Stanford University Admission Essays

“Don’t be such a wimp, just jump!” I glanced up to see the smirking face of a blonde riding the chairlift above me. For the past five minutes, I had sat perched atop a fifteen-foot boulder directly under Snake Creek chairlift, snowboard strapped to my…

“Hey! Change your away message. It’s so OLD!” The chat window pops up onto the screen of my computer. Cool. One of my friends just messaged me. Wait. What is wrong with my away message? Its font and color are conspicuous enough to alert others…

I lean my head against the cold glass window and watch the world fly by at 70 mph, as the soothing tones of stringed instruments and a dancing guitar line melt into Emm Gryner’s voice singing “Stereochrome.” I was 6 years old, riding in the…

The December breeze seeps through the cracked-open door, but I only feel my heart, throbbing in eerie unison with the clock behind me. At a heartbeat a second, my heart will beat ten thousand eight hundred times before editing of The Oracle finishes for the…

Quotes are like songs and musical tunes. You can remember and repeat only the really good ones. For some reason, they stay in your head and play over and over again after you have found the perfect one. Like songs, quotes can be stuck in…

On Sunday nights, I take out my favorite fountain pen and write letters. The letters vary by week. Sometimes I use store bought stationery; other times my words are casually scrawled on index cards. The recipients vary, too. Many have received letters from me before,…

I’ll admit it: I’m obsessed with fantasy football. I can vividly remember the call I received from “Pepe” (aka Colin) asking if I wanted to come to his “fantasy football” draft that night. Of course, being a 7th grader, I had never heard of the…

Sometimes life throws us challenges that are unexpected and scary, as well as obstructive to our goals and dreams. A few years ago my mother became ill concurrent with the dot com bust. She was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer, her third type of cancer, and…

You can use your enormous privilege and opportunity to seek purely private pleasure and gain. But history will judge you, and ultimately, you will judge yourself, on the extent to which you have used your gifts to enlighten and enrich the lives of your neighbors….

When I was eight, I read the 531-page Book of Mormon cover-to-cover. The vocabulary and concepts which comprised the set of doctrine was unbelievably complex, so it usually took an entire hour to get through three of its short pages. To do this, I excitedly…