The higher the admission rate, the more emphasis will be placed on your scores. People make an assumption that we are exploiting these identities into sob stories that admissions readers will immediately hang on to. But her openness to adapt with humility is a critical skill that is so necessary to be a great student, and unfortunately a skill that many students miss. white America, college application essay examples harvard, but I also fail to define my identity sandwiched between Korean and American. We want to get you admitted to your dream schools.
Choose Your Test
Names and identifying information have been changed, but all other details are preserved. Want to know your chances at Harvard? Calculate your chances for free! Prompt: Travel, living, or working experiences in your own or other communities. In the town of Montagu, South Africa, the sun had set hours ago, leaving its place to a deep dark sky. Everything was peaceful and quiet. In a little lodge, a family of four people had just finished eating on a dimly lit terrace. The heat was so intense even the black silence seemed to suffocate — only a few crickets dared to break its density. The mother asked something to her daughter, who stood up, college application essay examples harvard, and bypassed the table.
An intense, long scream, that reverberated in the little town of Montagu. Me, miserable as I had fallen down the terrace… into a plantation of cacti! I felt as if each cactus college application essay examples harvard contained poison that spread through my back, my arms, my entire body. The plants were engulfing me into the darkness, college application essay examples harvard. I was suffocating, trying to grasp some of the hot, heavy air, college application essay examples harvard. Until I felt her hand. She and my father organized this trip to South Africa. Valuing experiences more than material wealth, they liked to organize trips to foreign, far away countries.
In addition to South Africa, I visited Cuba, Nepal and China. Four countries that allowed me to discover numerous communities, recipes and traditions. Four countries where I met animals, plants and humans I had never seen before. I am a city girl. As a little girl, I was never really fond of flora or fauna. However, during my trips, college application essay examples harvard, I was lucky to see animals in freedom and to interact with nature. A baboon broke into my car in South Africa and walked all over me — literally.
I held an iguana in Cuba, did a safari in South Africa and talked with a parrot in Nepal. I saw the sun rising on the Machapuchare. I ultimately understood that all I had experienced was thanks to Nature. I realized its preciousness and its urgency to be college application essay examples harvard. I gained proximity to the environment that I had always lacked. My blood turned green thanks to travels. In addition to animal discoveries, travels are encounter engines. From little to aged humans, from all genders, from everywhere, travels allowed me to meet incredible people.
The uncanny apparition of a mysterious little girl particularly touched me in Ghorepani, Nepal. I had walked for seven hours that day, and was waiting for dinner, sitting on a bench. She slowly advanced towards me. The little girl stopped moving. Dark curly hair, dark deep eyes, white clothes covered in mud among the deep dark night. After what felt like dozens of hours, she looked at me and silently walked away, a star in the ink black sky. Every person encountered made me grow. Some like the Nepalese little girl simply disrupted me, some opened my eyes on poverty, others opened my eyes on racism. Every person I met had a college application essay examples harvard to share, a fact to transmit.
I visited an orphanage in a township in South Africa. The teacher, a frail and tiny woman, explained that racism was still so profound in the country that black and mixed race people were fighting to death in the neighbourhood. Centuries of abuse towards people of color, for children to pay the price, growing up parentless in the orphanage. The sound of the rain was echoing on the metal houses as the children sang their anthem. Wet furrows appeared as raindrops were racing on every cheek:. Traveling is ultimately a chance. It is an opportunity to understand the complexity of the world by getting close to it.
Traveling allowed me to realize the differences between each country and region. But beyond those dissimilarities, I saw singing, dancing and laughing everywhere in the world. Traveling represents a learning process. I integrated leadership and diligence in Nepal, watching children and old men transport wood college application essay examples harvard their back. Speaking foreign languages allowed me to acquire experience and put my theoretical skills to practise. I acquired a lot of adaptability through travels as part of their greatness comes from its unpredictability.
