Rochester Institute of Technology Undergraduate College Application Essays

Two years ago at summer camp, I hiked the better part of the Northville-Lake Placid Trail.

No one from camp had gone on this trip since some time in the seventies, so we had a certain air of bravado. We were a group of 14 and 15 year olds...

“I wanna go home!” I say as I sit on the kitchen floor watching my mother cook.

“What do you mean?” she asks, giving me a questioning look. “Ethiopia?”

“I don’t know.”

Home. For most people, the word can be easily defined as the place where they grew...

“Would you like fries with that?” Very few, if any, aspire to say that phrase at any age, but I’ve been lucky enough to have been saying it since I turned fourteen. Almost every teenager loathes getting a first job, but for me working at McDonald’...

It’s just my luck to play the first match of the season on one of the windiest days of the year. However, that doesn’t faze me by now. My head is in the game, and nothing can break my concentration. My partner prepares her serve, tossing the...

With great celerity, I rushed towards the large, oaken doors, hoping that I hadn’t missed the start of a new adventure. After the doors creaked open with a slow, decaying roar, I quietly crept along the shadowed aisles, the seating area filled to...

“Stop interrupting! Before opening your mouth, see if the adults are in the middle of a conversation,” my dad reminded me for the hundredth time. What I couldn’t have articulated at the time was that I was too lazy to ‘watch’, and I couldn’t hear...

For me, the summer months used to possess a certain emptiness. The warm weather and freedom to explore personal projects were always welcome, but the absence of school’s daily scheduling and assignments sometimes left me feeling generally aimless...

I push through the mountain of people ahead of me to glimpse at the check in line at the traikin station. I frantically push myself through the multitude of people to avoid being trampled to death in the busiest city in the world: Beijing.

I...

I am a simple person. My dad works with computers, my mom works with food, and ironically, my two favorite things are computers and food. Yet, no matter how hard I try to convince myself that I’m that simple, my thoughts always wander into the...