College Admissions Essay: The Labels Of My Life

Everyone has been given a label in their lifetime. They can be said in person, spread throught the school or posted online. But labels have a great impact on others, and can be extremely hurtful. The novel To Kill a Mockingbird has many characters who have been given labels, and the book shows how people are affected by them. The labels that are given to people can affect them in many ways.

Labeling is not the right thing to do, but it is necessary in order for people to find out who they are. Labeling is necessary for people to make friendships. The basis of friendships are to find people that have the same ideologies and personality types as you do. This would not be as easy to identify if it wasn’t for society putting labels on people. Even though labeling isn’t right, people are accustomed and comfortable with it because it allows people to be in their comfort zone. Labeling people also gives people a sense of

Everybody has gone through high school, and was put into one of those groups. Labels in my opinion are important, they give a person a sense of belonging to a group or club. I was considered popular in school, so I conformed to fit in. In order for me to be considered as one of the popular kids, I had to dress up and be one of the funnier ones in the group. While lables can be a good thing, they also can be a curse.

A label has the power to define the individual or group of individuals being identified. That power is equal to control (Koppelman, 2011). Both can have a positive or negative effect. Unfortunately, the labels used by the majority are meant to have a negative effect. In fact, the labels are meant to demean and hurt as much as possible. They are so negative that there seems to be the intent to drive the labeled individual and/or group away, so they are no longer present and able to interact with the majority.

With such a strong influence on the way we perceive ourselves society’s use of labels and pressure for assimilation eradicate the individuality associated with identity. Labels like “mentally challenged,” “homo,” and “slut” have been created, and almost forced onto us by society, keeping us from properly identifying ourselves. One woman spends a whole essay

or geographic origins does not define all that he or she is or will be.

What labels, that you dislike, have been applied to you or to groups (for example: ethnic, social, cultural, professional, etc.) to which you belong? Explain how the labels have or have not affected you.

“Congratulations on your admittance to UCLA!” was the most common phrase I heard in the summer of senior to college freshman. It became annoying to the degree that I stopped mentioning what college I had gotten into until someone asked me directly, it was not because I was ashamed just that it comes with a profile I know I do not fit in appearance. Throughout life you are expected to fit into society’s boxes they have set up for you and life becomes challenging when you do not fit into those boxes. From birth, you are assigned a gender that contains certain expectations, the class you were born into determines your future and what race you were born into nails down the path of life you are going to experience. My labels in life as I would describe myself would be a proud transgender Chicano whose a 3rd generation son from a working class background and the first in my family to attend college. The reason I made it to UCLA was my privileges of being a US citizen, my mother, Catholic education and the academic profiling that determined me as a “high-achieving” student.

In this world there are ideas that separate people by race, and these are the stereotypes or labels. Stereotypes are put on African Americans, Asian, and even white people, or they could get more specific and go into a certain type of person like their actions or their personality; however labels could also be on different levels such as positive,neutral, and negative.

There are many factors that shape us into who we are, and who we will become. Some of these factors we can control, while others we cannot. While we are born into many traits of our identities, much of our other behavior is learned. My identity, for example, is “based not only on responses to the question ‘Who am I?’ but also on responses to the question ‘Who am I in relation to others?’” (Allen, 2011, p. 11). My identity and the question of who I am, are both influenced by many aspects of my life, including my hometown, my family, my friends, and my beliefs and moral values.

Labelling theory refers to the ability to attach a label to a person or group of people and in so doing the label becomes more important than the individual. The label becomes the dominant form of identify and takes on ‘Master Status’ (Becker 1963; Lemert 1967) so that the person can no longer be seen other than through the lens of the label. Words, just like labels, are containers of meaning. In this case, the label and the meaning attached to it becomes all that the person is rather than a temporary feature of something that they have done or a way that they have behaved.

What are labels? They are these words people associate you with. Labels can be good but most of them make your ship plummet farther and farther down till you hit the hard rocky bottom. You can’t go up and you can’t move. You are stuck, frozen caught in a net of words and actions from your past present and maybe even future. This leads to the everlasting question, "why am I not good enough". What makes me not good enough for you. Is it my hair my lips my actions or words. Why am I not good enough? But, who decides what I’m not good enough for? In society, we believe that the popular, the worthy, the famous, rich, important. We believe that they decide for us. Because after all, we can’t decide for ourselves.

Who are you? Who am I? These are questions that we all ponder at some point or another in our lives. As human beings we are seemingly inundated with the desire to classify and categorise. We are constantly defining and analysing the differences that we observe in the world, it seems only natural that we would apply this method of classification to our position within our society. More specifically, we want to understand our social identities and this can be achieved by acknowledging which groups we identify most with.

Howard Becker is a sociologist that is often credited with the development of the labelling theory. However the origins of this theory can be traced back to sociologists at the beginning of the twentieth century who made invaluable contributions to the creation of the “labelling” concept. The first was Charles Cooley who wrote “Human Nature and the Social Order” in 1902, in which he introduced the term the “looking glass self”. This idea suggests

Negative labels and comparisons determined your thoughts, feelings and behavior when you were a child, and naturally so, because you did not have the cognitive ability to analyze and dispute your negative thoughts and behaviors. Parents and other significant adults seemed to be all knowing. Now, as an adult, you are able to analyze, dispute and change faulty ways of thinking and negative behaviors that prevent you from achieving your goals. To recognize that you have choices and you can choose to change is empowering.