Traveling truly enriches the intellect of those who have the chance to do it. This is overall a delightful, very readable essay. In addition to strong imagery, the author also does a satisfactory job at answering the prompt. The open-ended question not only means that students could answer in a variety of ways, but also that it might be easy to fall into a trap of answering in an unrelated or uninteresting manner. The author here does a good job of directly answering the prompt by providing clear examples of their travels around the world. Their response also goes beyond merely listing experiences; rather, they tell stories and describe some of the notable people they have met along the way.
By telling stories and adopting a whimsical tone that evokes the wanderlust of travel, they elevate the impact of their response. We also learn a fair amount about the author through their stories and personal reflections. We see that they are concerned about social justice through their retelling of the interactions in South Africa. While the essay is beautiful, college application essay examples harvard, and the fast-moving pace college application essay examples harvard the feeling of seeing unfamiliar places for the first time, the narrative runs the risk of being too wide-ranging.
The introductory story of falling onto a bed of cacti could warrant an entire essay unto itself, yet the author does not return to it anywhere else in their response. They missed an opportunity to bring the response full circle by ruminating on that once more in their conclusion. Another thing to be careful of is how the privilege inherent in international travel might cause the author to see the life through a certain lens. Although they remark upon how their family prioritizes experiences over material wealth, the fact is that extensive international travel relies on having material wealth to pay for costs like airfare and housing. It is important to demonstrate humility and awareness of privilege when responding to college essay prompts, and this is no exception.
How to Write Harvard College Essays: See our in-depth guide of each supplemental essay prompt for Harvard University. How to Write the Common App Essays : Learn how to write a strong Common App essay for each of the prompts, with examples. Free CollegeVine Peer Essay Review : Submit your essay and get feedback from another student.
accomplishments essay
In return for probing into previously ignored details, my canvas and paints opened the world. I began to appreciate the pink kiss of ever-evolving sunsets and the even suppression of melancholy. When my father came home from a business trip, it was no longer a matter of simple happiness, but of fatigue and gladness' underlying shades. The personalities who had once seemed so annoyingly arrogant now turned soft with their complexities of doubt and inspiration. Each mundane scene is as deep and varied as the paint needed to capture it. One day, I will learn to paint people. As I run faster into the heart of art and my love for politics and law, I will learn to see the faces behind each page of cold policy text, the amazing innovation sketched in the tattered Constitution, and the progressiveness living in oak-paneled courts.
I know that in a few years I will see a thousand more colors than I do today. Yet the most beautiful part about art is that there is no end. No matter how deep I penetrate its shimmering realms, the enigmatic caverns of wonder will stay. My favorite college essays begin with one moment in time and end by tying that moment into a larger truth about the world. In this essay, Elizabeth uses this structure masterfully. The essay opens with dialogue, placing the reader right in the middle of the action. She skips backstory and explanations that can bore readers and bog down a short essay. The reader is left feeling as though we are sitting beside her, staring at an empty vase and a set of paints, with no idea how to begin. The SPARC method of essay writing says that the best college essays show how a student can do one or more of these five things: Seize an opportunity, Pursue goals despite obstacles, Ask important questions, take smart Risks, or Create with limited resources.
As the essay transitions from the personal to the universal, her experience painting the vase becomes a metaphor for how she sees the world. Not only has painting helped her appreciate the subtle shades of color in the sunset, it has opened her up to understand that nothing in life is black and white. Sponsored by Bridge to College, a data company that matches students to colleges that are an academic, financial, and social fit. We provide services to students, families, high schools, and colleges to support all of their admissions needs. Find Bridge to College on Social Media: Facebook Instagram Twitter LinkedIn.
I entered the surprisingly cool car. Since when is Beijing Line 13 air-conditioned? The pressure of their eyes on me filled the car and smothered me. An old man very loudly whispered to a child curled up in his lap. If only they could look inside. They would know that I actually speak Chinese—not just speak, but love. They would know that this love was born from my first love of Latin—the language that fostered my admiration of all languages. Latin lives in the words we speak around the world today. And translating this ancient language is like watching a play and performing in it at the same time.
