Sample college personal statement essays
I put the water to boil, adding salt. To my own surprise, I successfully took back the day. The very innermost part of that shadow, the umbra, is where no light has bent around you—it has completely changed direction, bounced off. As my bus drove through the still-bustling market square and past the medieval Ben-Youssef madrasa, I realized that becoming independent was a process, not an event. How does platelet rich plasma stimulate tissue growth? Not only does it tell us a lot about him, but it allows him to transition into the meat of his story about how his unconventional educational trajectory influenced the person he is today, sample college personal statement essays. As I deciphered complex codes into comprehensible languages like rate of change and speed of an object, Sample college personal statement essays gained the ability to solve even more complicated and fascinating problems.
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The essays are a place to show us who you are and who you'll be in our community. In each of these essays, students were able to share stories from their everyday lives to reveal something about their character, values, and life that aligned with the culture and values at Hopkins, sample college personal statement essays. your strongest essay. Join an essay preparation workshop. our mailing list to get updates from Johns Hopkins University. more inspiration from current students at Hopkins Insider. These selections represent just a few examples of essays we found impressive and helpful during the past admissions cycle. We hope these essays inspire you as you prepare to compose your own personal statements. The most important thing to remember is to be original as you share your own story, thoughts, and ideas with us.
The white yarn slipped off my aluminium crochet hook, adding a single crochet to rows and rows of existing stitches, that looked to be in the form of a blob. Staring at the image of the little unicorn amigurumi lit up on the screen of my laptop, and looking back at the UMO unidentified messy object number five, I was extremely perplexed. This had seemed so easy. Round 1, construct a magic circle sample college personal statement essays 6 single crochets. Round 2 was an increase round resulting in a total of 12 stitches. Also done. The remaining rounds were blurred into hours and minutes that should have resulted in a little white creature in the likeness of a unicorn, but sitting on my desk much like the four days before today was a pool of tangled white yarn.
It was not until day seven that a creature with a lopsided head whose horn was the only identifier of the mythical being emerged. Very much like learning how to crochet, my journey in forging my own path and finding a passion was confusing, messy and at times infuriating. Even in primary school, I had heard all the stories of individuals finding their own route in life. I had been told stories of those who found their passion at a young age and were exceptionally proficient at their craft, of those that abandoned their interests and pursued a lucrative career, even those who chose their dreams but regretted it afterwards. This weighed heavily on me, as I was determined to have a success story as many of my other family members had.
The only problem was that I did not have a direction. In the years following primary school, I stepped out of my comfort zone in a frenzy to find a passion. I joined the school orchestra where I played the violin, and a debate class to practice public speaking and become much more eloquent. At my ballet school, I branched out to contemporary and jazz dance. I stuffed myself with experience similar to an amigurumi engorged with batting. I found myself enjoying all sample college personal statement essays those activities but soon enough, I was swamped with extracurriculars. Just like the tangles of white yarn on my desk, I was pulled in all directions.
I still felt lost. To make things worse, it seemed as if everyone else had found their path in life, sample college personal statement essays, and they had all become white unicorns while I was still doubting the stitch I just made. It was not until high school that I realised that I could view this mission to find a passion from another perspective. While successfully completing a crochet project is an accomplishment itself, the motions of making slip knots, single or double crochets takes you on an adventure as well. The knots that I had encountered in my craft were evidence of my experiences and what shaped me as an individual.
My exploration of various paths through detours may have sometimes resulted in roadblocks, but I continued to persevere and learn from my experiences, applying the skills that I have gained to future knots. The mini adventures that I went on were all crucial to me in the greater journey of life. Through trial and error, the current adventure that I am on resonates the most with me, taking me down the path of service and environmental activism. However, I have learnt that no one path is static, and I sample college personal statement essays be on more than one path at a time.
While I may only be halfway to the proportionate unicorn amigurumi that some others may have already achieved, I still have so much to learn and so much that I want to learn, and so my journey to grow continues. On an even greater level, though, the essay allows the admissions committee to see that she is someone who will take advantage of opportunities, engage with her community in a number of ways, push herself outside of her comfort zone, and be able to reflect on her own development. If you told me I would be playing a sport called squash at 11 years old, I would call you sample college personal statement essays. But in seventh grade, I was at a new school 10 times bigger than my last one. I felt like a little fish in a big pond. I was quiet, withdrawn, and very introverted.
