Being A Black Student at A Big 10 University

(updated in August 2021 from the original Summer 2020 essay)

My senior year of high school, I applied to several big Midwestern universities, as well as one Hail Mary school, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Among the schools I applied to were Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan State.

My parents are from North Carolina, and I thought it might be a great experience being a Tar Heel, but Chapel Hill is notoriously difficult to get into if you are an out-of-state student, and I didn’t do well on the SAT.