I’m sitting here writing one of the Stanford Law supplemental essays:
“Describe a time you changed your belief about something.”
As I’m brainstorming this prompt, It reminded me of something from my freshman year at Hopkins.
After getting rejected from some of my top choices for undergrad, I blamed it on checking “Asian” on my application. I hated affirmative action.
My first semester at Hopkins, I took American Racial Politics, where we debated affirmative action and the Harvard case. It was basically 8 vs. 1, and I was the one arguing against it. I could tell my professor disagreed, so I went to his office hours to debate him.
Ironically, I was wearing my FLI (First-Generation, Low-Income) shirt. He noticed and asked about my background, then asked my SAT score. I told him 1580. He said “How did you study?” I explained that it took me about a year, mostly using free practice tests, Khan Academy, and YouTube.
He asked, “Don’t you think you could’ve gotten there much faster with a private tutor?”
Then I reflected: Did I really earn my 1580 under the same conditions as someone whose family could spend thousands on private SAT prep?
I walked home realizing that I had been thinking about fairness almost entirely through outcomes. I hadn’t thought enough about how unequal the path to those outcomes could be. This fundamentally changed how I thought about merit and what it actually means for a process to be “fair.”
Years later, I ended up doing my senior independent study with the same professor, researching affirmative action, and the consequences of its elimination.
Just thought it was a cool story to share