A lot of the time, I stayed where Sample college personal statement essays was comfortable. During the first week of school, a group of people visited the school and they introduced themselves as Squashbusters. Because the program combined the sport of squash with academic support, mentoring, and service opportunities, sample college personal statement essays, I decided to sign up. In SquashBusters, they tell us to push ourselves past our limits on the squash courts, but that mindset has transferred to other areas of my life as well.
From team trips and tournaments to cringy karaoke moments and participating in eccentric traditions like our annual SquashBusters Olympics, my comfort zone has steadily grown larger. At Hopkins, I want to do something similar. I want to try new things and embrace the campus traditions. Our students push the boundaries of discovery, are faced with challenges in and out of the classroom, and pursue newfound passions. By growing accustomed to challenging himself, Samuel exemplifies these characteristics and is able to take the lessons he has learned on the squash court into other areas of his life. He shows that if given the opportunity, he would flourish on our campus given the variety of academic and extracurricular opportunities and that he is equipped with the tools to overcome whatever challenges he is faced with, sample college personal statement essays.
While it was meant to be a single-player game, solitaire was the one thing we did together, moving and dealing the cards in a symphony of order: red to black, red to black. Pulling the pattern out of the random array of cards. For hours, we sat at our glossy kitchen table, playing game after game. If there were no more moves to make, I would always sneak a card from below a column without my grandma seeing. She always did. We might win one out of ten games played. Why not just turn the cards one by one? It was too frustrating to see the cards go by, but turn exactly three and not be able to pick them up! Her polished fingernails scratched against the cards as she shuffled them and told me.
It was an internal battle, a strengthening of the mind. One playing against oneself. The cards rhythmically slapped down onto the table as my grandmother, small yet stoic, effortlessly moved the cards with frail hands. I watched her. I thought about any other way to understand this idea. I desperately wanted to. The slow manipulation of life around her precedent made me think back to my grandma, to what she told me, and made me understand. Two years later, pushing myself harder than I ever had before in a field hockey match, I realized how much I had been cheating myself and my team by not putting this effort in before. Four years later, I was helping my parents clean after dinner sample college personal statement essays I saw the value in not taking the easy way out.
Five years later, I found once again the difficult ease in pottery. Lifting the pot off the wheel, I found satisfaction. Seven columns. Four aces. Fifty-two cards, sample college personal statement essays. Through time, her inner spirit never crumbled as her body began to deteriorate. Her mind stayed strong and proud. Each challenge I face, or will face, in life, I think back to her lesson one inconspicuous afternoon. Never let myself cheat. Always hold myself accountable. Work hard in every competition, especially the ones against myself, as those are the ones that better me the most.
I did not understand what my grandmother meant that day. Now, with each day, I do more. Many students want to sample college personal statement essays about an important person or family member in their life in their college essays. The challenge with this is making sure that the essay is still about the applicant, not just the important person. Elizabeth does a great job of incorporating that important person, her grandmother, while still keeping the focus on herself, what she learned from that specific moment, how that impacted her life, sample college personal statement essays. Additionally, although Elizabeth began by focussing on a childhood experience, she brought that back to her day-to-day life and how she incorporates accountability and hard work throughout.
Understanding who Elizabeth is and her values, helps us understand who she will be in our campus community. She demonstrates her values of hard work and self-accountability are not limited to just solitaire but incorporated in sports, hobbies, her family life and are sure to shine through in her new communities on a college campus. I was thoroughly confused. I thought I had procured the complete solution to this elaborate chess puzzle. What am I missing? A knight fork, a bishop move? Am I in check? After a quick glance at the left side of the board, I slapped my hand on my head as I suddenly realized what my chess coach was telling me. My queen was sitting unused, positioned all the way on the other side of the board, and I had no idea.
If you begin to look at the whole chessboard, then these puzzles will become a breeze for you. Ever since that chess lesson, those words have stuck, sample college personal statement essays.
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It can help them succeed in their professional career. Personal statement writing requires a lot of time and in-depth preparation from a student to make it sound effective, persuasive, and unique. A lot of students also find it challenging and look for college admission essay help. Personal statement examples for college can be of great service to you. The way you write a motivation letter college will decide on your education, career, or even future life. Reading personal statement examples, the admissions committee makes up the idea of you. And your mission is to look successful, educated, experienced, and self-confident in every word you write. In this post, we will cover all the aspects of personal statement writing and will help you stand out from the crowd of other applicants!
