University of California - Santa Barbara Undergraduate College Application Essays

It’s 6am. My alarm clock squawks at me to wake up. With legs aching from practice, arms tired from shooting drills, and head throbbing with pain from only sleeping four hours, I squint at the illuminated red numbers, contemplating whether or not...

“Stop interrupting! Before opening your mouth, see if the adults are in the middle of a conversation,” my dad reminded me for the hundredth time. What I couldn’t have articulated at the time was that I was too lazy to ‘watch’, and I couldn’t hear...

When I was in seventh grade, my biological mother—who was then living in Luxembourg—was involved in a serious car accident and had to be put into a medically induced coma. After somewhat recovering from the physical and mental trauma she...

Every birthday of mine there is one specific thing I look forward to: my friend Tamara's handmade card. Every year she makes me a homemade card and every year, I'm warmed by her thoughtfulness, love, and care. It's the small yet thoughtful...

To begin, I am going to describe the state of the desk on which I am currently writing this essay. Besides the normal clutter of assignments, one film and one digital camera sit directly across from me. At least five rolls of film wait patiently...

In the summer going into junior year, I signed up for a Rustic Pathways photography trip to the Himalayas. Going into the program, I was ecstatic that my parents had allowed me to do this and I couldn't wait to take my first solo trip out of the...

“I’m done!” our frustrated band director shouted, throwing his baton down on his stand and storming into his office. If this was his way to motivate the Band to try harder, it didn’t work. All 250 members of the largest high school band in...

The smell of burning metal tickled my nose as I stared intently at the oscilloscope on my messy desk. I looked back at the breadboard, and quickly realized what I had done. I hurried to rip the IC chip out of the circuit, burning my finger in the...

My name is Scheherezade. I am about to die at the hands of a King, but if I can captivate him through my stories I might be able to stay alive for just one more night.

The orchestra drops to quiet plucking, and I take a deep breath in. I...

I squint through tall, streaming light, trying to peer up at the towering stage. Sunbeams seem to pierce the very core of my head so I look down at my toes wriggling under the buttery, tan leather fabric of my tiny dance slip-ons. The fabric is...

It was 2:00 AM local time in a continent where I had never been. There were 18 of us rumbling down a poorly paved road, in an old bus that could not have been meant for more than 15. The seats were uncomfortable, and a horribly made music video of...

Telling my peers that I intern at a morgue catches them by surprise; typically, they look at me in bewilderment. Many question why I would want to do something like this. But I honestly do not think they would react with such astonishment if they...

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...

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....

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,...

My final task was to finish coloring Spider-Man’s leg, and as I laid on the floor discomfort enveloped the room so intensely you could hear a pin drop. This situation came about because I was one of the three people chosen to be apart of the...

I always find myself sitting cross legged on my bedroom floor, body hunched over a canvas, with the aroma of paint surrounding me. I follow the bleeding of one shade of brown into another and decide on using oil instead of acrylic to magnify the...