Belief: College Admission Essay Sample

Tell us about a personal quality, talent, accomplishment, contribution or experience that is important to you. What about this quality or accomplishment makes you proud and how does it relate to the person you are?

I stood at the edge of the small wooden pier clutching my little white flower and gazing out hopefully into the sea. I was waiting. It didn’t matter what anyone else told me, I knew they were coming. My eyes scanned the water, from the enormous, glittering pirate ship gift shop on my left to the busy green bridge clogged with traffic on my right. My brother and older cousin sat behind me, waiting impatiently for my mom, aunt, and grandmother to pay the bill at the waterfront restaurant where we had just finished eating.

It was the last day of our vacation in Treasure Island, Florida. In a few days, I would return to my fourth grade classroom, back to multiplication and my hopeless attempts at transforming my messy printing into neatly curving cursive writing.

When I felt it was time, I threw my flower into the water, just like the girl in my favorite story. Whenever my mom offered to read me a story, I always chose the same one. In the story, a little girl stands on a cliff overlooking the ocean and throws flowers into the sea. Later that night, she wakes up and goes out to the cliff to see all kinds of whales and dolphins dancing through the water, collecting her flowers. Standing on the pier, I knew that her story was true, and that in a matter of minutes, it would become my story too. I watched my flower bobbing up and down with the roll of the sea, and I waited, scanning.

Then suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a movement near the bridge. My eyes shot quickly to the right, and there they were! In the distance, a pod of dolphins swam towards the bridge. I can still remember how quickly my heart filled with joy as I laughed and screamed for my family to come and see. They weren’t very close, but that didn’t matter. Then, just as quickly as they had appeared, they vanished beneath the sparkling water, heading out towards the open ocean.

I bounced up and down next to my family, feeling a rush of pride that I had the power to make something like that happen, knowing that because I had believed with all of my heart that the story could come true for me, it had.

This experience changed my life. To this day, I still have that same sense of optimistic hope. Looking back on this experience helps me to have faith in the world around me. I realize now how lucky I was to encounter one of the magical things that can happen in this world. Whenever I have doubts about my future, I look back on this experience and know in my heart that if I could make my dreams come true at eight years old, than any dream I have now or in the future can be achieved if I dedicate my whole heart to it and truly believe that I can make it happen.