Writing any kind of text requires preparation. When it comes to working on personal statement examples, things become even tougher. We do not recommend putting this task away for later. It is impossible to write a stunning application essay overnight. You will need several days to come up with the ideas on paper contents; at least one week will be necessary for you to shape all your ideas into the text and proofread it. The earlier you will start working on your college motivation letter — the better. You will have plenty of time for edits. Before drafting college personal statement, consider the content you are going to cover in it.
Prepare a list of questions to be answered in the text:. It is impossible to fully cover the above questions in a few hours. You will need several days to build your argumentation strategy, or you will fail. Following a clear and easy-to-perceive structure is important in personal statement writing process. It helps you build a strong argumentation strategy. The more logically your motivation letter examples are built, the easier it will be for you to persuade a reader, convincing him step-by-step. Start by writing down your answers to the above questions and organize your ideas in a logical sequence. Write an outline. Attract the reader's attention with something exciting - formulate the main idea you are going to prove at the beginning of the college motivation letter.
Give evidence in support of your main idea. Provide specific examples from your life, study, or work. Here, you can write about your family, country, or someone you admire; the body part of your personal statement examples is critically important. Use it to win over the reader. My parents both had minimum wage jobs with no benefits. Without health insurance, without coverage, healthcare was, to us, a luxury. I remember when I was 12, my mother, who at the time had an undiagnosed diabetic condition, went into insulin shock, and almost died. My mother survived, and so did our family, but the suffering of that time still lives with me. It informs my desire to be the best possible doctor I can be, serving communities that need my help.
School: Harvard University. Prompt: The mission of Harvard College is to educate our students to be citizens and citizen-leaders for society. What would you do to contribute to the lives of your classmates in advancing this mission? Rather than leading by trying to single oneself out among peers, I believe that real leadership comes through effecting palpable change in the lives of those around you. A real leader is first and foremost a citizen, a peer, and a support for those around them. My sense of leadership has been shaped by my father, whose nearly 25 years in public education have positively impacted hundreds of students.
Each year he would come home on the last day of a school year with dozens of cards and gifts, from both current students graduating and former students who stopped by to thank him sometimes years after being his students. He was a leader—someone who helped others learn to find themselves, rather than direct their actions or words through conventional authority. Since I also hope to become a teacher, this has provided important experience that helped me better understand the kind of communication and time management skills needed to help people overcome their educational obstacles, specifically regarding their writing skills. Coaching in sports is another mode of leadership that I hope to maintain at Harvard. Powerlifting has had a major place in my extracurricular life during high school and I was thrilled to learn that Harvard boasts a competitive powerlifting club.
This goes back to the metric of encouraging success and wellbeing of others — the powerlifting club presents an opportunity in which I can further develop these skills along with my fellow barbell enthusiasts. By lifting up oneself and others, we eventually pass a threshold into becoming beacons of knowledge, exemplars of ethical and effective action, and citizen-leaders. This all further galvanizes my desire to teach following my time at Harvard. I feel incredibly fortunate that my current passions in writing and powerlifting will provide opportunities in which I can further develop my leadership skills in a way that will improve my ability to teach them to others. I will strive to continue being a supportive peer and collaborator which is an important foundation for becoming a true leader and educator.
Harvard is in every sense the best possible environment for continuing this evolution and encouraging it in my fellow students as well. School: University of Pennsylvania. Prompt: How did you discover your intellectual and academic interests, and how will you explore them at the University of Pennsylvania? Realizing how infinitely fascinating biology could be is a memory steeped in the peculiar odor of formaldehyde. My parents have since told me that I was overcome with fascination in that moment, genuinely transfixed by what surrounded me. My mother laughed and my father calmly tried to explain, in toddler terms, just how much pain this person suffered. This planted a seed that has since matured into a profound appreciation for the complexity of living systems. And, in more somber terms, a sensitivity to how these systems can short-circuit and create a domino effect of dysfunction that results in everything from uric acid crystals in knuckles to conjoined twins.
