James Madison University Undergraduate College Application Essays

ELLICOTT CITY, MD--- It is 12 AM and parents everywhere believe their teenagers are snug in bed. However, instead of sleeping, their kids are wide awake, studying every ounce of information they could be tested on in a matter of hours. Believing...

Giving up my weekend nights for swim practice was something I was used to by the time I reached high school. Swimming, I felt, was my niche, and with that niche came many sacrifices. Yet, for all the “hardships” that came with it, I earned the...

Two flamboyant characters sat in the center of the first row; I saw their hands dancing wildly in the air while I tiptoed quietly into the theatre so as not to pop their bubble of eccentricity. However, the heavy door’s loud click as it closed...

Eye color was evenly divided in my family before I was born: two sets of blue eyes and two sets of green eyes. My birth would have traditionally tipped the scales, but I was born with one blue eye and one green. This anomaly was originally...

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...

"I think I'm ready to go home now," I inform my roommate Patrick, yet again, as we mix cement and shovel rocks for hours upon hours under the beating Mexican sun. It is Tuesday of our week-long mission trip to Nuevo Durango, and I already feel...

I nervously sat down to the computer and started typing. Creating an Evite wouldn’t seem like a big deal to most people, but it was to me. Always having been too shy to reach out to my teammates from soccer, I had never been included in their...

It is 7:00 on Saturday morning and I walk into the Chick-fil-a kitchen. Attempting to prepare my mind for work, I enter my daydream of war to get through the upcoming seemingly endless morning. My ingredients suddenly turn into weapons and armor;...

After completing an hour of training with the overworked nurses of Johnston-Willis Hospital, I acquainted myself with Holly, a frail ninety year old woman who, along with fighting terminal cancer, was recovering from a stroke that also impaired...