Published on May 15, 2026
Published on May 14, 2026
Every September, when I start Diversity Essay meetings with Taiwanese students, the first question is almost always the same:
"Teacher, I'm not Black, not a refugee, my family isn't poor, and both my parents graduated from NTU -- what diversity do I even have to write about?"
This is the harshest structural dilemma Taiwanese students face in U.S. college admissions. The Diversity Essay, also known as the Identity Essay, Background Essay, or Community Essay, is asked by almost every Top 30 university, from Harvard to UMich to UPenn to Cornell. In this essay, adcoms are looking for URM (under-represented minority), first-generation college student, low-income, refugee / immigrant, LGBTQ+ -- and Taiwanese students usually do not fall into these default categories.
Even worse: Taiwanese students are categorized as the "Asian model minority" -- an identity seen as over-represented in the admissions logic of elite U.S. universities. This is why, before the Supreme Court banned affirmative action in 2023, Taiwanese students with SAT 1550 were still often rejected -- "there are too many kids like you."
But the diversity essay still has to be written. Drawing on my 15 years of experience working with 600+ Taiwanese students, this article explains how to redefine diversity -- and write your identity from an angle adcoms have not seen before.
First, understand the prompt variations of the Diversity Essay. Common examples:
School | Prompt Summary |
|---|---|
Harvard | "Top 3 things your roommates might like to know about you" |
Yale | "What is something about you that is essential to understanding you?" |
UPenn | "Write about an aspect of your identity, lived experience, or background that has shaped you." |
Cornell | "How will your background contribute to Cornell?" |
Duke | "Tell us about an experience or aspect of your identity that has been important to you." |
Stanford | "How did you spend your last two summers?" (implicit diversity) |
UMich | "Everyone belongs to many different communities. Describe one." |
Real purpose: adcoms want to know what you will bring to campus that other people will not.
It is not "what suffering have you endured" (that is what a hardship essay asks). It is "how is your way of seeing the world different from the other 50,000 applicants?"
That is the essence of the diversity essay -- diversity of perspective, not just diversity of identity.
Look at the structure of Harvard's publicly available 2024 admissions data:
Race | Share of Applicants | Share of Admits |
|---|---|---|
Asian | ~28% | ~25% |
White | ~38% | ~36% |
Hispanic | ~13% | ~14% |
Black | ~13% | ~14% |
Native | ~1% |
Asian applicants have the lowest admit rate -- because the applicant pool is largest and the competition is most intense. Taiwanese students are usually placed in the doubly over-represented category of "Asian / International Asian."
Even more brutally, the Diversity Essays submitted by Taiwanese students are also highly homogeneous:
Most Common Diversity Topics Taiwanese Students Write | Why They Are Weak |
|---|---|
"I love Chinese / Taiwanese culture and Lunar New Year" | Every Asian student writes this |
"Being bilingual makes me see two worlds" | Every international student writes this |
"I love bubble tea / night markets / beef noodle soup" | Tourist perspective |
"My grandparents lived through war" | Secondhand experience |
"Taiwan vs China political tension" | Politicized and high-risk |
"I love K-pop / anime" | You are a fan, not a cultural insider |
When you write these topics, adcoms classify you after one sentence as a "generic East Asian applicant" -- exactly the label you need to escape.
The framework I give every Dr. G. Taiwanese student is to expand the definition of diversity into 5 dimensions:
Dimension | Definition | Examples Taiwanese Students Can Write |
|---|---|---|
| Your family's distinctive cultural practices, not a general overview of "Chinese culture" | Grandmother's Taiwanese, Hakka, Indigenous identity, military dependents' village |
| Your geographic identity within Taiwan | Kaohsiung vs Taipei, eastern Taiwan, outlying islands |
| What your family does for work | Family workshop, night market stall, taxi, farming |
|
Key point: you do not need to write "macro diversity" (race / nationality) -- adcoms already know from your application that you are Taiwanese. What can actually win in a Diversity Essay is uniqueness at the micro level.
One student I worked with, little R, was from Taipei, but her maternal grandmother was from Tainan. In her family, only her grandmother spoke Taiwanese -- her parents both spoke Mandarin, and little R herself could barely speak Taiwanese. Her original Diversity Essay was going to be about "the diversity of Chinese culture." I sent it back.
