Sharing my College Essays: UT, Hopkins, Barnard, Emory, UNC
Below are some of the essays that got me into college! I hope that they are helpful to anyone writing their essays right now.
Common App and Apply Texas Prompt- Accepted to Johns Hopkins, Emory, Barnard, UNC Chapel Hill, Boston University, UT Austin, A&M, UTSA
Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others.
“As my Instagram account hit six-hundred followers, I temporarily thought I had made it in life.” While this sounds like the musings of an insecure lifestyle blogger, these and other social media accounts I run are not a source of narcissism for me. Rather, to go from no background in marketing to successfully promoting my family’s business is my personal testament to what my loyalty spurred me to begin three years ago.
When my mom announced that she was opening a real estate brokerage my freshman year, she may as well have used “we” as the pronoun. My mom had worked tirelessly to be successful in her difficult industry throughout my life, and I was determined to do whatever I could to help the business through its predictably tumultuous first year. Thus began a six-month stint of venturing out to scrub the office more than I ventured upstairs to clean my room, greeting new employees with the enthusiasm only a fourteen-year-old girl can emit, and doling out business cards to the most unsuspecting of recipients: my teachers!
By the time summer rolled around, my sense of control had faded into a sense of uselessness. The problem with making a real estate brokerage a “family business” is that, unlike a burger joint or retail store, one can’t exactly get their kids an official job. Although I had volunteered most of my summer to work in her office, I found that my days consisted of completing crosswords while I served as the acting receptionist for an empty building.
My eureka moment came when I noticed some trouble my mom was having with advertising. She had made the mistake of paying for Instagram followers in the hopes of garnering exposure, and now her page was infested with users of questionable occupations and objectionable intentions. Everyone knows you can’t buy followers. Everyone knows that, right? It was then that I realized how my fourteen-year-old skill set could finally be used to recreate the practices of this 18+ field. The next day, I asked my mom for all the social media passwords and donned myself with the title of Social Media Liaison.
A common misconception is that managing social media is easy, and that’s true; it’s easy to do poorly. My first year, my content and links seemed to fall silent on an empty void. I bit my nails over the crickets that cyberspace was giving me, as if my mom and her agents didn’t deserve to be connected with the people who needed them. It was then that I began to do social media the hard way, but the correct way. I curated a theme, researched trends, and targeted ads to the correct demographics. Slowly, and surely, my nail-biting shifted to fist-bumping.
After three years of taps, clicks, hearts, and faves, the business’ viewership has increased 1200 percent, but I’m not stopping there. In an effort to reach out to the elusive millennial market, I’m currently trying to produce a video series; I also hold regular classes at her office so that employees don’t have to learn social media through trial and error like I did.
Of course, when the accounts surpassed six-hundred followers, I did not, in fact, figure out my life or even conclude that social media marketing was in my professional future. However, the fact that all this work spurred from a desire to help my mom serves as an example to me of the lengths I go to for people I care about. Subsequently, it was working from this passion that taught me how to reach people, a skill I can horizontally transfer to any field I stick my head into. Whether I’ll be researching MRSA with the CDC or lobbying for health policy, any cause I’m passionate about that needs a hand with outreach knows exactly who to call.
UT Austin Supplement- Accepted into College of Natural Science
Why are you interested in the major you indicated as your first-choice major?(250–300)
Before I even knew about public health, I have always had a desire to keep my community safe. For example, I asked Santa Claus to bring me a bike helmet in lieu of a shiny Barbie and fashioned fire evacuation maps on the walls in lieu of scribbles. In 6th grade, when Ebola dominated news headlines, I began to realize how disease could endanger entire communities and, under certain conditions, the world. This realization sponsored numerous library trips, where I finally saw the job title of “epidemiologist.”
There is seldom an epidemiology club at any high school, but I knew I wanted to learn more about how this career might enable me to make the world a safer place. I got creative by doing everything from debating in the World Health category of Model UN to earning the opportunity to attend a CDC summer program in Atlanta. Every opportunity I participated in further confirmed my comfort in public health but also my delight in the challenges it presented.
I am especially excited about pursuing the public health program at UT Austin. While other schools house their public health programs in the social science or even history departments, I am pleased by the fact that UT’s public health program is housed under Natural Science. I am also excited for the opportunities this program offers for me to give back to the state I grew up in through internships. I am particularly interested in the internship in Brownsville addressing border health. This seems like an amazing way to keep my home state and its newcomers safe while also observing first-hand a historical migration stream.