Strange as it may be, my lifelong obsession with medicine and biology comes out of this oddity-packed room, its vaguely astringent air, and impossibly large intestine sitting halfway up the stairs. Prompt: At Penn, learning and growth happen outside of the classroom, too. How will you explore the community at Penn? Consider how this community will help shape your perspective and identity, and how your identity and perspective will help shape this community. Growing up in a small town of just people meant that my high school was perpetually underfunded and unable to support any music programs. Moreover, working with such a renowned orchestra will be my first commitment to musical performance outside of small community ensembles.
This would enable a previously underdeveloped part of who I am to bloom in the company of incredibly talented musicians and directors. Shifting from very introverted, isolated artistic practice to genuine collaboration and community would be a massive evolution for me as both a musician and a person. I would look forward to unbottling the energy I've built up playing along to Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane over the last ten years, energizing and encouraging my fellow musicians and adding a unique perspective as someone who's new to—but very grateful for—larger ensemble performance.
School: Yale University. Tell us about your engagement with a topic or idea that excites you. Why are you drawn to it? Art is always a snapshot of a given cultural and artistic moment, but the physicality of this information in pottery has always fascinated me and encouraged me to be both a voracious researcher and experimenter in my own creative practice Pottery is rightly considered an art, but its underpinnings in chemistry are what have attracted me to this practice and kept me engaged with it over the years. Glazes in particular are endlessly complex, rife with history and a sense of cross-cultural collaboration. In a sense, something as simple as the type of cobalt luster on a Hispano-Moresque plate contains centuries of history, telling stories of resource availability, migration, commerce, and even theology.
Yet all of this information must be unlocked through understanding a piece's chemical underpinnings, and specifically the nearly infinite variations in fluxes and ensuing chemical interactions that have shaped—or more accurately, colored—earthenware and stoneware art throughout history. Much the same way surgeons often engage in very dexterity-dependent arts in their downtime, I look forward to continuing my personal explorations in art-oriented chemistry while further developing my academic proficiencies in the science itself. Prompt: Yale students, faculty, and alumni engage issues of local, national, and international significance. Discuss an issue that is important to you and how your college experience could help you address it. But just a few years later, I came to understand that I was not only significantly shorter than my friends but was in fact growing at a much slower pace.
As is the case for most families in these areas, mine rarely had enough money to afford what scarce high-nutrient food we did have access to. This experience has shaped a big part of not only my sense of self but of my desire to pursue a career in policy analysis to help prevent other kids from having food insufficiencies. I feel extremely strongly that I have an ethical duty to utilize the privilege afforded to me by an education at Yale to help other kids grow up happier, healthier, and in more self-sufficient communities. School: Columbia University. Prompt: Columbia students take an active role in improving their community, whether in their residence hall, classes or throughout New York City. Their actions, small or large, work to positively impact the lives of others.
Share one contribution that you have made to your family, school, friend group or another community that surrounds you. It started simply: one day in 8th grade, a friend forgot to pack any money, so the rest of us pitched in to buy her lunch. Prompt: Why are you interested in attending Columbia University? Columbia has long been my magnetic North in the world of American literature. I was an early reader, and became interested in poetry, first the romantics and transcendentalists, then the beats. Tracing the biographies of figures like Kerouac and Ginsburg more recently, I began to realize that they and many other writers whose work had found its way to me spontaneously came with the common thread of Columbia.
My own poetic practice has therefore been deeply informed by the textures and philosophical milieus which stem from Columbia, and a big part of my desire to matriculate. And on a more concrete level, the resources of both the Burke and Butler libraries would play a central part in my proposed thesis, allowing me to fully enmesh my own academic work with the history that has shaped it. Prompt: Please tell us what from your current and past experiences either academic or personal attracts you specifically to the areas of study that you noted in the application.
My first visit to a planetarium at the age of 10 infected me with a specific obsession: infinity. For months after my first trip to the Hayden planetarium, I pondered infinity, barely understanding the word itself. This matured into a lasting fascination with number and number theory specifically, and by the time I was in high school I was committed to following this path of knowledge without reservation. The history of number theory formed a prominent part of my elective work as an undergrad, during which I undertook both bibliographic and technical research on Cantor's paradox and "actual infinity" in relation to his lifelong mysticism.