In the end, she wrote this:
My grandmother's lullabies were in Taiwanese. My mother's bedtime stories were in Mandarin. By the time I started kindergarten, I already understood that one language could not love me in two ways. When my grandmother died in 2022, my mother stopped saying "thank you" in Taiwanese at the morning market. I started learning it on Duolingo the next month, halfway between mourning and fluency.
In 300 words, she never mentioned weak phrases like "Chinese culture," "heritage," or "bilingual." But the adcom immediately saw:
She was admitted to Brown.
Strong cultural micro-level topics:
Rule: it must be something distinctive inside your family, not "what makes Taiwan special."
Taiwan's urban-rural divide is an excellent topic because adcoms know almost nothing about it.
Sample opening:
I was the only student in my Taipei AP class from Kaohsiung. At first, I thought this was just a logistic detail. But by the time I rode the high-speed rail back home for Lunar New Year, listening to my classmates compare which Taipei boba shops had the best brown sugar, I realized my "home accent" had already faded. My grandmother on the train asked if I had become a Taibei lang. I didn't know how to answer.
Angles this essay can develop:
Why this works: adcoms do not know Taiwan has such clear urban-rural and regional cultural differences, but after reading your essay, they will feel, "This is an angle I have not seen before."
Many Taiwanese students think "my family runs a small business / factory / street stall" is embarrassing and should not be included in the application. Wrong. This is gold material.
One student I worked with, little D, had a father who owned a precision mold factory, a 30-person small factory in a county in central Taiwan. At first, he thought there was nothing to write about -- "it is just traditional Taiwanese manufacturing." In the end, he wrote this:
By the time I was 12, I could distinguish 0.02mm machining error by the sound of the lathe. My father's factory makes the mold cavities that produce smartphone vibration motors—a fact I learned by listening to him explain to a Korean buyer why our tolerance was 0.005mm tighter than his last supplier's. I have never seen a Korean buyer leave my father's factory without ordering more. I also have never seen my father raise his voice.
In these 100 words, there are:
He was admitted to UMich Engineering. In the feedback, the admissions reader wrote, "this kid grew up in a factory and it shows" -- that is the power of diversity.
Strong occupational backgrounds:
Parent's Occupation | How to Approach It |
|---|---|
Night market vendor | You grew up watching a micro-economy operate |
Taxi driver | You have heard the stories of an entire city |
Restaurant owner | You understand human nature in a high-pressure service industry |
Manufacturing factory | You have seen globalization land locally |
Farming / fishing / aquaculture | You understand land and climate |
Funeral / religion | You have a different perspective on life and death |
Rule: do not write "my parents worked so hard, so I must work hard too" -- Taiwanese parents love that storyline, but adcoms do not buy it. What you should write is the concrete skills / perspective you gained from that occupation.
Over the past 5 years, more and more Taiwanese families have begun to disclose their children's neurodivergent identities (ADHD, Autism Spectrum, Dyslexia, Sensory Processing Disorder).
This can be a powerful Diversity Essay topic -- but the writing is delicate.
Do Not Write | Write Instead |
|---|---|
"I have ADHD, so life has been hard" | "I have ADHD, so I learned to use X method to solve Y" |
"Asperger's made it hard for me to make friends" | "Asperger's helped me see patterns others missed" |
"Dyslexia made me perform poorly on tests" | "Dyslexia led me to develop a distinctive memory method" |
Example (student with Asperger's):
The first time I noticed my classmates were lying, I was nine. The teacher asked "who broke the vase?" and three children said "not me" with their faces tilted slightly down. I didn't understand the question's grammar—nobody had said "yes, I broke it"—but I knew, with the same certainty I knew Pi was 3.14159, that all three had broken it. I didn't say anything. I just wrote down the pattern.
In these 100 words:
Rule: before disclosing a neurodivergent identity, discuss it with your parents first -- this still carries stigma among Taiwanese parents, but for U.S. adcoms it can strengthen diversity.
Everyone carries "identities no one notices." This is the most overlooked gold mine in the Diversity Essay.
