Stepping on the Moon: College Admission Essay Sample

The snow crunched underneath my feet as I walked, and I wondered how it must have felt to step on the moon. I had decided to make the most of the cloudy day by exploring and taking pictures at a local state park. Was the view from the moon anything like this? I think similes fail us when there is nothing truly comparable.

In the summer, my sister and I visited our grandparents in a small town in southern Germany. We decided to follow a trail our grandfather had showed us years ago. We had a faint memory of the path, but as the forest surrounded us, this memory became more and more hazy. We were lost. When we began to trace our steps back home, we ran into a little altar in the middle of the woods that was surrounded by a small waterfall, a cross, and an old wooden bench— beauty in a dark, lonely forest. My sister and I sat down and instantly forgot that we were lost.

Ironically, I have learned to foster this sense of adventure through more passive and indoor interests. Reading Jack Kerouac made me want to trek across the nation; Richard Feynman told me bluntly that there is an entire world in the atomic scale. Bacteria are much larger than atoms, but when my friend Emma and I peered through the microscope into the microscopic world, we saw a close-up of something that seemed very, very small to us. The bacteria we had cultured had been scraped off the bottom of my shoe. Our sample looked like a supernova explosion, tinted purple from the gram stain. We shrieked excitedly. Gram-positive!

The allure of Johns Hopkins cannot be summed up simply by the wonderful research opportunities or the Neuroscience Program that has captivated me since I read Ben Carson's autobiography in middle school. ("Johns? Why Johns?" I had wondered). To me, the allure of Johns Hopkins lies in the adventure of each class, from Medieval Philosophy to Phage Research, as well as in the people, from those who stage protests on Friday afternoons to those who can be found exploring the enchanting George Peabody Library for the hundredth time.

Johns Hopkins is like the little altar in the middle of the woods – no, it is the wooden bench where I know I will find my way – no, Johns Hopkins is the trail. But it does not matter anyway. Similes fail us when there is nothing truly comparable.

When I look back on my hometown of old, quaint Commerce, Michigan, it will feel like looking back to our beautiful planet from the moon. Then again, I do not know how it feels to stand on the moon.

I would like to, though.