My commitment to mathematics has grown and become much more specialized since my early bedazzlement by cosmology, but the experience of seeing mathematics as a way of thinking beyond conventional scales and frameworks has remained a central part of my love for the discipline ever since. A life spent exploring the outermost reaches of number and logic has been and still is my deepest desire. Max words. Cold water splashed my exposed calves as I helped pull the rubber dingy safely to shore. My family and I had been vacationing on a Greek island when we heard cries coming from the sea. We rushed to help and with the aid of locals, we pulled the boat to shore. Luckily everyone survived. A few of those on the boat spoke English; they explained that they were refugees and had fled conflict in Syria.
Until that point in my life the concept of a refugee was opaque. Since this trip one year ago, I have devoted most of my extracurricular hours to a local NGO that helps to resettle refugees. We teach each other about our cultures by cooking together, sharing stories, and exploring nature. The more I learn about other cultures, the more I realize that I have much more to learn. What I now know is that is my duty to advocate for those who do not have the power to advocate for themselves and to fight for the rights of those at home and abroad. Prompt: Please briefly elaborate on one of your extracurricular activities or work experiences. My arms began to shake as the bag filled up. Soon it became almost too heavy to manage. Finally, the massive Leatherback Sea Turtle had finished laying her eggs and my team and I could move them to a nursery we had prepared.
I was in Costa Rica for an AP class in Tropical Ecology and we were tasked with saving these eggs from poachers. We brought the eggs to safety and when we returned two months later, we were able to watch as hundreds of baby sea turtles hatched and made it out to sea. This experience was particularly formative for me. I learned two important lessons. The first is the importance of environmental stewardship. Due to trawling, harvesting for consumption, light pollution and other human factors, many sea turtles are now critically endangered. It will be left to my generation to continue the fight to preserve the natural world. I also learned how inequality can contribute to environmental degradation. When I heard this, I had to act.
By saving the eggs, we may have unintentionally denyied these families their means of survival. I therefore, asked my school program if we could brainstorm a solution that would help both the turtles and the locals. We decided to buy their handicrafts at a higher price, to sell back at home. We also established a yearly fundraiser. To date we have helped transition 10 local families from relying on turtle eggs, to selling handmade items. Through this new partnership with the community, we have also established a cultural exchange, in which a few of our youth spend one month in Costa Rica each year while their youth come to the United States.
I hope that this will continue to flourish in the years to come. With privilege comes responsibility: those of us who have grown up in wealthy societies have largely benefitted from an unequal global system. Common App Essays. Prompt: The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience? I had not lived long, but at that moment, I was sure this was the worst day of my life. I was only eleven years old, and I had to listen to a doctor tell my mother that I would have to inject myself every day for the rest of my life.
Being diagnosed with Type I diabetes felt almost like a death sentence; my life changed in an instant, and I was terrified of not being able to cope with a chronic disease and afraid that I would never get to be a normal child. Little did I know that this condition would later on allow me to give back to my community through my volunteering initiatives and would make me want to pursue a career where I could help others. The impact that my disease had on my family was profound. We all had to learn to adjust to a new reality, and I went from having a normal life, to having to mature in a matter of weeks. I knew that it was up to me to make this work, but I felt lost and did not know how to deal with this immense responsibility of managing a new diet, an insulin shot four times a day, and my emotions.
After a few days, the initial shock was replaced by denial, then came anger, and little by little, I later gained acceptance. By exercising determination and courage, I decided that even though my disease was now a part of my life, I would not let it dictate who I was or what I could become. I was resolute to do great things. Besides the discipline and resilience that I had to muster to live my life as a diabetic, I realized that some things in life are better dealt with by having a support system. With this in mind, I looked for volunteering positions where I could share my experience with others and listen to their own struggles. After I got involved in different initiatives, I decided to organize a support group in high school for students who were dealing with difficult situations and just needed someone to talk to.
Today, we have more than twenty volunteers, and our meeting times have doubled since we started. Additionally, this group has been a platform for other initiatives that I have helped launch such as fundraising campaigns and mental health events. I do this as I keep looking for ways to get involved in my community and create spaces for people to support one another in difficult times. We all have challenges in life. Being diagnosed with a chronic disease at such a young age was devastating for me and my family. However, form this experience I have learned that being disciplined is the key to living a healthy life and that being compassionate is the first step to helping those who need it.