UT has the motto “What starts here changes the world,” but through the undergraduate public health program, I know I will be able to start changing the world here.
Leadership can be demonstrated in many ways. Please share how you have demonstrated leadership in either your school, job, community, and/or within your family responsibilities.
The word leader conjures images of Napoleon or Churchill mobilizing countries to complete their bidding, but my experience with leadership has been drastically different. Instead of equipping others to complete my agenda, I often prompt them to construct their own!
Sophomore year, on the heels of an international Model United Nations award I received in DC, my teacher invited me to teach a global politics and debate course to forty students. I took the task with pleasure, but I would’ve never pictured the reality of my experience. The (mostly freshmen) I taught were politically and culturally diverse, opinionated, and asked to complete an open-ended political discussion every day.
What could go wrong? Everything, but at the same time, nothing at all.
As I moderated these discussions every day, I made sure that every perspective got a chance to speak and that all conflicts ended with compliments. It wasn’t easy, but by the end of the year, the classroom had a strange sort of bond. More liberal students turned to their conservative peers for perspective on current events, and vice versa. Barely anyone ascribed to the unique set of views I held, but I had pride for the personal ideologies each student had developed throughout the year.
At UT, I hope to use the skills I gleaned from leading these conversations to continue challenging others to craft their own opinions. Whether that means I lead my fellow public health majors through convoluted discussions on vaccinations in the classroom or volunteer for Central Texas Model United Nations to help youth learn about global topics, every nuanced opinion will make Austin (and shortly thereafter, the world) a more discerning place.
Please share how you believe your experiences, perspectives, and/or talents have shaped your ability to contribute to and enrich the learning environment at UT Austin, both in and out of the classroom. (250–300)
My sweet sixteen before junior year was straight out of a modern movie, with a few modifications. First, swap Ariana Grande music for Louis Armstrong jazz, then pizza for charcuterie, and fellow teenage friends for several of my closest, long retired, companions. Okay, it may as well have been a sweet seventy.
I was born an only child in a neighborhood with a median age of 50, so my options for coveted peer-to-peer interaction were severely limited. Instead of growing up on playdates and Chuck-e-Cheese, the older couples in my neighborhood dutifully hosted me for cross-stitch lessons and Little House marathons.
Education is inherently biased in terms of age-range, but my experiences with these overaged playmates led me to gravitate more towards the adults at my school. I took nuggets of wisdom from each lopsided friendship I entered, from the school librarian who advised me concerning the meaninglessness of my adolescent angst in the long run to the forty-year-old coworker who recounted the annals of her childhood in Croatia and her immigration to America . Granted, I still have plenty of friends who are my peers. However, reaching out to such a variance of cohorts equips me to serve as a liaison from generation to generation and to help my peers connect with adults in their lives in hopes of having comparable experiences.
While UT undergraduates are generally young adults, I believe that education is only enriched by reaching out to older individuals not for career-centered networking, but for genuine relationships. That is why I am so excited to connect my fellow classmates to everyone from their tenure FRI professors to the staff at Jester. And who knows? Their 2024 graduation parties may end up being hosted at a bingo parlor!
Johns Hopkins Supplement
Successful students at Johns Hopkins make the biggest impact by collaborating with others, including peers, mentors, and professors. Talk about a time, inside or outside the classroom, when you worked with others and what you learned from the experience. (Up to 400 words).
The invaders’ battle cries are a dead giveaway to their imminent advance. Today, their arrival is early. In executing our operations’ response plan, we gather all necessary gear we need for initiating contact; markers, popsicle sticks and bottle caps filled my comrades’ arms. With a jubilant shout, we call out to the singing campers, still dripping from the pool, to sit down for afternoon crafts.
I have had the pleasure of spending my last two Junes as head volunteer for a day camp. Beyond having the time of my life, my job description includes helping teenage volunteers develop leadership skills by engaging with younger girls. The activity not in my job description? Serving as a translator between the disparate languages of adult directors and adolescent volunteers.
My first year on the job, there was a bleak disconnect between the two cohorts. While the adults resented the teenagers for being “lazy,” the teenagers felt that the adults were intimidating. The standoff had climaxed with a wave of quitting volunteers. June 31st, I lay my head in my hands and did what I usually do when I feel like I’ve failed: I write a game plan.
Next year, I shifted my role from middleman to platonic matchmaker. As I conversed with adults and joked with girls, I made special notes of interests and hobbies. Over lunch breaks and downtime, I used these common interests to forge friendships between both ages. Slowly and surely, I saw a cross-generational camaraderie graft itself together.