We share the intrinsic value of loyalty to friends, family, and society. We stand true to our own word, and we uphold others to theirs. Language has helped me do that. If these subway passengers understood me, they would know that the very reason I sat beside them was because of Latin. Even before Aeneas and his tale, I met Caecilius and Grumio, characters in my first Latin textbook. I realized how learning another language could expose me to other worlds and other people—something that has always excited me. I also realized that if I wanted to know more about the world and the people in it, I would have to learn a spoken language. Spanish, despite the seven years of study prior to Latin, did not stick with me.
And the throatiness of French was not appealing. But Chinese, more than these other traditional languages, intrigued me. The doors to new worlds it could open seemed endless. Thus I chose Chinese. If these subway passengers looked inside me, they would find that my knowledge of both Latin and Chinese makes me feel whole. It feels like the world of the past is flowing through me alongside the world of the future. If this little boy and his family and friends could look inside, they would understand that Latin laid the foundation for my lifelong commitment to languages. Without words, thoughts and actions would be lost in the space between our ears. Unfortunately, they will not know this until I speak. Then once I speak, the doors will open.
Your college essay should serve two purposes: allow the reader to gain insights about you that they are not able to do in other parts of your application and provide an example of your writing abilities. To the former, you are hoping to demonstrate five soft skills that most colleges are at least implicitly interested in gleaning, those that indicate your capacity to be a good student at their institution. Alex arrives at both goals in an interesting way. Without seeing the rest of her application, I can only assume that she is possibly interested in pursuing a major in a language if she is pursuing a major in an applied math, this essay would be extremely interesting and she has likely participated in some kind of team sport to demonstrate the soft skill of teamwork.
I want to keep reading. And she does that. I want to keep reading because there is something she is saying about her identity--be it performative or actual--that I am curious about. People make an assumption that we are exploiting these identities into sob stories that admissions readers will immediately hang on to. We are encouraging students to write about something similar to what Alex did—describe how your identity has created a learning opportunity or a moment of resilience or determination. Alex seems like someone who is well resourced: her access to certain text; language curricula and the amount of time she spent studying those languages; even her sentence structure, gives that away.
But her openness to adapt with humility is a critical skill that is so necessary to be a great student, and unfortunately a skill that many students miss. For the second goal, she does a tremendous job of demonstrating her writing abilities. The last two sentences of the second paragraph sold me on her skill-level and personhood. I love that. The essay works as an introduction to who she is and her soft skills, as well as a demonstration of her writing abilities. AcceptU is the 1 rated college admissions consulting group. With a team composed entirely of former college admissions officers, AcceptU advises families on all aspects of the college planning process, from early profile-building to strategy and essay editing.
com and schedule an introductory call with an AcceptU advisor today. I had never seen houses floating down a river. Minutes before there had not even been a river. An immense wall of water was destroying everything in its wake, picking up fishing boats to smash them against buildings. It was the morning of March 11, Seeing the images of destruction wrought by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, I felt as if something within myself was also being shaken, for I had just spent two of the happiest summers of my life there.
In the summer of my freshman year, I received the Kikkoman National Scholarship, which allowed me to travel to Japan to stay with a host family in Tokyo for ten weeks. I arrived just as the swine flu panic gripped the world, so I was not allowed to attend high school with my host brother, Yamato. Instead, I took Japanese language, judo, and karate classes and explored the confusing sprawl of the largest city in the world. I spent time with the old men of my neighborhood in the onsen, or hot spring, questioning them about the Japan of their youth. They laughed and told me that if I wanted to see for myself, I should work on a farm. I spent two weeks working more than fourteen hours a day. Other days were spent pulling up endless rows of daikon, or Japanese radish, which left rashes on my arms that itched for weeks.
I passed out every night in a room too small for me to straighten my legs. One day, I overslept a lunch break by two hours. I awoke mortified, and hurried to the father. After I apologized in the most polite form of Japanese, his face broke into a broad grin. There is no need to apologize. The family had lived for years in conditions that thoroughly wore me out in only a few days. I had missed two hours of work, yet they were still perpetually thankful to me. In their life of unbelievable hardship, they still found room for compassion.