When I see how many people have been benefitted from our group, I look back and remember being a scared eleven-year-old, and I feel proud of what I have become. What felt like a death sentence at first turned into a way of supporting others in my community proving that the lessons we take from the obstacles we encounter can, in fact, be fundamental to later success. Would you like more help with your common app essay? Check out our guide below:. School: Brown University. Tell us about an academic interest or interests that excites you, and how you might use the Open Curriculum to pursue it. Looking through the eyepiece of a microscope, I was amazed to see the individual cells of a sea urchin embryo.
In my high school cell and molecular biology class, we were studying the cell cycle and we had the opportunity to harvest embryos from sea urchins to view under the microscope. I had used a microscope before, but only to look at prepared slides containing preserved tissue samples. This was my first time viewing a live sample that I had prepared myself. This experience opened my eyes to the wonders of cell biology and how our scientific world has been expanded with the technology of microscopes. I knew that I wanted to continue to incorporate microscopes into my own learning and to learn as much as I could about cells and their inner workings. The excitement I felt when looking through the microscope at a sea urchin embryo is one that I look to bring with me to Brown as my classmates and I embark on expanding our academic horizons and building the foundation needed to be successful in our future scientific careers.
Prompt: Tell us about a place or community you call home. How has it shaped your perspective? When I was a child, I was upset to learn that my parents had decided we would be moving houses. I did not want to leave the place I had called home for the past thirteen years, the place where I had friends and happy childhood memories. Since this period in my life, I have moved several times and now when I think of home, the first thought that comes to mind is my parents. I realized that home is not a specific place; it is the people that surround you that make you feel at home.
This perspective allows me to travel to new places and embark on new adventures with the understanding that I can make any place feel like home. The key is building friendships and relationships with those around you so a place does not feel foreign but rather a place in which you feel supported. As I join your community, I look forward to establishing these relationships as my peers and I build a new home at Brown University. maximum of words. Growing up, my sisters and I became hooked on watching chefs like Emeril cook on The Food Network. I never liked mushrooms and despised when my parents included them as we sat down to eat dinner together each night.
My parents said that if I did not like it, I could cook dinner myself. I had been watching cooking shows, so I decided to try my hand at cooking our family meals. My parents were thrilled to have someone else making dinner for the night and I was ecstatic to be put in the decision making seat for what we would be eating for dinner. Over the years, I continue to cook with my family as a way to grow closer together and I also cook by myself as a form of stress relief. As I chop vegetables, I get lost in the repetitive nature of the task and it becomes a form of meditation for me; something for my mind to focus on that allows me to forget about the troubles of the day. While my love for cooking stemmed from a desire to not have to eat mushrooms with dinner, it has grown into one of my favorite hobbies.
At Cornell, I know I will meet a wide range of people and even the typical college student that does not know now to cook and relies on a microwave, pop tarts, and ramen to get through arduous study sessions. I hope to bring my hobby of cooking to Cornell where I can use it to make it through my own stressful hurdles but also to build relationships with my new classmates who may be missing a home-cooked meal. Prompt: Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea. What prompted your thinking?
What was the outcome? Staring down at my scuffed Converse Chuck Taylors, I distinctly remember the feeling of heat rising in my cheeks. I blame it on the growth spurt I experienced the summer before that had single-handedly taken half of my wardrobe out of commission. Though I respected the rules at my school, I was infuriated, embarrassed, and confused about being made to feel as though I had done something morally wrong as a result of my height making my skirt length criminally deficient. Growing up in a conservative area, my defiance was met with disdain and whispers in the hallway about not knowing my place.
Thankfully, however, not all of my peers were so resistant to change. I knew that our school could do better. I distinctly remember the heat rising in my cheeks as I stepped up to the podium to address the school board, but this time they were flushed with excitement and pride, not shame or embarrassment. The results of the reconsideration are not yet in, but I learned the power of using my voice for positive social change — something I look forward to continuing in college. Prompt: Describe a topic, idea, or concept you find so engaging that it makes you lose all track of time. Why does it captivate you? What or who do you turn to when you want to learn more? Nothing compares to the feeling of the first pass of a pigment-soaked brush on a clean canvas.
