Optional Diversity Statement?

[butterfingers2010]

I am applying to Northwestern's graduate school and they are requesting an "optional" diversity statement on their application. I am at a loss to figure out if I should do this or not. I don't really consider myself diverse, traditionally speaking. I am a white female from a suburban, lower middle class family. The only thing really "diverse" about me is my socioeconomic status..I am low-income, but aren't pretty much all 20 somethings just starting their career? I'm from a military family and am the first of my family to earn a bachelor's degree, but I'm not really sure if either of those things qualifies me for being "diverse" enough to write a statement about it. I've also done a fair share of traveling, but I don't consider that to be too unusual this day in age, either.

Has anybody else had to try to figure this one out? What did you end up doing? I don't want to look like I'm just writing the essay for the sake of writing it, but I don't want to NOT write it if it could help me out in some way.

[fuzzylogician]

It may depend on the school; when I applied to grad school, I contacted the departments that required a diversity statement to ask what to include in it and was pretty much told that the diversity requirement had something to do with the university being public so there were some strings attached to the state funding. They all but told me that the statement was going to go to some other university office and no one in my intended departments was going to even look at it, and at the same time that my chances of winning any funding were slim-to-none, given my personal circumstances. I wrote the statement when it was mandatory, skipped it when it was optional, and didn't spend too long on it anyway. It didn't seem to hurt my applications at all.

Edited September 21, 2011 by fuzzylogician