When I had first gone to Tokyo, I had sought the soul of the nation among its skyscrapers and urban hot springs. The next summer I spurned the beaten track in an attempt to discover the true spirit of Japan. While lugging enormously heavy bags of garlic and picking daikon, I found that spirit. The farmers worked harder than anyone I have ever met, but they still made room in their hearts for me. So when the tsunami threatened the people to whom I owed so much, I had to act. This essay is very clean and straightforward. Anthony wisely uses imagery from a well-known historic event, the tsunami, to set the scene for his story. He visited Japan for two summers and provides depth about what he learned: In his first summer, he explored Tokyo and studied the language and culture; in his second summer, he lived in rural Japan and worked long hours on a farm.
The beauty of the essay actually lies in its simplicity. Admittedly, it is not a groundbreaking or original essay in the way he tells his story; instead, Anthony comes across as someone who is very interesting, hardworking, intellectually curious, dedicated, humble and likable - all traits that admissions officers are seeking in applicants. We like to see how applicants learn, grow or change from the beginning to the end - and Anthony rightfully spends more time describing the hard work and lifestyle of farming and what he learned from this experience. Anthony concludes with a reference to his opening paragraph about the tsunami, and impresses the reader with his fundraising to help victims. It is not necessarily missing, but perhaps a sentence or two could have been added to explain why Anthony was in Japan in the first place.
What was his connection to the country, language or culture? Does it tie into an academic interest? If so, that would make his already strong essay even stronger in the eyes of admissions officers. The Crimson Brand Studio. What's This. sponsored by. Nicolas sponsored by. Nikolas sponsored by. Nikolas is candid, writing about how he could solve problems intellectually, but struggled to cope emotionally during Kiersten's diagnosis and treatment. Abigail sponsored by. I hate the letter S. Of the , words with S, I only grapple with one. There's an honesty here as she reveals to the reader her attempts at filling this void in her life by constantly keeping busy. It's further satisfying to see these attempts at committing to various activities evolve into what she terms a double.
Justine sponsored by. For all my love of order when it comes to my room, I don't want myself, or the people with whom I interact, to fit squarely into any one category. Justine's reliance on labelling is underpinned by her yearning for a sense of stability and order in a messy world—an unaffected yearning that readers, to varying degrees, can sympathize with. Carrie sponsored by. I've come to the realization that my life has been a string as well, a string of stories. Jiafeng sponsored by. My character. As we peer into his mind, we learn something essential about Jiafeng's character—that he is irrepressibly drawn to the intricate beauty of pure learning. Ella sponsored by. To do so, however, I step outside my Korean American Southern Baptist paradigm because my experiences do not constitute everyone else's.
Elizabeth sponsored by. This essay is a great example of a create essay. It's real strength, however, lies in showing how the writer pursues her goal despite frustration and grapples with universal questions. Alex sponsored by. If I were to guess, I assign the following weights to how much each activity contributed to the strength of my activities section:. In other words, participating in the Research Science Institute RSI was far more important than all of my other extracurriculars, combined. You can see that this was the only activity my admissions reader circled.
The reason for this is the prestige of RSI. Because the program was so prestigious and selective, getting in served as a big confirmation signal of my academic quality. In other words, the Harvard admissions reader would likely think, "OK, if this very selective program has already validated Allen as a top student, I'm inclined to believe that Allen is a top student and should pay special attention to him. Now, it took a lot of prior work to even get into RSI because it's so selective. I had already ranked nationally in the Chemistry Olympiad more below , and I had done a lot of prior research work in computer science at Jisan Research Institute—more about this later. But getting into RSI really propelled my application to another level. Because RSI was so important and was such a big Spike, all my other extracurriculars paled in importance.