The first slice into a beautifully iced birthday cake or the powerful print of a first footstep in snow may come close, but I can never lose myself in a sugary confection or icy landscape the way I can when standing at my easel. The thrill I felt as a small child when finger painting never left me, though my technique may have improved a bit. Technique aside, the value of self-expression through artistic endeavor has only grown for me as I mature. Many find cathartic release through journaling or sharing their thoughts with others in conversation, but I feel most connected to my feelings and the world when I put paint brush to canvas. Not all sentiments can be captured in words, which is where art takes over for me.
Just as a piece of music can engender poignant emotions in its listener, a piece of art can make a person feel seen in a large and often lonely world. Nobody knew this better than my middle school art teacher Mrs. She often let me stay in the studio after school to put continuous rounds of final touches on my latest masterpiece, knowing that sometimes my piece did not need those additional strokes, but my soul did. A true artist herself, Mrs. Over the years following middle school, I visited Mrs. Williams every once in a while and each time was always like no time had passed. We would set our easels side by side and paint, sometimes chatting a bit, but often sitting in comfortable silence as we watched colors blend and form new hues with the flick of a paint brush. In the middle of my junior year of high school, I received the tragic news that Mrs.
Williams had suffered a massive heart attack and passed. Devastated and trying to make sense of the first death I had ever experienced, I turned to my mother for advice. Williams were here? Of course. I should have known that was the answer to working through my grief. Grabbing my easel and a stool, I set up on the front porch where I could see the sun filtering through the oak leaves in green and yellow shards of glass, smiled at the memory of Mrs. Williams, and began to paint. Yes, your college admission essays are important. Although the committee can evaluate your academic abilities based on your grades and test scores, the essay is your chance to present a full, unique story of your experiences.
You must work hard to create an essay that will make your application stand out. Each school will have specific instructions regarding the length of the essay, but the range is usually between and words. You need to review the instructions and the word limit carefully before you begin to write. Writing a strong essay requires a significant commitment of time and energy. Ideally, you should plan on spending weeks writing and rewriting your essay. Always remember that a truly effective essay will require multiple drafts! The essay prompts are typically very open-ended. You can choose to write about any topic you like as long as it directly relates to the prompt.
Remember, you must answer the prompt, do not ignore it! As I already said, essay prompts are open to interpretation, so try to be original. Instead of writing about common topics like a sports victory or a difficult test, brainstorm unique ideas for your college essay. Rather than playing it safe, take your chance to be unique and unforgettable. Your essay is your chance to be personable, real, and honest. Do not be afraid to explore different topics. Give yourself ample amount of time to prepare your essay. It might take you weeks or even months to shape it into a great paper.
Give yourself at least 8 weeks to prepare your submission. First, make sure you have set aside enough time for your personal essay weeks. Then, take some time to familiarize yourself with the culture and values of your school and program of choice, to get a general sense of what sort of person they would value having has a student. Read and re-read the essay prompt several times to ensure that you understand what they expect you to address in your essay. Make a list of qualities and experiences that you may wish to include in your essay.
Review your list of experiences carefully to narrow them down to the most significant ones. Once you know which experiences you wish to feature in your essay, brainstorm how you would like to tell your story. Create an outline or some notes sketching out what each section of your essay should cover, and keep it close by for reference while writing. It might be a good idea for someone to review your essay. Do not let too many people read it, as too many reviews could make your essay into a melting pot of ideas and opinions. Ideally, your reader is someone you trust and who can provide you with honest feedback on the content and grammar of your essay.
Remember, this is your story. Instead of writing about topics often used in college essays, reflect on your own unique experiences and choose something that will intrigue and interest the admissions committee. You might not think that your life and experiences are very interesting, but you are wrong. Your essay will feature an introduction, main body, and conclusion. Your main body highlights the formative experience or experiences that you wish to share, and what you learned from that experience. Your conclusion ties your essay together and should leave your reader with an interesting and memorable final thought, which will leave your reader wanting to learn more about you. Some colleges may ask you to submit a curriculum vitae, or a CV.
This is not a requirement for all schools, but most colleges have some kind of variation of the CV. For example, UC schools ask their applicants to fill out an activities list. Admissions committees regularly check for plagiarism from online sources. What Is the Easiest Ivy League School To Get Into in? Persuasive Speech Topics: The Best Questions in. UC Rankings: Your Ultimate Guide to UC Schools. Our site uses cookies. By using our website, you agree with our cookie policy. Medicine Residency Law Graduate College Dentistry Other. Blog Resources Scholarship.
