Cornell’s FSAD Program: College Admission Essay Sample

Riding the elevator down into the aquarium, with the azure shadows refracting off my body, I had never been so alive. Immersed in the aura of the thousands upon millions species of fish, I felt like I was staring right into my own soul and beyond it, until my own being was suffused with the creatures swarming behind glass. All this I’d record in my sketchbook, letting the ideas build and collide, emerge and fade. The thoughts, through time and imagination, become my illustrations. From this oceanic trip emerged a translucent turquoise dress design, made of fish bones and mirror pieces.

Sometimes a friend would ask, what was your inspiration? I’m not really sure how to answer. To be honest, I don’t often find conceptual disparity between visual art and poetry. Like a never-ending dialogue, each dimension influences and informs the other. My urge to create, or express, is exhaling all that is within me. And by designing garments, I crystallize that exhalation and consolidate it into emotion. I’m constantly intrigued by visual art with the power to tell poignant tales, like cohesive fashion collections or graphic novels. Equally fascinated with form, with the profoundly infinite architecture of human visual-art, I desperately strive to bridge the gap between story-telling and design. I want to create apparel that can communicate the intangible dialogues between people and places, like how I felt in the aquarium. I know that this vision for my future garments is ambitious; I must reach a higher level of creative capacity. Thus, through the FSAD program, I’m willing to take on all the quantitative and scientific aspects of design as well as the artistic component. Here in Cornell’s FSAD program, I see the integrated fiber and marketing curriculum as my route towards a more telescopic worldview of the fashion realm.

Walking through Shanghai’s urban ecosystem, I notice that designs engulf us, unconsciously altering our existence. When did kitsch trends start dominating the aesthetics of my generation? I was passionately discussing this with a friend from Cornell’s art program when she said, that with the intensity in which I like to observe contemporary patterns, I’d enjoy Cornell’s more innovative approach to design. After two campus visits and extensive research, I found that many of the cutting-edge courses in Cornell’s Apparel Design program resonated with my current interests. I began to dream that, as an undergrad, I could take Aesthetics and Meaning in World Dress and look into how the designer’s role has changed through globalization. However, what I find most appealing is that Cornell's program doesn’t just focus on artistic theory like so many of the pre-professional art majors elsewhere. Instead, as a freshman in FSAD’s balanced curriculum of both practical application and philosophical theory, I could dive right into learning how to actually apply my designs in the real world while taking classes like Contemporary Moral Issues, combining my academic interests in art and philosophy.

I’m not just here to make clothes—I could learn that anywhere. I’m here to absorb all there is to offer in the FSAD curriculum: to learn how to incorporate sustainability into my designs, how to dress the modern human to express an inner world, how to establish my own line (tentative name: Subterranean Labyrinth!) A garment is alive like a human being. Its integrity is to follow its own truth, its one single theme. The purpose, the body, the material determine the shape. And as its maker, I must give it the soul and every trim, element and silhouette to articulate. I know this higher mind-space can be reached: immersing in FSAD’s academics and the Paris exchange program with L’école Nationale des Arts Décoratifs, I’m ready to express the vision welling up inside me. Here I’ll be able to fully connect with an audience which has yet to take its seat in my fashion show, and perhaps become a part of how I re-imagine the world.