Columbia University Admission Essays

The sweat trickling down my neck felt like the stickiness of a dinosaur’s breath. My muscles tightened as author Michael Crichton revealed the extent of scientific advancement in today’s world. The pages of Jurassic Park turned quickly in my hands. A young reader, I had…

Rolling a suitcase through the Morning Heights gates with a backpack slung over my shoulder, the view ahead of me is bright. Through College Walk, undergraduate students pace past me to catch the subway on 116th St. The breeze from their stride, reveals not haste,…

For as long as I can remember, the concept of currency and the exchange of goods and services has always fascinated me. Growing up, I observed cashiers nonchalantly letting people walk away with goods in exchange for nothing more than a swipe of a plastic…

I prodded the chicken with my fork. The rest of the table was heatedly arguing about health care while I wondered how much longer the school fundraiser dinner would last. Then, an idle comment uttered by a boy I didn’t know made my head jerk…

“I wanna go home!” I say as I sit on the kitchen floor watching my mother cook. “What do you mean?” she asks, giving me a questioning look. “Ethiopia?” “I don’t know.” Home. For most people, the word can be easily defined as the place…

Some of my earliest and most vividly hazy memories involve riding in the backseat of an old Honda Civic. The seats were a stripey velour that stuck to the backs of my legs when the air conditioning stopped working, and the back window was lined…

Grind the spices in the molcajete. Taste the gritty texture on your tongue. “No, mija,” my grandmother says as she shows me how to mash the cumin, garlic, onions, and tomatillo. She is in Michigan for the summer, and I think she is homesick. After…

I watched Dion walk slowly into my classroom for her first tutoring session. She held her hands clamped tightly over her mouth, dropping them only to introduce herself, and then immediately bringing them back up to cover her face as before. If I were pressed…

Yellow – one of the primary colors. It is one hue; it is a million hues. Pale yellow, the color of silt in China’s River of Life; saffron yellow, the color of Chinese sovereignty for two millennia; tanned yellow, the tint of my skin. As…

I discovered the philosopher dormant in me when introduced to TOK in grade 11, where we learned about the means of acquiring knowledge. Both science and philosophy, as I realized, aim to unravel the basis of our existence. String theory proves its premise through math…