Newest College Application Essays

I round the corner into my cubicle and toss my coat on my chair. I chat with April as my computer starts up, and then check my Threads calendar, which is riddled with deadlines. My day could be filled with writing blog posts, driving over to help...

The little orange lights blink against the dark blue background, resembling the twinkling of stars at dusk. As the black rings of rubber rapidly revolving around the orbits of metal hubcaps come to a halt, a screech of protest is heard. The driver...

Although “Latin Club” conjures up images of stodgy professors scrutinizing ancient texts, my own club consisted of nine teenagers enthusiastically translating Harry Potter spells.

I co-founded the club with visions of handouts and worksheets—...

Whenever I’m taking notes in English, answering questions on a history test, or listening to a class discussion, I doodle flowers. Yes, flowers. You might imagine that a high school senior in AP classes would be too busy absorbing PowerPoint...

My blades kiss the pasty ice as I step onto the empty rink. The zamboni driver has signed out for the night, leaving everything engulfed in darkness, except for a few dim yellow lights. I revel in the frosty silence until the rude hums of the...

I am a human ping-pong ball, constantly moving to and fro, packing up my life in a record-breaking 25 minutes. In a flurry of well-practiced movements I gathered all the books off my overfull shelves and all the clothes from my slightly...

A thrift store is a naturally dynamic world, with a constant influx of the unknown and an incessant purging of the unwanted. Any moment may yield a glimmer of Fendi drowning in an ocean of Gap, everything marked $3.99. The objective is to find the...

Everyone thinks me strange because I love it all as though it were a person.

I love the quiet road named after my great-uncle Pintor Ruano as though it were my great-uncle himself; I love the old church like an old friend; I love the sound of its...

“Climbers, at your marks!” shouted the Chilean official in his thick Spanish accent. The musty air filled my nostrils before I let out one last, shaky breath. I wasn’t really supposed to be here. Luck was the only thing that had gotten me to a...

I grew up in the most All-American suburban town imaginable. My father, a former quarterback, married Miss Talladega County; they settled down in Vestavia Hills with the expectation that their first child would be a sweet, Southern belle with a...

It's 4:55 on a Thursday morning when you hear a shrill ring pulse through the room. You rub your eyes groggily, praying that the noise will go away soon, when a dim light blinks on. Roommate #1 climbs out of her bed and finally, blessedly, turns...

The transition between childhood and adulthood is not denoted by a fine line, but sometimes there is a definitive moment that rearranges everything that has gone before and shapes everything that comes after. For me, that moment was the first day...

It’s no secret that millennials want to change the world; an entire generation of young men and women who have been told repeatedly that they have the capacity to accomplish whatever they set their minds to. They are raised to be cognizant of...

While most girls in second grade were playing with their Barbies, I was designing homes. I was the little girl who dreamed of being an architect, who at the time was only concerned about the design of elaborate yet welcoming interiors and...

Thank goodness apartments don’t have emotions. If my one bedroom apartment did, I can guarantee that its paint would be chipping off as rapidly as the layers of my sanity. Every morning, I'd wake up to the sound of my alarm clock simultaneously...

For many of my friends, summer break means swimming at the local pool and hanging out at our downtown movie theater. Yet for me, summer means traveling 6,000 miles to a completely different country, where I speak a completely different language...

Man's Search for Meaning - Viktor Frankl

A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

The Prince - Machiavelli

Outliers - Malcolm Gladwell

Art of War - Sun Tzu

Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning spoke to me on a deeper, more emotional level than...

As the sunlight began to dim, my panic rose. The street signs were incomprehensible, and any request for assistance only resulted in a barrage of unfamiliar German. I found myself hoping for a rapid rescue, yet I knew that I needed to find my own...

One of my favorite business mantras is from Simon Sinek: "people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it." This idea is based on what Sinek calls the "golden circle" of business. The outside of the circle is the "what," the middle is the...

On the top shelf on the far right wall of my closet, there are stacks and stacks of dog-eared, worn-out, bent-up composition notebooks. Well, mostly composition notebooks, but there is some variety -- like a locked plastic purple diary that my...

I was recently on a cramped yet frigidly air-conditioned 12-hour bus ride to Chicago, when I noticed a group of cows grazing under a tree. “It’s crazy, isn’t it?” I said to the woman next to me. “I’ve lived in Tennessee for over a year, and I’m...