The admissions officer at Princeton or MIT probably didn't care at all that I volunteered at a hospital or founded a high school club. This is a good sign of developing a strong Spike. You want to do something so important that everything else you do pales in comparison to it. A strong Spike becomes impossible to ignore. In contrast, if you're well-rounded, all your activities hold equal weight—which likely means none of them are really that impressive unless you're a combination of Olympic athlete, internationally-ranked science researcher, and New York Times bestselling author, but then I'd call you unicorn because you don't exist. Apply this concept to your own interests—what can be so impressive and such a big Spike that it completely overshadows all your other achievements?
This might be worth spending a disproportionate amount of time on. As I recommend in my Harvard guide and 4. In retrospect, one "mistake" I made was spending a lot of time on the violin. Each week I spent eight hours on practice and a lesson and four hours of orchestra rehearsals. This amounted to over 1, hours from freshman to junior year. The result? I was pretty good, but definitely nowhere near world-class. Remember, there are thousands of orchestras and bands in the country, each with their own concertmasters, drum majors, and section 1 st chairs. If I were to optimize purely for college applications, I should have spent that time on pushing my spike even further —working on more Olympiad competitions, or doing even more hardcore research.
Looking back I don't mind this much because I generally enjoyed my musical training and had a mostly fun time in orchestra and I had a strong Spike anyway. But this problem can be a lot worse for well-rounded students who are stretched too thin. First, developing a Spike requires continuous, increasingly ambitious foundational work. It's like climbing a staircase. From the beginning of high school, each step was more and more ambitious—my first academic team, my first research experience, leading up to state and national competitions and more serious research work. So when I suggest devoting a lot of time to developing your Spike, it's not necessarily the Spike in itself—it's also spending time on foundational work leading up to what will be your major achievement.
That's why I don't see my time with academic teams or volunteering as wasted, even though in the end they didn't contribute as much to my application. Second, it is important to do things you enjoy. I still enjoyed playing the violin and being part of an orchestra, and I really enjoyed my school's academic teams, even though we never went beyond state level. Even if some activities don't contribute as much to your application, it's still fine to spend some time on them—just don't delude yourself into thinking they're stronger than they really are and overspend time on them. Finally, note that most of my activities were pursued over multiple years.
This is a good sign of commitment—rather than hopping from activity year to year, it's better to show sustained commitment, as this is a better signal of genuine passion. In a future article, I'll break down these activities in more detail. But this guide is already super long, so I want to focus our attention on the main points. Please describe which of your activities extracurricular and personal activities or work experience has been most meaningful and why. I chose RSI as my most significant activity for two reasons—one based on the meaning of the work, and another on the social aspect. Reading the second paragraph now, it's a bit cringe-y in its enthusiasm, but I really did have an amazing experience and am still good friends with some of my classmates from RSI, over a decade later.
In my application and in the Common Application, there's an Additional Information section, where you can write about anything else. I chose to spend this clarifying my extracurriculars even further. My main motive in this section was to add more detail around my most significant activities : what I did, why they should be noteworthy to the reader, and what I personally gained from them. The only parts the reader underlined were the name of my research supervisor, and the fact that my research was then a Siemens-Westinghouse Semi-Finalist. Both of these legitimate my research. I highly recommend you take the time to write an Additional Information section. You have so little space in your Yale application or Duke application to express yourself—this is purposely designed so everyone doesn't submit pages of drivel.
Here you have an extra words to add more color around your life and accomplishments—DO IT. Along with Activities, Academic Honors is the other major area where you can really shine and develop a big Spike. The higher the level of competition and the more prestigious the award, the more the honor is worth. This has an exponential relationship, because of how quickly the field is narrowed at each stage of competition. A state ranking is probably worth 10x that of a regional ranking; a national ranking 10x that of a state ranking; and an international ranking even more. This can also mean an international ranking is worth x that of a regional ranking—again, why a big Spike is so impressive.
It's obvious that schools like Yale and UChicago want the best students in the world that they can get their hands on. Academic honors and awards are a great, quantifiable way to show that. Here's the complete list of Academic Honors I submitted. By far, the biggest academic honor I had was competing in the US National Chemistry Olympiad , where I ranked 6 in the country in junior year, out of roughly 11, students who took the first round test. If you don't know about these academic Olympiads, they're like the Olympics for math and science geeks. At the highest international level of competition, countries send their top students to wage battle against each other, just like the sports Olympics. The best known subjects are Math , Physics , Chemistry , and Biology in order of descending prestige, among nerds.
