The Oil and Gas industry is a worldwide affair, and students in these families move frequently. These students end up as Third Culture Kids, children raised in a different culture from their parents, often more than one. Of course, this doesn’t just apply to oil and gas families; military families, state department workers, and other business-people often experience the same thing.
These children have a tendency to write a certain kind of essay when applying to college, what we will call here a third culture kid essay. While these essays are very well written, and often detail experiences unique to the student, they are inevitably interchangeable with every other third culture kid essay.
Here, we will explore what these essays are, and why they don’t work as expected for college admissions. We will also discuss some alternative essay topics to explore, which are able to highlight a student’s experiences in a more unique way.
What is a Third Culture Kid Essay?
These essays discuss a student’s adaptability, their perpetual new-kid status, and how they’ve learned and grown from the multitude of schools and experiences they’ve had throughout childhood. These experiences have made them mature, and given them a global perspective. Now, they call the US home, and are eager to bring their worldly views to the college they are writing to.
While these experiences are rare from an overall sampling of the population, essays written about them tend to become incredibly similar. Here are three essays written by three students, anonymized to protect their privacy. Each is a supplemental essay written for a different school, yet each essay reads remarkably similarly, despite the high quality of the prose:
Example 1
I am a perpetual “new kid.” I’ve moved nine times, visited more than twenty countries and been educated in seven vastly different cultures, languages and school systems. My parents worried that the chaos of constant transitions would impede my education, but they couldn’t have been more wrong.
Being an international student forced me to overcome social barriers by adapting to people of different cultures and engaging them on their own terms. I did everything from learning about Hafla etiquette during a cultural exchange with Bedouins in the UAE to studying wildlife in Fevik, Norway alongside local zoologists. My exposure has done more than acculturate me; the struggle to understand different preferences and mindsets has taught me how to work with people from across the globe.
I thrive in the chaos of reconciling different cultural mores and belief systems. My struggles with language barriers, faux pas, and cultural impasses have made me immune to first-day jitters. My best education happens outside the classroom. I’ve not only learned to answer correctly on tests and express myself in essays; I have insight into people. I know that when I go to Tufts, I’ll be able to excel precisely because I know what it means to be new, to not belong, to adapt. I live for that.
Example 2
I’ve grown up internationally and feel fortunate to have called eleven countries “home”. One of the major benefits of this itinerant upbringing has been my degree of adaptability; after every move, I adapted to the new school system, new langage, new friends, new homes, and new challenges.
For a long time, however, even though I only lived a short period of time in my ancestral nation of Turkey, I always felt that was where I truly belonged. When I closed my eyes to fall asleep, I would imagine myself back in Turkey, walking home after school to be greeted by grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins.
Ten countries later (and having discovered the magic of ordering Turkish manti on DoorDash), however, I’ve come to see things differently. When we moved to Houston during the middle of my seventh grade, it was again time for adaptation. Like in the other places we had lived, my parents put me in an international school hosting students from across the world. Going through the familiar motions of learning a new building, new teachers, and new classmates–from Vietnam, Nigeria, and everywhere else, as usual–a realization dawned on me. No matter where I was, the place where I could most easily slip into old routines and learn new ones was school. School was home.
I’m confident that the insights and habits I’ve developed from my extensive movements from school to school across the globe will translate to a smooth transition into the campus environment. Whereas for others, college might be the very first time uprooting themselves from “home” and interacting with many different types of people, this is already second nature to me–I am situated to hit the ground running and make the absolute most of the resources on campus and my time in college.
During my campus visit to Johns Hopkins, it was easy to imagine myself playing my trumpet in the Hopkins Pep Band and, more importantly, working in the Richard A. Swirnow Computer-Integrated Surgical and Interventional Systems Mock Operation Room in Hackerman Hall on a computational medicine project. With Professor Sridevi Sarma as my advisor and a cohort of teammates working at my side, I would be on the frontlines of the fight against Parkinson’s, fully supported by and acclimated to my new academic home. I am ready to join BME 2.0 and pursue deeper knowledge in biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins.
Example 3
I’ve left my tracks on the soil of many countries and territories–from my native Thailand to Australia, Singapore, Indonesia, Japan, and even far-off New Jersey. It’s the United States, however, where I not only left my footprints but planted both feet firmly on the ground. Unlike other countries I’d visited, my first journey to the US in 2018 was not for vacation but to stay.