After these relationships formed, it was as if the camp was running on a new engine. When planning crafts, our directors knew what supplies we could afford, our high schoolers knew what campers enjoyed, and our middle schoolers knew how to make the craft easier for chubby hands. I had read plenty about cohort diversity in the workplace, but it was always approached as a problem. Last year, I probably would have agreed with them. This year, I realize that forging relationships between life-stages and integrating their perspectives is vital to successful outcomes.
The undergraduate experience is not one known for age diversity, but at Johns Hopkins I hope to find more opportunities to engage in cross-generational connection. Whether that means I have coffee with my chemistry professor or interact with graduate students in a lab, I cannot wait to see the great things that different minds can create together.
UNC Chapel Hill Robertson Scholarship: I advanced to finalist before the scholarship class was cancelled due to COVID-19
Share a quote (attributable to someone else) that you feel best aligns with your definition of leadership. How does your leadership style fit within the framework of that description? Provide concrete examples of the ways you have applied this leadership philosophy within your life.
I grew up in a religious household, so the story of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet was omnipresent in my childhood. In Christian culture, this story is used as an example of service leadership as one strives to honor Jesus’ instructions in Luke that “the one who is greatest among you must become like the youngest, and the leader like the servant.” While other belief systems have similar philosophies, I grew up seeing this applied in the Christian faith, whether I was watching Pope Francis wash prisoners’ feet or observing the local pastor cook a meal for his congregation.
This philosophy was so ingrained in me that I almost naturally tried to humble myself in my first leadership experience: my tenth-grade task of running a political awareness course. In subsequent years, I would be an officer in a political awareness organization. While most leaders create an agenda for their followers to adhere to, my job was to help my students craft their own beliefs. Not only were the students sophomore year and thereafter opinionated, but they were politically polarized. Managing those conversations felt like balancing a teacup on my head at first, but it gradually began to feel more natural.
Throughout our daily news discussions, I put my own beliefs aside and presented myself as an opinionless fool. Any ideology or suggestion that was thrown on me, I deflected with a question, regardless of whether or not I agreed with that stance in real life. This experience required me to suppress my own opinions quite often, but I believe it helped both me and my students better comprehend the nuances of political issues and understand the contrary side of our personal values.
In political awareness I had to humble myself to complete my outlined role, but as I rose to head volunteer at a day camp, I knew that I could craft my own desires and still get the job done. However, I knew I wouldn’t be able to hit it out of the park this way. I wanted to create a volunteer community and let them know how appreciated they were. To do that, I couldn’t rise to the role of a tyrant.
The main way I served my volunteers was through food; after all, summer camp in Texas burns a lot of calories! I stopped by Starbucks every morning to pick up their favorite drinks, and some Fridays I woke up even earlier to prepare a fresh pan of allergen-friendly rice krispies. At the end of the summer, I would organize appreciation picnics and sleepovers to give us a space to bond outside of keeping campers happy. Granted, this approach, like any other, was not foolproof. I sometimes wonder if my attempt to be nice invited some volunteers to become uncooperative or unreliable. Possibly those issues could have been prevented if I had decided to make my role a more autocratic one. However, I think that my decision to be a serving leader not only empowered hard-working volunteers to be more hard-working, but it also protected the camp from my own fallibility and mistakes. Girls were more comfortable pointing out their ideas or my errors, which in the end made the camp run smooth as butter.
Granted, I have yet to sink someone’s foot into a pool of water or scrub beneath their toes, and part of me hopes I’ll never have to. On the other hand, I feel incredibly lucky that I grew up learning the foot washing story, because I believe that it has made me a better leader (or should I say, servant) over time.
Option 1: It’s easy to identify with heroes, historical or literary figures who save the day. Tell us about a time you identified with a figure who was a villain or a scapegoat, a bench-warmer or a bit player. What aspects of the individual’s character drew you to them? How do you embody those characteristics? Provide examples of when those characteristics have proven positive and negative in your life.
When I was ten years old, I was introduced to the story of Les Miserables on film. Something about the peril, the music, and the actors sucked me in to the point that my limited-storage iPod became nothing but a Les Mis music machine and my foreign language of choice became French. Over many years, I read the books and analyses over and over, entrenched in such an interconnected story.