I ranked at the national level, before the US selected their final team—a study camp of 20 students. In junior year, I didn't make it onto the international team to compete I did in senior year, too late for college apps. But this was still a national level honor, in a well-known competition. If you are nationally or internationally ranked for something meaningful, you really stand out in the reader's mind , because most applicants only have regional and state honors, if even that. This is why I say a big Spike makes you stand out clearly among a bin of well-rounded applicants. Note that even though I had a strong application, I clearly didn't have the strongest application possible.
At Harvard in my class, I knew International Math and Physics Olympiad gold medalists, people who were on their national teams for the hardest subjects AND ranked in the top percentiles worldwide. And there were students with similar level accomplishments in other arenas, from music performance to writing. Earning this kind of honor was nearly a golden ticket to getting into schools like Harvard , because you literally are the best in the world at what you care about. So you don't need anywhere near a "perfect" application to get in. I know this is intimidating if you don't already have a prestigious honor.
But remember there are thousands of nationally-ranked people in a multitude of honor types, from science competitions to essay contests to athletics to weird talents. And I strongly believe the 1 differentiator of high school students who achieve things is work ethic, NOT intelligence or talent. Yes, you need a baseline level of competence to get places, but people far undervalue the progress they can make if they work hard and persevere. Far too many people give up too quickly or fatigue without putting in serious effort. If you're stuck thinking, "well I'm just an average person, and there's no way I'm going to become world-class in anything," then you've already lost before you've begun.
The truth is everyone who achieves something of note puts in an incredible amount of hard work. Because this is invisible to you, it looks like talent is what distinguishes the two of you, when really it's much more often diligence. I talk a lot more about the Growth Mindset in my How To Get a 4. Just like extracurriculars, there's a quick dropoff in value of each item after that. My research work took up the next two honors, one a presentation at an academic conference, and the other Siemens a research competition for high school researchers. At the risk of beating a dead horse, think about how many state medalists there are in the country, in the hundreds of competitions that exist.
The number of state to national rankers is probably at least less than because of variation in state size , so if there are 2, nationally ranked students, there are 40, state-ranked students in something! So state honors really don't help you stand out on your Princeton application. There are just too many of them around. On the other hand, if you can get to be nationally ranked in something, you will have an amazing Spike that distinguishes you. Having read books like 50 Successful Harvard Application Essays , I was frightened. I didn't grow up as a refugee, wrenched from my war-torn home! I didn't have a sibling with a debilitating illness!
How could anything I write compare to these tales of personal strength? The trite truth is that colleges want to know who you really are. Clearly they don't expect everyone to have had immense personal struggle. But they do want students who are:. In retrospect, in the context of MY application, the personal statement really wasn't what got me into Harvard. I do think my Spike was nearly sufficient to get me admitted to every school in the country. I say "nearly" because, even if you're world-class, schools do want to know you're not a jerk and that you're an interesting person which is conveyed through your personal essay and letters of recommendation. Back then, we had a set of different prompts :. I chose to write on a topic of my choice.
After thorough brainstorming, I didn't really identify with any of the other topics. I couldn't think of a topic that wasn't trite and that I cared about enough. I also felt a need to be distinctive and thought that a free essay topic might give me more freedom. The way I saw it, the personal statement was a vehicle to convey my personality and my interests. To build my Personal Narrative, I wanted to showcase my personality and reveal a bit about my life experiences. Even though the life experiences I'd had weren't distinctive in themselves, I thought I could package them from an interesting perspective. The idea I used was to talk about my battle against the snooze alarm.
I really did love sleep and still do and I thought it'd be interesting to frame my personality, interests, and life experiences from this perspective. Frankly this personal statement is really embarrassing. Each time I read it, I cringe a bit. I think I sound too smug and self-satisfied. But again in the interest of transparency, here goes:. I'm still cringing a bit. I want to as well. We'll get to areas of improvement later, but first, let's talk about what this personal essay did well. As I said above, I saw the theme of the snooze button as a VEHICLE to showcase a few qualities I cared about :.
