Lehigh University Undergraduate College Application Essays

Throughout my life, my eyes have been drawn to the sky. When I was a child I would look up in speckled black night and gaze at constellations, unable to comprehend the extent of the universe, wondering if it ever ended. By day I would look to the...

"Merudh, get up, get up!" It was four in the morning, and I was four years old. The heart-pounding sound of my dad's voice woke me out of a deep sleep. As I peeked through my bedroom door, I saw my father bolt out of our house with my mother in...

It was a crisp, clear January day in Park Ridge, New Jersey, a few miles from the middle of nowhere. Before me stood an imposing sight: Schubert’s Impromptu. With a length of fourteen pages and a required foundation of meticulous technical skills,...

Giving up my weekend nights for swim practice was something I was used to by the time I reached high school. Swimming, I felt, was my niche, and with that niche came many sacrifices. Yet, for all the “hardships” that came with it, I earned the...

A good university is, in many ways, a lot like a strong soccer team. Just as Lehigh does not have a single objective of teaching information, so also the aim of a strong soccer team is not only to win. Aside from teaching in the classroom, a...

A baseball player my entire life, I often find myself comparing the sport to different things in life. In my eyes, a college campus is comparable to a baseball team, and doing well in a college setting is similar to winning a baseball game.

A...

He reached out, unfurled his hand, and looked up at me with what can only be described as a look of pure desperation. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a crumpled five-dollar bill and handed it to the man. "It's a cold one," I remarked. "God...

Since I was a toddler, my father has taken me sailing on the Long Island Sound. As I grew older, I began to ask questions. How do the sails move the boat forward? Why isn’t the boat pushed over by the wind? After ten years of asking questions, I...

It was 2 AM. As my fingers moved across the keyboard, words sprang onto the surface of my laptop screen like drops of tar. Word count revealed that I had only written 500 words today. Unacceptable. Stephen King averaged 2000 words a day. I had to...

One afternoon I received a letter from a friend, a current student at Lehigh. Nestled inside the letter was a newspaper article regarding initiatives undertaken by a group of Lehigh students to provide fresh, organic food to those living in the...

I felt an unequivocal sense of community when I gazed at my dinner plate one night at Chewonki and acknowledged that the beets, potatoes, and lettuce on my plate were plucked from the earth by me and my best friends. The hours that we expended on...

My hair used to fall out because I thought I was strong, my heartbeat used to waver because I thought I was in control, and my hands used to shake because, for the first time, I thought I was beautiful.

My hands have done great things. I used my...

Two dogs with bladder problems, one screaming six year old, and one painful, fifteen-hour drive. After suffering through traffic jams, vehicle smog tests, and no privacy, my parents decided to uproot our San Diego routines and begin a new life in...

It’s May 5, a typical Thursday. Your alarm rings. You sit up, check your phone, and spot a Facebook viral video on Holocaust Memorial Day. It's not an ordinary day. Plugging in your headphones, you brace yourself and hit play.You see a black...

She runs so gracefully, her arms swinging back and forth, her legs flying, barely even touching the ground as she laps the girl in front of her. I am that girl—not the graceful one but the slow one who runs like a beanbag chair, hunched over and...

Despite what he meant to me, I won’t tell you his name; that privilege was signed away as part of camp counselor protocol.

I moved myself under the rock wall. The dense heat rising from the tire pieces covering the floor paired with the green...

I always thought of living life through the saying “quality over quantity”, but when dealing with problems like child poverty, or teen suicide, you need quality and quantity. This was what got me into running the Kids in Action Network Non-Profit...

The best way to learn is through blood, sweat, and a little bit of vomit. Prior to my relatively new experiences in EMS I always believed that the classroom was where you learned and the real world is where you apply your skills. 150 hours of...

Everyone in Darte Hall knew my set of house rules. Number tokens are applied to the board randomly, twos and twelves are equal, and your turn is forfeited if you roll the die outside of the box lid. The game The Settlers of Catan has become a...

Christopher Robin is the best movie in the world. Despite the poor acting and the animation that made the animals look sad and dreary, a movie is impressive if it can make the viewer feel an emotion, and Christopher Robin exceeds in that realm....