A Game to Remember by Natalia

A Game to Remember by Natalia - October 2026 Scholarship Essay

In my college-level sociology class, I was assigned a simulation in which I played Monopoly with a group of students. At first, I was as baffled as you probably are right now, but it was more than just Monopoly. Each player was assigned a role: middle class, working poor, upper class, capitalists, or lower class. I was assigned middle class and thought it would be relatively easy, but boy, was I wrong. The game started pretty normally, with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, but both sides grew upset quickly. The social elite had all the money they could ever ask for, but they craved power, and the poor folk desperately needed money. In the end, all the other classes teamed up to prevent me from making any money and make me pay way more than I could afford. This wasn't the social simulation it was supposed to be, nor what my teacher anticipated, but it taught me a really important lesson. While some circumstances in people’s lives should, in theory, prevent them from climbing the social ladder, some people are willing to sacrifice their ethics; in this case, the poor worked with the very people who made them that way to advance. Looking back on my experience with this simulation, I also realize that, as sociologists, there are only so many things we can do to prevent a situation like this from happening. My sociology teacher had never had this happen, but she did not stop it. She didn't encourage it to keep happening; instead, she stood at her desk and took notes. She compared how all the other groups played that day with how my group played every year before. The next day, as a class, we had a discussion that was meant to be based on what every group had done, but instead only my group was brought up.