I showed this through mentioning different interests Rubik's cube, chemistry, Nietzsche and iterating through a few designs for an alarm clock electric shocks, explosions, Shakespearean sonnet recitation. I don't take life too seriously. The theme of the essay—battling an alarm clock—shows this well, in comparison to the gravitas of the typical student essay. I also found individual lines funny, like "All right, so I had violated the divine honor of the family and the tenets of Confucius. The frank admission of a realistic lazy habit—pushing the Snooze button—served as a nice foil to my academic honors and shows that I can be down-to-earth. So you see how the snooze button acts as a vehicle to carry these major points and a lot of details, tied together to the same theme.
In the same way, The Walking Dead is NOT a zombie show—the zombie environment is a VEHICLE by which to show human drama and conflict. Packaging my points together under the snooze button theme makes it a lot more interesting than just outright saying "I'm such an interesting guy. So overall, I believe the essay accomplishes my goals and the main points of what I wanted to convey about myself. Note that this is just one of many ways to write an essay. It worked for me, but it may be totally inappropriate for you. Looking at it with a more seasoned perspective, some parts of it are WAY too try-hard. I try too hard to show off my breadth of knowledge in a way that seems artificial and embellishing.
The entire introduction with the Rubik's cube seems bolted on, just to describe my long-standing desire to be a Renaissance man. Only three paragraphs down do I get to the Snooze button, and I don't refer again to the introduction until the end. With just words, I could have made the essay more cohesive by keeping the same theme from beginning to end. Some phrases really make me roll my eyes. A key principle of effective writing is to show, not say. You don't say "I'm passionate about X," you describe what extraordinary lengths you took to achieve X. The mention of Nietzsche is over-the-top. I mean, come on.
The reader probably thought, "OK, this kid just read it in English class and now he thinks he's a philosopher. The ending: "with the extra nine minutes, maybe I'll teach myself to cook fried rice" is silly. Where in the world did fried rice come from? I meant it as a nod to my Chinese heritage, but it's too sudden to work. I could have deleted the sentence and wrapped up the essay more cleanly. So I have mixed feelings of my essay. I think it accomplished my major goals and showed the humorous, irreverent side of my personality well.
However, it also gave the impression of a kid who thought he knew more than he did, a pseudo-sophisticate bordering on obnoxious. I still think it was a net positive. At the end of the day, I believe the safest, surefire strategy is to develop a Spike so big that the importance of the Personal Essay pales in comparison to your achievements. You want your Personal Essay to be a supplement to your application, not the only reason you get in. There are probably some cases where a well-rounded student writes an amazing Personal Essay and gets in through the strength of that. As a Hail Mary if you're a senior and can't improve your application further, this might work.
But the results are very variable—some readers may love your essay, others may just think it's OK. Without a strong application to back it up, your mileage may vary. We know what kinds of students colleges want to admit. We want to get you admitted to your dream schools. This is a really fun section. Usually you don't get to read your letter of recommendation because you sign the FERPA waiver. I've also reached out to my letter writers to make sure they're ok with my showing this. Teacher recommendations are incredibly important to your application. The average teacher sees thousands of students through a career, and so he or she is very well equipped to position you relative to all other students.
Furthermore, your teachers are experienced adults—their impressions of you are much more reliable than your impressions of yourself see my Personal Essay above. They can corroborate your entire Personal Narrative as an outside observer. The most effective recommendation letters speak both to your academic strengths and to your personality. For the second factor, the teacher needs to have interacted with you meaningfully, ideally both in and out of class. Check out our guide on what makes for effective letters of recommendation. Starting from sophomore year, I started thinking about whom I connected better with and chose to engage with those teachers more deeply.
