Weird prompt for optional personal statement?

nancy

The college is simply giving the applicant a chance to provide an explanation for anything on the transcript that might be puzzling to an admissions committee. A general personal statement might include things like your hobbies or passions, but this isn't a general statement. In this case, the college is asking only for information that is relevant to your academic record, such as low grades in a particular subject, or during a particular period of time. They're not limiting you to hardships or disabilities--you could potentially also include something positive, such as describing how your high GPA is the result of skills you learned while participating in an extra curricular activity that you were able to apply in the classroom. However, they use disability and hardship as examples since those are the things that are most likely to affect your grades and/or test scores. Students are sometimes reluctant to mention things like this because they're afraid that the college might view them as a negative. The college is simply letting applicants know that it's OK to include this information and that it might actually be helpful to the student when they make the admissions decision. For example, my daughter has a learning disability called dyscalculia that affects her ability to process numerical concepts. Her transcripts shows grades in math class that would be considered low when compared to other students and that might have been a negative factor in an admissions counselor's decision. However, by including an explanation of her disability and statements from her math teachers that talked about how difficult the subject was and how persistent she was in trying to master it, she was able to turn a blot on her transcript into a plus. If you don't have anything on your transcript that needs explaining, then you don't need to do anything about this. But, if there's some information that might affect the admissions committees decision, by all means include it. Incidentally, "attention differences" refers to students who have one of several conditions that involve ability to focus or maintain attention, such as ADD or ADHD. Rather than listing all the possible types of attention disorders, the college is just referring to them collectively as attention differences.