Newest College Application Essays

I wake up to the pleasant sound of The Flaming Lips flowing from my alarm clock. As I sit up and rub my eyes, I bask in the familiar comfort of my favorite piece of rented art. After dressing, I gather my belongings, walk out the door, check to...

“It focuses 201 precise beams of radiation directly on the tumor. Scary isn’t it?” As I deliver my prepared presentation about the Gamma Knife during the TSA National Conference, I can't help but wonder if I have really done justice to the power...

"Call off the priest. We have a live birth." Moments before I took my first breath, doctors were sure that I wouldn't make it out of the ICU alive. I was born three months premature and weighed two pounds, eleven ounces. Doctors officially...

I am a child of the city. My summer afternoons were spent baking under the tyranny of the sun, whose heat bounced unforgivingly off of the blacktop streets and the harsh, cement sidewalks. Blaring hip hop mixes and soulful R&B ballads filled...

Even in the very Southwest corner of the continental United States, 2301 miles away and weather patterns worlds away from Ann Arbor, it seems that ever since I began the process of college exploration, I cannot escape the presence of UMichigan....

The banging on the door suddenly stops and, to my surprise, I am awakened not by the noise but by the silence. It was the debtors again, bent on extracting money from an immigrant family barely able to put food on the table. Soon after my mother...

I am holding my brother's hand."Hi, Will," I say."Hi," he mutters curtly, a trained reply.

It's better than the less favorable option of "Goodbye, please" or "I want goodbye."

His palm feels like a living creature itself, warm and squirming. When...

I've always had a special interest in physics, and if I could teach the Reed community anything, I'd want to talk about Biocentrism. Biocentrism is a relatively obscure theory that states that we, with our consciousness, create the universe,...

My friend, Margot, wears a ring on her wedding finger. Boys tell her she should stop. They say she’s not married, say she doesn’t belong to anybody yet. Margot wears a ring on her wedding finger to show that she does— she belongs to herself.

My...

I changed my name in preschool.

I’d always thought that being an Indian in America was about being the least Indian I could possibly be. I exchanged dosas and coconut chutney for the cafeteria’s coveted French bread pizza. I hid the six-armed...

The reason I did so well on my Math Analysis final exam in my junior year was because of Blink-182 and black tea. By the time May came around, my study session for math went like this – pour the water in the kettle and check Instagram while the...

Scrawled as haphazardly as it demands, the word braids from a continuous thread of twists and turns. There is a sense of urgency as the letters come to life in a flourish. The plummeting stroke of the “p” appears out of place, as if the weighty...

“It was rough, but we had loads of fun, those lads and I.” As I sat on my grandpa’s beat-up couch while he rambled on about his schemes as a young Coast Guardsman in the Korean Conflict, I mindlessly scrolled through my phone, letting out a “mhm”...

It is raining, and I am measuring the length of Frida Kahlo’s unibrow with a ruler – eleven inches and a half. When I was ten, my fifth grade teacher Mrs. Hoef said that ancient Egyptians had pharaohs and priests. My mother tells me that Frida was...

During my freshman year of high school, I fell in love.

My English teacher assigned Jane Eyre as our last reading of the year. Great, I thought, another pretentious novel about 19th century English society that the BBC adapts for television every...

Slowly walking down the stairs, wiping the sleep from my eyes, I head directly towards the kitchen. The cold metal mixing bowl meets my hand as I remove it from the cupboard. Struggling to make it to the counter with my hands full of ingredients,...

Muted pastels climbed sluggishly into the sky that morning, pale pinks and periwinkles barely peeking through the marine layers of Imperial Beach. It was the kind of morning ideal for lounging in pajamas. And yet as dawn shed its light, I found my...

The line between water and sky is two shades of black. Silence hides between the crevices of elements, and I convince myself that I can weigh the air.

I cannot see my body or my paddle or my kayak, but I am kayaking.

The trees’ shadows reflect on...

There I sat, an American-born Indian boarding a flight to Guatemala with Japanese anime loaded on my phone and a Wheelock’s Latin textbook in hand. At only 15, I was somewhat culturally aware, but I felt culturally confused. My skin said I was...

While opportunity cost is what we must give up in order to attain what we desire, I’m sure that there is no opportunity cost of attending Penn. From research, volunteering, and publications to distinct majors, the opportunity cost of Penn is...

People love to complain about how “useless” mathematics is in everyday life:

•“How will cubic factoring help me get my dream job?”

•“How is the quadratic formula going to stop global warming?”

Typical.

If not mathematics, they often set their...

A middle aged woman enters the riding arena with what looks like a rag doll draped over her forearms. Her face has the furrowed brow of melancholy, but her tone is hopeful when she speaks to me. “Esta es mi hija Mili (this is my daughter Mili),”...