It's wonderful that you were given an opportunity to develop your talents, and that people believed in you enough to help mentor you through the process. But did you notice that nothing you said actually hinged on affirmative action as understood in a contemporary setting (e.g. as ruled against by the Supreme Court)? It's clear that you were (justly) helped, in person, by the implementation of affirmative action policies in UCSB's EOP/SAA program, but what isn't clear is that it needed to be affirmative action--in particular, in the context of the recent Supreme Court decision, that race needed to be a factor.

You said that affirmative action was about "looking at the whole person". But it's not. It's true that if you are going to use race as an admissions criteria it has (prior to SFFA vs. Harvard 2023) been required to meet "strict scrutiny" (e.g. Gratz vs. Bollinger, 2003), which in practice means assessing the whole person enough to have some plausible claim that using race as an admission factor is ameliorating a prior harm rather than just being context-blind bonus points. But you can also look at the whole person without using race as a factor, and anyway, Harvard and UNC weren't really using race as a "whole person" measure anyway.

Indeed, the majority opinion leaves open individual examination of how race has affected an applicant's life as a possible factor! Chief Justice Roberts' words: "Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant's discussion of how race affected his or her life."

Perhaps in The Girl in the Yellow Poncho, you make a sufficient case that explicit consideration of race--not of your personal situation in all its details, but race alone--was necessary.

As it stands, the piece is compelling as personal narrative but not as a pro-affirmative-action argument. It suggests that a compelling case could be made, but you don't make the case. To do so for yourself personally, you would need to, for instance, reveal specific cases where you know you fell below a threshold that your white peers helped by EOP/SAA passed, and that therefore consideration of you-as-a-whole-person was gated by a race-aware admissions mechanism. And to do so as a general principle, you need to not rely simply on the whole-person argument, since that is always an available option; you'd need additionally to argue, for example, that in practice universities will not devote adequate attention to each student to make a competent assessment of how race may have affected them.

Again, I think it's splendid and appropriate that you were given the opportunity and encouragement to develop your talents. But to the extent that you intend this piece to argue that race-aware admissions to university is needed, it falls short.