College Application Essays accepted by University of Texas - Austin

University of Texas - Austin

"S-P-H-E-R-I-C-A-L," I declared. Flashing a grin to the 600-person audience, I glanced at the ink stains dotting my clasped hands. These hands had suffered for months practicing obscure words from the dictionary. One person away from winning the...

University of Texas - Austin

Grasping the knife, I made deliberate cuts. Mumbling, I couldn't focus on what I was doing. Looking outside at the bleak clouds and parched grass, I felt groggy. Gray cinderblock-like bags tugged on my haggard eyes. The leaky kitchen faucet's "ka...

University of Texas - Austin

Saturday, early December 2012. Auxiliary Court 3. Lewis University, Romeoville, Illinois. The last match of the day’s tournament had finally come to an end, and I lay cowering on the court in eye-watering pain. The nature of my agony perfectly...

University of Texas - Austin

I have weak eyes, strained but experienced; they peer through windows of thick, -11.75 prescription lenses.

They have curiously looked outside during countless road trips, widening in awe at the giant redwoods of Yosemite; marveling at the...

University of Texas - Austin

My family is anything but sedentary. Already in my life I have lived in Florida, Oklahoma, Texas, and have found myself in England nearly every summer. I have explored the rainforests of Australia and New Zealand, braved the oppressive heat of...

University of Texas - Austin

The school day is over, which means it's time for ESL American Social Studies. Spread all over the table are primary sources from the Civil Rights Movement. Sitting across from me are Carlos from Mexico and Durgam from Iraq. As a peer tutor, I was...

University of Texas - Austin

Maggi is desire. Maggi is beautiful. There are few things I wouldn’t give up to have Maggi. Just so things are clear - Maggi is a brand of instant noodles.

Every night in our dormitories, my friends and I used my kettle and cooked up exactly these...

University of Texas - Austin

We climbed out of the van and into the lush Thai jungle, overgrown and wild, unlike anything in America. The soothing trill of the locusts was met by complete silence, aside from the deep breaths of the colossal creatures across the road and the...

University of Texas - Austin

The screen glowed brightly in her face as she would check her Facebook, and wonder why people did this to her. “Who would be mean enough to treat a person like this?”, she would always ask me. The cruel, menacing, and terrifying words that some of...

University of Texas - Austin

If I had to describe the culture of my family in one word, it would be "resilient." Every year, my father gets a new assignment... fight in the skies above Iraq, train future pilots in Mississippi, advise a four star general in Hawaii, and now,...

University of Texas - Austin

A week after New Year’s in 2011, the cherry blossom tree outside my apartment’s living room erupted in pink and my best friend died. Two weeks later, I stared into the eyes of seventeen eager 9-year-olds in my first classroom. By the end of the...

University of Texas - Austin

We have a saying at work: “Dealing with an angry mom is like dealing with a burglar; just give her what she wants, and no one gets hurt.”

I see it almost every day at the pool - a mother’s desperate desire to have everyone acknowledge her son as...

University of Texas - Austin

Diving in a pool is an experience like no other. It’s like immersing yourself in a world with no sound and no communication. Underwater you can do things that would be so much more difficult to do on land, for example: a backflip or a handstand....

University of Texas - Austin

The athlete-to-captain relationship is the lifeblood of any functioning sports team. After all, the team captain essentially acts as a mediator between the other players and the coach. Some other jobs of a team captain include, but are not limited...

University of Texas - Austin

Monsoon season began the day after I arrived at Jeongok, a small town where the rushed lifestyle found in most Korean cities was in abundance. My grandmother, who owned a grocery store in the town, asked me to take over during a particularly rainy...

University of Texas - Austin

Scrolling through the lines of G-code iterations, I rubbed my eyes as my cursor hovered over the “Run” button onthe monitor. The image of the Arc de Triomphe taunted me. My finger rested on the mouse in anticipation, but thehigh stakes furthered...

University of Texas - Austin

My childhood memories were mixed by hand. Hunched over Formica countertops my grandmother formed my earliest ephemera between her palms. Side by side we rolled the hours away perfecting the one dish that continues to define me even now. Roll,...

University of Texas - Austin

“…Thus I advocate for the global suicide of humanity as a solution to anthropocentrism…” I dropped my pen, frozen in shock and hilarity. Surely this was a joke; although I had only attended a few debate tournaments, I had never encountered...

University of Texas - Austin

I walked past a building labeled “prayer room” and knew I did not fit in. A Buddhist boy playing basketball in a Christian basketball league, I found myself walking through a parochial school on a Saturday in search of a gym.

I ambled through two...

University of Texas - Austin

“Don’t turn the flip flop upside down!” I heard my grandmother let out a screech, that truly, could have awoken the dead had my mother not briskly calmed her down. Weird, I thought to myself. It was only a brown leather flip flop that my brother...

University of Texas - Austin

In the fifth grade, I touched a human brain. The children in my enrichment program clustered around the sterile table with little regard for the stench of formaldehyde that engulfed us. Granted, much of the interest we showed can be attributed to...

University of Texas - Austin

At 8:35 AM, on a Tuesday during the school year, November 29, 2011 to be exact, I not-so-vividly recall shuffling around under the covers as a young teenager often does after waking up in the morning and looking over at the clock. After seeing...

University of Texas - Austin

I woke up to the sound of my brother screaming. Worried, I rushed downstairs to the sight of ripped paper beneath his feet and a new iPad in his hands. It was Christmas. Giddy with excitement, I dove into the pile of gifts, searching for the box...