Because it's standard for colleges to require two teachers in different subjects, I made sure to engage with English and history teachers as well as math and science. The minimum requirement for a good letter is someone who taught a class in which you did well. I got straight A's in my coursework, so this wasn't an issue. Beyond this, I had to look for teachers who would be strong advocates for me on both an academic and personal level. These tended to be teachers I vibed more strongly with, and typically these were teachers who demonstrably cared about teaching. This was made clear by their enthusiasm, how they treated students, and how much they went above expectations to help.
I had a lot of teachers who really just phoned it in and treated their job perfunctorily—these people are likely to write pretty blasé letters. A final note before reading my actual teacher evaluations— you should avoid getting in the mindset where you get to know teachers JUST because you want a good recommendation letter. Your teachers have seen hundreds, if not thousands, of students pass through, and it's much easier to detect insincerity than you think. If you honestly like learning and are an enthusiastic, responsible, engaging student, a great recommendation letter will follow naturally. The horse should lead the cart. Read my How to Get a 4. I took AP Chemistry in 10 th grade and had Miss Cherryl Vorak now Mynster. She was young, having taught for fewer than 5 years when I had her.
She was my favorite teacher throughout high school for these reasons:. By the time of the letter writing, I had known her for two full years and engaged with her continuously, even when I wasn't taking a class with her in junior year. We'd build up a strong relationship over the course of many small interactions. All of this flowed down to the recommendation you see here. Remember, the horse leads the cart. First, we'll look at the teacher evaluation page. The Common Application now has 16 qualities to rate, rather than the 10 here. But they're largely the same.
You can see a very strong evaluation here, giving me the highest ratings possible for all qualities. In today's Common Application, all of these Ratings are retained, aside from "Potential for Growth. You can tell that the updated Common App places a great emphasis on personality. The most important point here: it is important to be ranked "One of the top few encountered in my career" for as many ratings as possible. If you're part of a big school, this is CRITICAL to distinguish yourself from other students. The more experienced and trustworthy the teacher, the more meaningful this is. Again, it's a numbers game. You really want to make sure you're one of the best in your school class, if not one of the best the teacher has ever encountered. You'll see below how you can accomplish this.
As you read this, think— what are the interactions that would prompt the teacher to write a recommendation like this? This was a relationship built up in a period of over 2 years, with every small interaction adding to an overall larger impression. You can see how seriously they take the letter because of all the underlining. This admissions reader underlined things that weren't even underlined in my application, like my US National Chemistry Olympiad awards. It's one thing for a student to claim things about himself—it's another to have a teacher put her reputation on the line to advocate for her student.
The letter here is very strong for a multitude of reasons. First, the length is notable —most letters are just a page long, but this is nearly two full pages , single spaced. In addition to South Africa, I visited Cuba, Nepal and China. Four countries that allowed me to discover numerous communities, recipes and traditions. Four countries where I met animals, plants and humans I had never seen before. I am a city girl. As a little girl, I was never really fond of flora or fauna. However, during my trips, I was lucky to see animals in freedom and to interact with nature. A baboon broke into my car in South Africa and walked all over me — literally.
I held an iguana in Cuba, did a safari in South Africa and talked with a parrot in Nepal. I saw the sun rising on the Machapuchare. I ultimately understood that all I had experienced was thanks to Nature. I realized its preciousness and its urgency to be saved. I gained proximity to the environment that I had always lacked. My blood turned green thanks to travels. In addition to animal discoveries, travels are encounter engines. From little to aged humans, from all genders, from everywhere, travels allowed me to meet incredible people. The uncanny apparition of a mysterious little girl particularly touched me in Ghorepani, Nepal.
I had walked for seven hours that day, and was waiting for dinner, sitting on a bench. She slowly advanced towards me. The little girl stopped moving. Dark curly hair, dark deep eyes, white clothes covered in mud among the deep dark night. After what felt like dozens of hours, she looked at me and silently walked away, a star in the ink black sky. Every person encountered made me grow. Some like the Nepalese little girl simply disrupted me, some opened my eyes on poverty, others opened my eyes on racism. Every person I met had a story to share, a fact to transmit.
No comments:
Post a Comment