Is there a Spot for Tourettes on College Applications?

One of the awesome things about this type of blog is that you can see exactly how people get to your blog! If they use google and just happen to find my blog, I can see exactly what the person typed in to get to my blog.

Recently I saw that someone found my blog by typing in the question that is the title of this post: "Is there as spot for tourettes on college applications?". So I thought I would do a post answering this exact question.

The answer is YES! There are so many opportunities for you to indicate that you have Tourette's on your college application. No, there isn't a spot that says "If you have Tourettes check this box" or "List any diagnoses that you have here", but that doesn't mean that there isn't a spot for it if you want to indicate to colleges that you have TS before they accept you.

For m,  this was something that I thought was really important. I wanted my colleges to know, before they accepted me, that I have Tourette's Syndrome. I didn't want it to be a surprise to them, and I certainly didn't want to get into a college and then just keep on thinking "well would they have accepted me if they knew about my TS before hand?".

Colleges want and need diversity and students with disabilities or differences. If anything, disclosing that you have Tourette's or another disorder will help you in terms of your changes for acceptance into a college. This is what I have been told by my parents and college advisers. For me, it was easy to work my TS into my college application because I wrote my entire college essay for the common app on my experience with TS. This is a really neat place to for Tourettes because it really makes for a unique and original college essay! 


College admissions officers really do get bored of "My trip to community service trip to Peru caused me to grow as a person". If you don't want to write your entire essay about TS, you can work it into the essay in your own way without making TS the focus of the essay. 


Another place were I indicated that I have TS is on my list of activities. Since I'm involved with my state's TSA chapter it was easy to put this under the list of activities section as community service. Some of the college's I applied to though didn't want the common app or the common app essay, but there was still a spot on their separate applications for me to write about TS. There's usually supplemental questions for each colleges and if TS fits you can put it right in there! Also sometimes there's a "is there anything else you'd like to say?" section where you can talk about TS and when applying for scholarships there's lots of opportunities to work TS into supplemental writing and essays.