Newest College Application Essays

“On my honor, I will do my best, to do my duty to God and my country and to obey the scout law; to help other people at all times; to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight.” The scout law is how I incorporate Artes,...

I left my house on the first day of middle school wondering if I would fit in and if my iPod was fully charged. By the end of the day I was wondering if my mother would be alive by the time I got to seventh grade. I still vividly remember parts of...

In the “journey to be oneself,” people discover many things about themselves—both good and bad. This kind of self-revelation makes many people afraid to venture on the journey. Throughout life, I have experienced many different events including...

As a blonde cheerleader, I've chuckled to myself when instructors who don't yet know me refrain from calling on me the first week of class. I guess the uniform and pom-poms give them a subconscious stereotype that I will be unable to answer the...

Whenever the world turns on its head and things don’t go as planned, my mother consoles me by saying “I feel like the Rock of Gibraltar.”

My family visited that monstrous slab of stone two summers ago. The sheer enormity of it was overwhelming. My...

I often find myself momentarily stunned by small, jewel-like moments that make up this life. For this I must thank books.

I always loved to read, for reading allowed me to contemplate life in a way that reality never did. The novelty lay, I think,...

Turning around the sharp corner and onto the straightway, the car next to me, number 32, inched closer and closer to the inside of the track, forcing me to move to the outside. While trying to speed up my pace around the next curve, my car’s front...

The path to becoming a successful USMA cadet and Army officer must start before being admitted to the Academy. A potential cadet has to prepare by taking rigorous courses in high school and being successful in them. My class load, which includes...

After riding my bicycle around campus to start off the morning, I return to Cazenova Hall to prepare for the day. I leave my dorm and make my way to the Lulu to meet a couple of my friends for breakfast. We met when we were only freshmen at...

Beep.

Beeep. My mind begrudgingly detached itself from the safe nothingness of the subconscious, wondering, as any sane entity would, why it was waking up at 6:00 on a crisp Friday morning. A few confusing seconds later, as usual, I remembered: I...

One year ago, on a muggy summer morning, I boarded a plane with some of my classmates and teachers, headed for Ecuador. The trip was intended to reveal a different world to us, as well as aid a local elementary school in a state of disrepair. A...

I was practically born on the river. Both of my parents were extreme whitewater raft guides, and they passed on their love of the river and nature in general to me. From a young age, my parents took me rafting on rivers like the San Juan, the...

Eye color was evenly divided in my family before I was born: two sets of blue eyes and two sets of green eyes. My birth would have traditionally tipped the scales, but I was born with one blue eye and one green. This anomaly was originally...

"Darcy, why do we have to read this book?" I complained after school. "This book isn’t just stupid, it has no relevance in my life at all." Because she was used to me asking questions like this, her only response was, "Because I told you. And I'm...

And there I was: sitting in front of a school computer on a cheap plastic chair, my hands resting on a desk stained to look like wood. It was early in the morning and in the middle of my second semester of my freshman year of high school. Little...

My yearning for the highest caliber of learning has taken me to Design and Architecture Senior High; it has been the driving force that wakes me up in the morning to prepare for an eight hour day as well as two hours of travel time, it has defined...

“Where did you go to college, Ms. Jennifer?” is a question I get often at lunch mentoring. The kids I work with are less focused at times with why I’m there and instead want to know everything about me. Instead of giving them a long spiel about...

“Dinner is ready!” Every Sunday a member of our family takes a turn choosing what we’re having for dinner, and today was my turn. My mother had prepared all of my favorite food, from foie gras to sea urchin sushi to satay. As we began eating, my...

"Can I touch you there?" As an 8-year-old, I didn't know what to say. I was obedient. I was shy. I was afraid of speaking up and being judged. So instead of answering the question, I stayed silent and was sexually abused by a family member. He...

The future is made with vestiges of the past. This lesson was driven into me one day as I was reading about President of Taiwan Ma Ying-Jeou’s strategy of “No reunification, no independence and no war”. What impressed me about President’ Ma’s...

It was the McCarthy era. Attorney General Tom Clark had just announced a list of fifty-six “subversive” organizations that were supposedly part of the communist crusade. My grandfather, vice president of the History Society at Tilden Senior High...

My childhood dreams were built beside a bookshelf. Sitting cross-legged on the library floor immersed in science fiction, I dreamt of time-traveling tesseracts, of machines intelligent enough to raise families, of lunar colonies equipped with...

Shark Day 2011. 100 miles from the ocean, but the fate of the top predator of the oceans, key to the health of marine ecosystems, would be decided right here in Sacramento. The role I got to play on Shark Day was cutting off the tags that said “...

The air was humid and the room was wild with the excitement of children on summer vacation. There were board games, drawings, Lego creations, and a radio with the local station on. I was seated at the table with my head resting on my arm and a...