The Uninteresting Place: College Admission Essay Sample

Among the rooms in our small old house, the one at the extreme is a room I find banal. A room lacking luster, with very small wooden windows that barely lets light rays in; no one placed value on it. One Saturday, my mum told me to clean the room for the first time in a long time. The stench of decay and dry air mixed with dust enveloped me as I opened the door. A step into the room welcomed me into a trap of cobwebs. Within two hours, I was done with scrubbing, I made for the shelves to dust them; carelessly flinging one open, a book fell from it. It was my mum's misplaced dictionary I had been searching for  long ago. I really needed it for vocabulary building since I lost my own dictionary. I searched for it everywhere except that room because I least expected it to be there. (Surprisingly, after the cleaning, the room appeared neater and more appealing than other rooms in the house. It wasn’t bad after all. My siblings even preferred it to the other rooms and frequently made use of it.)

I had this cynical attitude: easily discarding seemingly unpromising matters. When I was the head of a Christian Union in my high school, I led with little gusto because attendance was abysmally low. Very few students turned up during prayer meetings and even when I fixed evangelisms, the number of members who came was discouraging. But my experience in that old room taught me a lesson. It taught me to see the positive aspect of everything. It taught me to give just one more try and that might be the turning point. Hence, I urged my colleagues to be more enthusiastic. We had more evangelisms and I appointed delegates who followed up our new members: students we invited during evangelisms. To the glory of God, the membership tripled before my graduation.

Disparaging things because of 'what I think' and not 'what it really is' is one behavior I have learnt to change. When everyone in the house despised the old room, we never knew it could ever be useful. But when I took time to clean it, the general conception towards the room changed.

Rather than being derogatory, I would say I am now encouraging and motivational. During my tenure as the school head girl, students with career choice difficulties came to me for counseling and It was always my pleasure helping out. I have also learnt to render even the least assistance because it makes a difference. Though we were students and depended on our parents for income, I made the members of the Christian Union understand the benefits of giving which led us to making weekly collections of money and clothing which we used to visit orphanages at the end of each term.

I am perfectly content in an atmosphere where I can make the best out of the worst situation. When people or things are written off, given up on, I am there to give them some hope. I feel good when I succeed in making at least one downcast person see the potentials he or she is endowed with and work towards unleashing their inner values. The turnaround of the old room taught me that nothing is entirely useless. Life is more meaningful when we give meaning to people’s life. My life is better today because a scholarship program in my country which alleviated the hardships of my family by funding my secondary school education. Hence, I love to better the life of others and I feel perfectly okay doing that. I believe these are few of the great things to do. I am bent on maintaining this positive attitude.