Vassar College Undergraduate College Application Essays

"Come on! Speed it up! Just a bit left to go!"

He was out of his mind.hell, they were both out of their minds. I was not going to be able to make it. I couldn't remember why I had ever agreed to go with them. The weight of the excessively large...

The advent of the year 2000 signifies a new world of hope and challenges for our country and the planet. With developments in technology such as the Internet, the world is coming closer together than ever. It is vital for the survival of our...

When I was a little kid I used to carry around notebooks which I filled with hundreds of stories ranging in length from a single, whimsical sentence to pages and pages of fantasy. Every hour of the day, there were countless images and ideas...

I still remember it like it was yesterday. After seven days of grueling labor pushing my body to its limits, I was proudly walking - no, strutting. As my clean and pressed uniform held my new ribbons for the world to see, I looked up to the stands...

Cowardice surged through me as Emma sneered down at me. Her eyes pierced my own, seemingly oblivious to the glints of sunlight through the boughs of the shadowy trees.

“Apologize!” Emma demanded, and I trembled. Raising my hand to shield my eyes...

By now, color and form are two essential ways I express myself. In my art I often draw myself as a stick figure with a shock of bright red hair. My family, friends, and even strangers have always commented on the thousands of freckles that pepper...

Thursday, March 19, 2009. The time is 6:55 AM. As my shirt proclaims, this is a special day. I pass my sister as she leaves to catch the school bus and she is wearing the same shirt. I drive to school and find that dozens of my friends are also...

I lead a double life. You don’t often find someone who both dances and plays football. I suppose that makes me a statistical anomaly, because I go to tackle practice at six a.m. and barre class at six p.m. I love dance because it’s art with...

This is the balcony that extends into infinite dimensions. Inside: paintings and the smell of dusk. Lined against the tiled walls are canvases both void and filled. A soft light overhead. There is something extremely calming about occupying this...

I think I was Canadian in a different life. Not because of my love of French, though strong, or my craving for maple syrup, though incessant; no, this Canadian lifestyle manifests itself through a kind of hockey mania. While my friends enjoy...

I learned about Vassar the way I grew up - independently. I stumbled upon the school online one lonely night while my single mother traveled for business. Upon visiting Vassar, I remember having goosebumps. The college was Phoebe incarnate, from...

I have an affinity for magnificent endings. The final words of a novel, the last bite of a salted caramel chocolate bar, or the teetering crescendos of a timpani at the end of a grand symphony by Beethoven are just a few examples. When life...

During the overnight at Vassar, my nighttime ritual was disrupted by the unexpected presence of a male Vassar student in what I thought was a female bathroom. Startled, I ran back into the dorm. There, my host explained to me that the bathrooms at...

“At 6.00 in the morning she begins her morning cleaning. After preparing breakfast and clearing the table, she cleans up all the rooms.” This is a brief translation of a short passage secondary school students are given in Turkey. The passage...

The train rambled down the tracks as smoke curled around the windows. It was 1861 and in both education and the country, a revolution was on the brink. A young girl gazed out the foggy window as she clutched a pamphlet in her gloved hand. Boldly...

Saturdays were the days I followed my mom to work. Her boss would pick us up from our home in Brooklyn to the store that was miles away in Long Island. The hour-long ride felt like a trip across the country; forests and wheat fields greeted us as...

I search “how to grieve properly” in the naive but hopeful belief Google knows the answer. An article tells me “broken crayons still color.” This strikes me as not only condescending but false. I am in pain and I am healing, but I am not broken....

During my weekends spent placing used books back on dusty shelves at Queens Village Community Library, I realized that Queens made the most of what it had. The dilemmas of my community fester in the book return bin. Teenagers stressed from the...

“Welcome to Newspaper! I’m passing the sign in sheet around.” A bustling classroom of half familiar faces stood before me. Posters of hunter gatherer societies and Mesopotamian Civilization were plastered to the walls. I fiddled with an Expo...

"You know Yume, you're the only black girl that I like, the rest are so ratchet," he let out.

What... did he just say?

I let the words sink... because, well, I genuinely liked him. He'd helped me study for almost every computer science test and...

To my future roommate,

Over the summer, I became somewhat of a trail mix connoisseur. I discovered a deep love of trail mix while spending time in a residential program where I essentially subsisted on the stuff. It makes sense for me to want to...

There is nothing quite as extraordinary as witnessing a Haitian sunset. Watching as the sky folds itself to form a dichotomy of colors that bleed into the horizon. If I climb a roof high enough, or stand on a hill tall enough, it looks like the...

From a grade school classmate who mocked me by stretching out the corners of his eyelids (I’m Thai!), to people who thought it was okay to use Asian slurs because they didn’t include me (I’m not Thai!), to a middle school “friend” who texted me a...