University of California - San Diego Undergraduate College Application Essays

Growing up, I was always surrounded by the classical Indian music that my parents sang but I could never understand because it was in Hindi. They often encouraged my sister and me to sing along with them but we were more interested in Taylor Swift...

So ubiquitously sold in the streets of cold breezes of winter in South Korea, a red bean bun brings deliberate warmth and joy to many people. Sold at a price of only forty cents back in the 90s, the red bean bun was more than just a snack; it was...

When the glorious makeup conceals my nerdy look, when the shiny spotlight embraces my entire body, and when I dance with my hair floating in midair, I turn into a different person.

Originally an amateur who loved to imitate dances in music...

The hill is too tall. That’s what my friends said. That’s what everybody said. Which is exactly why I tried to climb it.

Every Saturday morning I would begin my workout by biking around Walnut, making sure to stop by Norman Boulevard, a street...

On the weekends I spend hours hunched over my computer, studio headphones in my ears, bobbing my head to the throbbing kick drum. Listening to the drum pattern, I pull out my MIDI keyboard and begin to play chords in rhythm with the drums. Over...

In a strong, confident voice, I began: “I would like everyone to close their eyes and imagine the stress and frustration you have experienced with fake news.” This was the opening of my team’s presentation to a group of venture capitalists judging...

My award winning app, Cappable, built to help people with disabilities find employment had just made a record of sorts. We had faced our 100th rejection.

Cramped into my bedroom, the four members of our team stared at the dashboard. After months...

Reverberating voices. Flying spit. Clinking shot glasses. A gaggle of grandpas in furry trapper hats, perched on potato crates, pontificating about Soviet politics in a farm shed. They agreed, yet still managed to yell. As a routine observer of...

Bylo, jest, bedzie. These words were stitched into my six-year-old mind as Babushka’s deft fingers stitched hems into shirtsleeves, needle pausing in midair to conjugate Polish verbs for me, to translate them into my native Russian and Ukrainian....

History is a bad driver. It rarely ever indicates when it’s about to take a turn. But on a rainy Wednesday afternoon, I saw it shift gears. “Can I get the afternoon off, ma’am?” our housekeeper Kavita asked my mom. Despite my offer of a Netflix...

“How did you fix it akka?” asked Bhavani. I had spent the last three afternoons inside a small room at their school with Bhavani and eleven other underserved students. We had spent hours debugging a section of the code to no avail. Four mugs of...

I was waiting at the dinner table for the right moment and decided to serve it just before dessert, “I need 10,000 rupees to start a venture.” As my parents lost their appetite, their faces flashed curious amusement at a 15-year-old’s odd request....

One hundred degrees, one hundred dollars raised. True leadership takes sweat, especially under the blazing afternoon sun smack dab in the middle of downtown. However, it was under these temperatures that I demonstrated my own leadership...

A dark, stuffy band closet: a bizarre habitat for rusted brass, violin scraps, and a small preteen girl. It was a forgotten cubbyhole to many, but to me, it was a living, breathing creature that accepted me and my violin and listened to my every...

If there's one thing I've learned, it's that I'm a two-backpack kind of girl. Let me explain.

The bag on my right struggles to swallow every last sheet from my heft of papers with its gaping jaws and its straps bite sharply into my shoulder,...

To do today:

1. Conduct dramatics selections in snack-break2. Script finalization with class teacher in club period3. Production practice after school

It wasn’t always like this, though.

I’d had major body image issues and faced the...

Snowflakes, soft and silver in the dark, drift past the window, casting shadows on the floor. The door creaks open as my mother peeks into the room to check on my brand new baby sister. She finds me crouched besides the tiny swaddled figure,...

I could feel the creative energy growing, pushing restlessly against the silence as they waited for me to finish reading the brief. As soon as I did, it released itself in an outburst; voices grew loud as they struggled to make themselves heard,...

I find it humorous when my family debates who looks more Asian versus White, me or my twin brother. My parents also joke that Brandon and I would be even taller or better at math had it not been for the “shortcomings” each contributed to our...

“This has to be the worst summer ever,” I thought to myself. The only television in our apartment broke.

Unsettled by pure boredom, I started to flip through books on the shelf. I read voraciously that summer, and became inevitably fascinated with...

Every Friday at seven a shouting match commences in my house. The same argument is dredged up week after week like clockwork but the end result is always different. Sides change and so do loyalties. Some days it’s children versus adults and on...

I watched as eight people plummeted at the speed of lightning towards surefire slaughter. I watched lines of people eagerly waiting to embrace the same fate. I watched my sister giddy with excitement for her turn. Being voluntarily strapped to a...

When I was nine, my parents purchased a seemingly unspectacular piece of land. Eight years ago it was just mud and brick surrounded by a boundary wall. Today, it’s my home. Every weekend my father, an impassioned civil engineer, would drag me to...

It was a sizzling September day. I was behind a table at the Club Fair handing out shiny, glazed donuts. My peers meandered by with their giant plates of stromboli as I attempted to convince them to sign up for Jewish Club.

My biggest leadership...