Moving across the ocean, straight to a new continent on the opposite side of the world from Thailand was a life-changing and exciting experience. Beginning a life with a new family was terrifying, but I could not pass up the opportunity or let my family down.
Imagine my surprise when I first learned that my new home in Fort Bend County was one of the most diverse counties in the entire country. I was surrounded by people who were visibly diverse, with people of many races. However, it was when I attended high school that I learned that the diversity was much richer, including people with different religions and unexpected life experiences and family situations. I even made friends with people from nations I had never even heard of before.
As someone who has lived in different countries and has a racially and religiously mixed family, I feel that I’m well on my way to becoming a true global citizen, able to adapt to many different circumstances. I’ve learned that I thrive in inclusive environments that are accepting of everyone. At Texas A&M, I am eager to continue contributing diversity of thought and experiences to the learning environment both in and out of the classroom. With the support from others on campus, together we can create a welcoming and nurturing academic environment which will help all of us thrive in complex global settings.
Analyzing These Essays
Despite these essays detailing what should be very different experiences and growth processes, they all read almost the same, and leave the exact same impression on the reader. They do set the student apart from a standard applicant, but do nothing to set these students apart from the hundreds of other students with similar childhood experiences.
Each essay follows the following basic structure:
- Begin by describing how they’re a perpetual stranger in a strange land, and mention how many places they’ve lived in a short time.
- A brief sampler of some of their experiences, often culminating with them coming to the US.
- An explanation of how these experiences helped them grow as a person, and gave them skills like adaptability and worldliness.
- A desire to apply these skills at the university they are writing the essay for.
These essays do everything a standard college essay should do; they introduce what makes a student unique, and what viewpoints and talents they will bring to college. However, much like overdone essays about athletic prowess or volunteering abroad, the utility of these essays is diluted by their ubiquity.
If admissions officers received a single essay about third culture kids, then it would work well. Instead, they receive hundreds or thousands, which blur together. This is compounded by how colleges review essays. Applications are reviewed by geographic region, and states like Texas, with its rich oil and gas production, produce a great number of third culture kids, and the essays with them.
What Makes a College Essay Work
College essays work when they stick in the minds of readers, and make them passionate about a student, allowing them to see how that student will thrive on a particular college campus. Admissions officers argue in favor of every student admitted, and the goal we have when writing essays is to make it easy to argue that our students belong at college.
A successful college essay can’t be too similar or cliche, or it runs the risk of being easily forgettable. All essays will use cliches and have tropes to a certain extent; there are very few truly unique experiences. A successful essay discusses a common experience or trope in an uncommon way, allowing readers to view students from a unique angle.
Finally, a good college essay exemplifies a student’s values. These too should be unique, or at least somewhat so. Each essay has values which are cliche, like an athlete learning the power of perseverance, or a traveler learning maturity and the importance of diverse viewpoints. A good essay connects more uncommon values to an otherwise common or cliched experience. This also helps it stand out in the minds of admissions officers, and sets it apart from the mass of essays they must read.
What to Write About Instead
This may seem grim, but the same experiences which often lead to a cliche essay can also produce truly stellar ones. The trick is in presentation, and how you introduce and approach your unique upbringing and experiences. Just as with sports essays, they can work, you just have to take a non-standard approach.
We recommend focusing on a single experience, rather than taking a survey of your experiences. A blend of things often reverts to a montage by necessity, while a single experience provides concrete details which are more likely to be unique to that student.
Traces of this can be seen in the essays above. As the students briefly run through their experiences in foreign lands, you can see tantalizing details of what these essays could have been about. The mention of cultural exchange with the Bedouins in the first, or buying manti on DoorDash in the second both provide windows into unique experiences that these students had. Instead of elaborating on them further, however, they brush past, leaving behind essays that might have been.
Thus, a great essay can come from these experiences by writing about a single unique experience the student had, and exploring which values it instilled in them. Perhaps the student above learned the value of rest from the Bedouin, or how hospitality, properly applied, can shape a whole relationship. This is an uncommon essay, and allows the student to relate an experience most are not able to speak to.
In this way, the student’s essay sticks better in the mind of the reader, and does not get lost in the shuffle. The experiences students have as third culture children are often still valuable to the college essay writing process; they just need to be approached from the correct viewpoint.
All students are capable of writing great essays, third culture children are no different. They have an unforeseen pitfall they must look out for, but if they manage to avoid falling into the trap of cliche, their essays can be very strong. As with all essays, topic is key.