Most young female Les Miserables fans want to be Eponine and belt out “On My Own” in their showers. I certainly joined their ranks for a time, but that musical number was only after my bellowing low-toned renditions of “Javert’s Soliloquy.” Javert is the stiff police officer who pursues the protagonist Valjean for nineteen years after he broke his parole. Although I found his legalistic tendencies a bit forced and annoying at times, part of me understood his obsession with upholding the law. I grew up practically worshipping rules as if they were (and I still believe they are) the glue that holds society together. As a child I never snuck a candy, and as a student I never copied my homework or cut class. Sometimes, my rigid adherence gave me a “goody-two-shoes” reputation that isolated me from relationships and made me regret the way I was wired. Other times, they pointed me towards new opportunities.
When I explored policy through Model United Nations, I viewed new laws as a way to improve livelihoods and health in America and throughout the world. I wrote articles for Girl Scouts and a Medical Magazine calling for mental healthcare in public schools, equitable pricing of pharmaceuticals, or occupational safety laws. In my mind, these reforms would eradicate inequities with the wave of a finger.
I realize that my zeal for political panaceas is slightly illusory. Within the law, there are plenty of grey areas that even I can’t reconcile, and there are regions where the law is not enforced equitably or at all. Sometimes, laws and initiatives make things worse, such as how shipping food to low-income countries often puts local farmers out of business. When I receive questions regarding these concerns when I read an article at a launch party or present a Model UN resolution, I sometimes acknowledge their concern and decline any offer of rebuttal. Frankly, I agree with them while agreeing with my own presented perspective.
At the end of Les Miserables, Javert commits suicide when he is forced to reconcile Valjean’s criminality and morality. Although I empathize with this inner conflict, I find it perfectly fine to live with both my faith in the law and my awareness of its fallibility. After all, without the law there would be no order, but without disregard for the law Eponine would be unable to save Marius, Valjean unable to adopt Cosette, and the Bishop of Digne unable to exonerate Valjean. In short, maybe the next rule I write for myself should give some accommodations for exceptions.
Option 2: What work of art or music has surprised, unsettled, challenged or spoken to you, and in what way? How has this piece of work affected your life in tangible ways?
Throughout my childhood, an adventurous clownfish by the name of Nemo followed me everywhere from my birthday (topping the cake) to my bedroom (stuffed on my bed). By the age of six, my parent’s eardrums had bled out from my ceaseless giggles, and to this day they still shudder when I innocently ask if we can rent it on Vudu. I concede, the fact that I still hold the film so dear can come off as naive or immature, but still being young, I enjoy its unashamed sentimentality and remain in awe of the animator’s creativity. Beyond purposes of entertainment, when I saw the film for the nine-hundredth time it spoke to me differently.
At the time, my days were overloaded with eight classes, extracurriculars, a religious community, and family obligations. My weekly schedules looked like blackout curtains with no blank space allowed to creep into a Pomodoro-regulated routine. I had the misconception that the more I sacrificed for my work, the more successful I would be. Unfortunately, this meant that I viewed being spur-of-the-moment as being lazy. When I decided to put the beloved movie on for some rained-out campers, I realized that Finding Nemo directly contradicted what I was living by.
If you’ve ever seen Finding Nemo, you know that nothing in these adventures are carefully planned. Bruce the shark did not get a Google Calendar notification of Marlin’s drop-in. Likewise, Crush the sea turtle wasn’t able to pack an extra lunch for his unexpected travel companions. However, all of these character’s abilities to go-with-the-flow was what helped Marlin complete his journey. In isolating myself to the very notion of spontaneity, I may have turned away from the opportunity to help countless people go about their daily lives.
I read several articles following this viewing about the decline of “availability” in national culture. More and more Americans are overbooked at work or school, so less and less Americans are cooking casseroles for their sick neighbors, offering rides to friends or colleagues, or even giving directions to confused tourists. This culture seemed starkly different from the community Finding Nemo had immersed my in, and I knew wanted to swim against that tide.
Honestly, I’m quite proud of the changes I have made in the past two years to be more available to my friends that need it. Gone are the days of booked schedules; I always make myself leave significant white space for when a friend wanders into my room or wants to chat over dinner. I’ve sense discovered that a love language of mine is cooking, so I always save cookie-dough or noodles in my freezer as quick nourishment for those who need a comforting meal.
This change hasn’t happened overnight, but I’m excited to continue a chapter of my life where I can help people find themselves, their iPhones, or directions to a good restaurant. And besides, now I can always pencil in a screening of my beloved movies!
