Affairmative Action

I have wondered what my Romanian sons' stories would have looked like to even a moderately selective college admission team. My mother abandoned the family when I was six. I didn't start school for two more years because my father made my brother and me go out and work watching the goats and sheep for some people in our village in Transylvania so that he could have money for cigars and palinka. He didn't give us food.  Sometimes his mother di, bread and lard, but mostly we had to steal our food. He dropped us off at the state orphanage when we were ten and eight. I got out by getting into a foster home in a Hungarian village where we did farm work most of the day.  But I did go to school and I liked it there because the boys in Cetariu would all play soccer after the work day until it was too dark to play. We got transferred to a Christian orphanage when I was thirteen. They mostly treated us well there. Then we got adopted to America when was going into highschool. I got to play soccer and was pretty good and had lots of friends. I did win some math awards, but mostly I didn't do much at school.  I was a C student, sometimes B.

So what do you think, have I overcome enough to go to your school? 

He went at first to a small rather fundamentalist school in South Carolina, where the admissions department was enraptured by his story (and he had a testimony!) But he would have gotten into that school anyway. He moved back to NH three semesters later - we think there were not enough girlfriends - and gradually pushed himself through the rest of college online. He never thinks about his traumatic past and doesn't think of himself as someone who has overcome great odds to succeed, except perhaps his current boss, who is definitely a strange person. He had a bad life and now he has a good one.  That's about the way he sees it. 

I even wonder if being an affirmative action acceptance might have been a burden or and irritation to him.