Newest College Application Essays

The alarm heralding the dawn becomes redundant as a mix of dread and excitement has kept me up all night. It’s 5 am. Today I will compete in my third Junior National Equestrian Championship in Pune at the National Defence Academy.

I’ve determined...

At Waffle House, the waiter asks where I go and I reply, “Brookstone.” He scoffs, “Heh, the rich kid private school.”By reputation, Brookstone is full of kids that grew up with cotillion manners, groomed for debutante balls, settled in gated...

I didn’t understand what street lights were until I was about eight. Still, some of my earliest memories are of street lamps. Growing up, I clearly remember seeing blurry beacons of light suspended in the dark. In the daytime, the seemingly...

There was an intruder in my home; I was certain of it. I held my breath and pushed open my bedroom door slowly. A wave of foreign, discordant sounds struck me where I secretly crouched, turning my muscles to stone. But when I summoned the courage...

She greets me from her permanent abode whenever I return to my bedroom: chunky African braids trailing over her shoulders as she tilts her head to stare. I wonder, sometimes, if she blames me for what I did to her. She looked quite different when...

The mayor named it Uptown. It’s really just downtown. Take Exit One, go sixty down Second Avenue until you hit Broadway. We are downtown kids, brought together by those brick buildings a street over, home of our beloved Springer Theatre Academy....

It begins with a dark cerulean sky eerily illumined by forks of lightning. To a visitor, this might be an ordinary thunderstorm, but the locals exchange anxious looks and murmur "Nne tse logun": the rains are coming.

As a child, I looked forward...

My independence began with a walk.

One morning, instead of bursting into my mom’s room and shaking her awake to drive me to school, I quietly inched the door open. As I peeked down at a silhouette curled up in a fluffy mess of blankets, I couldn't...

When my grandmother arrived in the Nigerian village of Nowa for the first time, women wearing nothing but dyed fabrics tied around their waists danced in procession behind the vehicle that my newly wedded grandfather drove. My grandmother tells me...

Moshing - the arm flailing, leg kicking dancing that happens at hardcore concerts. And I mosh with my parents, of all people. As you can imagine, they weren’t too keen on the idea of their 13-year-old daughter “turning emo”. I developed a love for...

All I heard was giggles coming from my classmates as my name was announced back during my middle school graduation ceremony. Mr. Raleigh, my eighth-grade geometry teacher, had nominated me for the “Human Calculator” award. As I embarrassingly yet...

His name was Tiger. He was a 13-year-old Yorkshire Terrier with eyes that were too big for his face. He was nervous, understandably, having been displaced after his family had to give him up. Tiger was one of 3.9 million dogs that enter shelters...

At 5:00am my blissfully dark world was shattered by the indignant cries of Nne, the woman who looked after me while my mother worked. At 6:00am I was hauled into the bath tub where a bucket and a smooth, coloured bowl - not elegant, working taps -...

If time is money, then I am broke. My typical week involves a packed schedule from Monday to Friday with little free time between school, football practice, homework, and my commute from Murfreesboro to Nashville. I spend around 2.5 hours a day...

“Look!” I exclaimed as I wildly waved my bucket and spade in the air, “Mom, look at the sandcastle I made!”

My mother let out an amused chuckle. “Interesting, but what else can you make?” she asked with a twinkle in her almond brown eyes.

“I can...

Hell's marching band. I suppress a wince as the sound of cymbals ushers Lizzy and me into alien territory. The entrance door swings shut behind us and we shuffle in, breaths drawn. Two dozen heads turn to stare. A man with a jagged scar across his...

I was a nine-year-old novelist. No really, I was. Granted, it wasn’t professionally published and my first book was as sophisticated as you can imagine from a child but, nonetheless, I’m proud of my first written fiction piece. My book was called...

I woke up at six that morning. My mom had left an hour earlier to work her two full-time jobs. It was a routine weekend; surrounding me was our ramshackle apartment decorated with sparse furniture, a Hindu temple in the corner, and a telephone I...

I came of age underneath the faded awnings of stalls that sold peppers and crayfish; boiled pears and ripe ears of corn. The older women smiled at me as I, surreptitiously, tried to avoid the animal droppings that littered the market roads. Theirs...

From Ohio to Kentucky to Massachusetts, some may call me crazy for having three different trees as my best friends, but I assure you that I am perfectly sane. For my first birthday, my grandparents flew to Ohio and gave me my first birthday...

A semicolon, and a brace there. Done! I hit the “Compile and Run” button, my first ever computer program has printed out the famous “Hello World.”

When I was ten years old, I found a book on “Windows” operating system from my parents’...

On September 25, 2010, my parents agreed that shaving my head would be an effective disciplinary measure against my growing indifference towards my studies. It was a scaldingly hot day in Lagos. My mother drove down the old Ikoyi bridge that would...

As Tai moved through the strange garden, scarcely breathing in wonderment, I moved with him. When Tai’s classmates mocked him for drinking tea with his grandmother instead of attending sporting events, I flinched as though I was the recipient of...

The four of us sit still for a full minute, too humbled to move or to speak. My hand finds its way to the door handle and I cringe as the car opens with a low clunk, interrupting the total silence. I walk to the edge of the lookout to survey the...