Liberal Arts Schools Application Essays

As we all piled onto the aging tweed sofa, my dad struggled to get the fancy new VCR to work while my mom, my brother Jacob, and I continued to stare vacantly at the blank screen. It was Christmas Eve, 2001, and we were settling…

Inside a concrete church filled with stacks of children and thick, humid air, an old fan in the corner was my only source of comfort. I watched as a microphone was being passed around, frightfully heading my way like a pistol in a game of…

Last summer I was invited by Microsoft to attend a program offered by their diversity department called Digigirlz. At first I was skeptical, so I did some research and found out that Digigirlz was focused on encouraging girls to pursue careers in technology, an industry…

Among the candid celebrity shots and photogenic pets, one aspect of Instagram has always intrigued me: the Popular page—a continuously changing mosaic of current top posts. After checking the page, I often wondered what made those photos so special that they were shown on all…

I am afraid. No, not to the naked eye. I live in Philadelphia. I walk to the grocery store at midnight and laugh in the faces of drivers as I pedal through the morning rush-hour traffic. I work in a warehouse full of men and…

As in Harry Potter, where the wand chooses the wizard, the trumpet chose me—although, at the time, I thought I was choosing the trumpet. Four wind musicians stood before me in my elementary school’s auditorium. Each one played an excerpt showcasing the instrument’s ability, trying…

June 4th 2006 5:50am The volunteers in the red shirts direct us to enter our corrals. It’s race time. Twenty-three thousand of us cram into our assigned areas and stand shoulder-to-shoulder, no room to move. I know what lies in wait—fifty-four thousand steps, or twenty-six…

The sunlight collapses lazily against the windows of our tall, stately house today, yet the gracefully arching pathways and crisp white paint job hold steadfast against the lackluster attack. To some it may be a palace, while others see only a rickety shack. To me,…

Our Socratic reading group is the ultimate unconventional cult, nine curious high schoolers and a college professor gathering every weekend to discuss the practicality of anarchy, the life of the mind, and the cosmological divine. Here, I learned things my school curriculum couldn’t teach me:…

I glanced upward from my computer and saw a wall covered with posters, each displaying a beautiful computer modified image of a college campus. One of them struck me for months. It was a clear aerial view of a field of green trees dotted by…