader, rather than telling the reader how to react.

Best of luck.