New York University Undergraduate College Application Essays

I used to sit in my room staring at the wall, hoping for action, drama, comedy, or even romance. I did experience all of these things eventually, but through a screen, not directly. Every Saturday night was always another night at the movies. The...

For the first time, I was an outcast. The minority. The one who didn’t fit in. I was a speck of white in a sea of black, and everyone around me made sure that I realized that. I was in an unfamiliar country, across the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded...

The external reflections of my admiration are subtle. A red and blue toothbrush, its handle laced with white plastic webbing, stands among bottles of makeup remover by my sink. A boyish PVC and polyester wallet depicting an agile hero as he swings...

I was thirteen, chubby, and small. It was late and it was raining, and I needed to run to the grocery store to get some oven cleaner so my dad could surprise my mom when she came home. I was stopped from completing my honorable task by a guy on a...

Russia had never been bad to me. My eleven years there made for a joyful, carefree childhood. I never thought of my life as wanting despite living on my grandma’s miserly pension for three years. During those last three years of my life in Russia,...

"You're off to Great Places!

Today is your day!

Your mountain is waiting.

So...get on your way!"

Somewhere in a far off town in Australia, these words penetrated the deafening silence that pervaded the room in which I stood, deeply immersed in...

“Samantha Nicole!” my mother began. The deliberate usage of my middle name indicated she was preparing to reprimand me. I instantly knew I had been caught peering underneath my neon pink Barbie bandage. As do most young children, I chose to...

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...

As a result of my father’s business, my family moved to France in May of 1995. From France, we moved to Singapore, back to France, to Spain in 2001, and finally to our current location on a farm in rural Upstate New York in late 2002. Over the...

Getting up early simply hurts. Getting up early in the summer hurts even worse, and getting up early in the summer to do work is close to torture. This past summer I had to do just this. Every morning, except for Sundays when I was lucky enough to...

Smack! Within a fraction of a second, my life was changed forever. A homemade slingshot snapped and launched a funnel and water balloon at an unimaginable speed directly into my left ear. Once I’d been hit, an incredibly loud whistling screamed...

What motivates someone to bungee jump head-first off bridges, crawl through rock tunnels miles below the surface of the earth, or tackle the white crags of Mount Everest? Not everyone escapes these experiences unscathed, leaving many questioning...

When my Academic Decathlon coach distributes materials in June—hundreds of pages of history, poems, research topics, and more—it is with the tacit understanding that students have just seven months to synthesize, analyze, and otherwise own this...

The idea of the character haunted my mind for days. I couldn't shake the feeling that while reading this novel, I had heard the ideas portrayed somewhere before, somewhere all too familiar.The first book I was ever to read in German struck a nerve...

It was May 3, 2007, a warm, bright day. Every field was filled with blooming flowers and all the trees were covered with lime green leaves; everything seemed beautiful and normal besides this madness. I was in the back seat of a police car that...

1. I spent entire my last summer in Burlington County Footlighters, which is a small community theater. I was involved in two shows: The Secret Garden and The Odyssey, as a pianist for The Secret Garden rehearsals and a violinist for both shows. I...

I’ve lived with my grandparents all my life. My grandfather, whom I call “Pipo,” is like a father to me, and he is absolutely, no-doubt-about-it my favorite person in the world. He is intrigued by everything academic and has a photographic memory....

Three months into my exchange year in Germany, my friend called me, a little dejected. She wanted to go downtown, and it was clear why. There was still something incredibly rousing, mysterious, and exciting about the European city that had...

Maturation is a long, tedious process, as thrilling as it is challenging. Each stage of a young life poses its own set of unique challenges: the toddler taking his first clumsy steps, slowly progressing towards two-limbed balance; the first grader...

It’s 107 degrees and the sun’s hot rays are beating down on a family trekking through the busy streets of Dhaka. People, rickshaws, and goats alike are all rushing off to reach their respective destinations. As the parents of the family encourage...

Three A.M. I still smell like the chicken-soaked grease of a shift spent working at Chick-Fil-A, but I’ve hit a plot snag. My character’s stuck in Boston, I’m stuck on page 78, and I need to figure out how to get us both out before I’ll let myself...

A wave of feelings crashed through my mind as my eyes confronted the horror. Living, breathing animals were reduced to commodities before my eyes as workers shoved turkeys into crates and slammed piglets headfirst onto concrete floors. I could not...

It was the McCarthy era. Attorney General Tom Clark had just announced a list of fifty-six “subversive” organizations that were supposedly part of the communist crusade. My grandfather, vice president of the History Society at Tilden Senior High...

One of the most important books in the world is The Records of the Grand Historian. Written by Sima Qian in the first century B.C., it elucidates more than two thousand years’ worth of Chinese history. The story behind Qian’s masterpiece is...