Middlebury College Admission Essays

A thousand miles away from home, I sat in a cramped apartment littered with Bruce Springsteen CDs, listening to my Spanish home-stay family talk about their day. Every evening, just before dinner, the four of us would gather for tiempo de la familia (family time)….

I’ve been a lot of different people in my seventeen years of life. I’ve been a tap dancing mouse chased by shrieking female cats, a 1950s teenager with greased-back hair, a sailor on 24-hour shore-leave in New York City seeking love and a good time,…

For four dollars, anyone can buy a bag of heroin in a town five minutes from my school. Prescription cousins of heroin, like Oxycontin and Vicodin, have been over-prescribed for decades. But as the war on drugs has progressed, a crackdown on prescription drugs has…

When my younger brother, James, was five years old, Jack Nierman bit him while they were playing in our favorite playground. I was sitting atop the monkey bars when I saw it happen. I swung down and pushed Jack away, then dragged my screaming brother…

I can see myself alone, sitting, squatting really, on the branch of a monstrous sprawling oak tree with dirt under my fingernails and stinging branch-scraped knees. I am out of breath after having climbed to the very top so as to see my neighborhood in…

I am not a religious person. I cringe at the sound of Christian rock, think Broadway’s The Book of Mormon is shamelessly hilarious, and am often scolded by my elders for flippantly exclaiming “Oh my God!” I find the following of dogmatic religious rules to…

As a child, I was always fascinated by history, especially the ancient world. My family often took trips to museums and historical sites, which only fueled my curiosity further. As I grew older, I began to develop a keen interest in archaeology and the study…

As a child I always felt like I was missing something, as though everyone else was tuned into a common understanding of life to which I was oblivious. I first realized this when, in the third grade, I was sentenced to a fifteen minute “time…

At 7:30 am we set off. My father and I wove back and forth over damp rocks, climbed stairs, and slalomed cairns until the first glimpse of our destination — a cell tower — broke through the grey sky. Adrenaline pumping and boots racing at…