College Admissions Essay: Getting Trapped In A Community

For as long as I can remember I wanted to get out of this city. I wanted to escape all that I've known. I wanted to put St. Louis behind me. I wanted to move on from my current life. I wanted to make something of myself, and up until recently I thought the only way that I could accomplish that goal of making something of myself was to get away. For me, getting away meant proving a point. Getting away meant that I wouldn’t become trapped like so many of the other students that had came before me got trapped in our community.
For outsiders, it's a weird phenomenon to explain. The phenomenon of getting trapped in the same community for the rest of your life is obscure to even those who have been graced with even the slightest amount of affluence. I was raised in a low-income community on the edge of the city-county border in St. Louis. Over 50% of students in my small school district came from households that fell below the national poverty line. For further reference as to the background …show more content…
I was a QuestBridge Scholar, and it started to seem like all my hard work was finall paying off. I applied to Saint Louis University as my safety school, and SLU was the only local school I applied to. My mother was ecstatic when I received my acceptance letter from SLU, and I remember getting agitated and assuring her that there was no way in hell that I'd be attending SLU. I told her the only reason I applied there was so my college counselor would get off my back about needing to apply to a safety.
At this point, this reflection has become almost painfully cringe-worthy. When it came time for me to decide upon a university to attend I was stuck between Emory and SLU. In the means of full disclosure: I chose SLU for the money. I was given equitable amounts of money from each of the universities, but when it comes down to the brass tracks it’s much more affordable to move 5 miles from home rather than 550 miles from