Common micro-identities among Taiwanese students:
Identity | Writing Angle |
|---|---|
Interfaith family | Dad is Buddhist, mom is Christian; you celebrate Christmas and also worship ancestors |
Adoption | The story of you and your family |
Single-parent family | Not a tragedy card, but a way of operating |
Sibling with special needs | What you have cared for / observed |
First- / second-generation immigrant | Your parents are descendants of Vietnamese, Indonesian, or Filipino migrant workers |
Indigenous + Han mixed background | You carry two identities |
Second-generation new immigrant identity is especially worth mentioning. This is a rapidly growing population in Taiwan, but U.S. adcoms are almost completely unfamiliar with it. If your mother came from Vietnam / Indonesia, you are both Taiwanese and Southeast Asian -- an extremely distinctive identity.
Example (second-generation new immigrant):
My mother left Hanoi in 2001 with two suitcases and a marriage broker's phone number. By the time I was born in 2007, she could speak Mandarin fluently but still said cảm ơn by reflex after the morning market. I grew up between two grandmothers—one in Tainan, one in Hai Phong—who had never met and never would. My Mandarin homework had Vietnamese annotations in the margins. My Vietnamese was learned over phone calls. I have two mother tongues, neither of which I speak perfectly.
After reading this, adcoms immediately see a version of Taiwan they have never encountered in an application.
No matter which angle you choose, these 5 approaches are death sentences for the diversity essay:
Deadly Approach | Why |
|---|---|
"I love bubble tea / night markets" | Tourist perspective |
"I am proud to be Taiwanese / Chinese" | Emotional but content-free |
"Taiwan is a small island but..." | You are teaching adcoms geography |
"I can speak Mandarin, English, and a little Taiwanese" | Repeats the resume |
"My parents sacrificed so much for me" | Every Asian student writes this |
The third point is especially important -- do not introduce Taiwan in your essay. Adcoms already know where Taiwan is. Writing "Taiwan is an island of 23 million people" wastes essay word count on PR.
Some schools use the "Community Essay" instead of the Diversity Essay (for example, UMich, Tufts, Wake Forest). The prompt becomes:
"Everyone belongs to many different communities or groups. Describe one of them and your place within it."
In this case, your community does not need to be "racial / cultural" -- it can be:
Community Type | Examples |
|---|---|
Physical community | The military dependents' village, neighborhood, or village where you live |
Online community | A Discord / Reddit / Twitch community you participate in |
Niche hobby | Your Quizbowl, Speedcubing, or sport stacking community |
Family community | Your weekly call with your grandmother |
School community | The 5 friends in your AP class |
Religious / Cultural | Your temple festival, church, or temple service |
The standard for a strong Community Essay: the community you write about must be one in which you have sincerely invested time -- not something you joined one month before applying.
Here are outlines of the Diversity Essays from 3 students I worked with who were ultimately admitted to Top 20 schools:
What the three examples have in common:
After 15 years of working with Taiwanese students, one thing I believe is this:
Every Taiwanese student has diversity to write about. You just have not seen it yet.
You cannot see it because these forms of diversity feel "ordinary" to you -- your grandmother's Taiwanese, your father's factory, your mother's Vietnamese accent, your own ADHD, the high-speed rail ride from Kaohsiung to Taipei -- you assume these things do not count as "special."
But to U.S. adcoms, each one is a slice of Taiwan they have never seen in an application.
The way to write a Diversity Essay is not to "find a minority category I belong to." It is to find a small slice only you can write -- specific enough that, after reading it, the adcom wants to have dinner at your house.
One final piece of advice after 15 years: do not try to be someone you are not. The biggest disadvantage Taiwanese students face is not identity. It is imitating American students' writing templates. The more you write like a "typical Asian applicant," the more you lose; the more you write like "a Taiwanese kid only you could be," the more you win.
Your diversity is not in your passport. It is in your grandmother's Taiwanese, in your father's factory, in your mother's recipes, in that 1 hour and 40 minute high-speed rail ride from Kaohsiung to Taipei.
Write that. Everything else is noise.
Further Reading:
~1%
International | ~12% | ~11% |
Neurological diversity
ADHD, Asperger's, LD, sensory processing |
| Small identities people overlook | Interfaith family, adoption, single parent, sibling with special needs |
Child of a foreign spouse (new immigrant family)
Your mother came from Vietnam / Indonesia |
LGBTQ+ parents / relatives | You have seen how Taiwanese LGBTQ+ families operate |
