Accepted! 50 successful college admission essays - Gen Tanabe, Tanabe Kelly 2008
Essays about issues
57 successful admission essays
Lily Johnston
Federal Way, Washington
When a close friend attempted suicide, Lily reevaluated her priorities and had some realizations about the expectations placed on females. She volunteered with the Real Women Project, an organization that seeks to show the beauty of women. She says, “Writing about depression, body image and how this affects young women was a natural extension of
my work at Real Women as well as my way of pulling together what I was experiencing personally with what I was observing publicly.” At Charles Wright Academy, she was editor of the yearbook, a managing editor of the newspaper and captain of the volleyball team.
In for the Long Crawl
Princeton University
We died that day. Not her, not I, we. She came close enough for the both of us. I can still remember that feeling of the earth just dropping out from underneath me when my mom told me that Chris had tried to kill herself.
The worst part was that I wasn’t surprised. I knew she had been “sick” for years, but that old scar on her wrist was always “a scratch from the coffee table.” Since that day, we have never shared a secret or dreamed up a new fantasy—the “we” that had defi ned us for so long, those 10 years of friendship, that sisterhood, was the one thing she swallowed that a stomach pump couldn’t remove. From that day on, I made it my mission to fi nd the cause of the nation-wide epidemic of depression that had shattered our lives and to do everything in my power to fi nd a cure.
In her world, everything was warped. In her delusion, a pocketknife, a gift that should have marked her coming-of-age and responsibility, became the “coffee table.” Her grandfather’s illness, which should have been sad but a natural part of life and living, was seen only for the drugs it would provide her for death and dying. I watched as she dug her own grave for two years. I don’t feel guilty; I did everything I could to help her but alert the newspapers. What I would later understand and what would fuel my desire to help others was that she couldn’t process or even understand help at that point; she was too sick.
My family is the only reason I didn’t share her fate, they are why she ended up in a mental ward and I didn’t. They were the only substantial difference between Chris and me: we were both depressed, we both had few close friends and we both were too young for our grade and too old for our own good. It was the little things that really counted. My parents didn’t yell at me or each other. My sister and I never fought. My father didn’t commute to another state regularly. I felt sorry for Chris and her family, but I realized early on that I couldn’t control people’s families or home lives, so I changed my focus to the things that I saw around me that made people feel “less-than” and incomplete.
Opening my eyes has never been such a powerful experience. I began to see things all around me that had the potential to make people, especially girls, feel depressed. Around every street corner, in every shopping mall and even in museums these images and ideas accosted me: anorexic girls modeling the latest fashions and the latest fashions only available in sizes 0 to 10 are a few examples. At one point I wondered if there existed some large-scale conspiracy to make all the girls in the United States depressed.
The idea of social, physical and intellectual perfection was defi ned and fed to us as if there were such a thing as perfection and it could be defi ned only one way. It was all of a sudden a wonder to me that we all didn’t just start jumping off cliffs, one after another like lemmings.
Trying to reverse a nationally accepted image has been like trying to crawl up Mt. Everest. As one might expect, I’ve made little headway and have run into more obstacles than I can count. Apparently, it’s common for people to be advocates for women but to be much stronger advocates for their own pocketbooks. “Yes, we would really like to promote reality,” they say, “but people don’t buy reality. We’re a business, not a charity.” But, for Chris’ sake, and for the hope that our relationship may still be salvaged someday, I will keep crawling as long at it takes to save one life, for if I can save one life, I have saved two. If I have saved two, I’ve saved them all. If I’ve saved them all, I’ve fi nally saved myself.
One of the biggest mistakes that many students make when writing about an issue is that they do not personalize it. They write about an issue as they would for an assignment for a social studies class rather than for a creative writing class. Whatever the issue, there needs to be a reason why it is important to you. Clearly, teen depression is a huge national issue. But Lily does an excellent job of making it close to home.
Her essay covers both her individual experience with depression and some of the larger societal issues that she believes perpetuate it.
Notice that her essay contains a lot of thoughtful refl ection. She realizes that she can’t change the world in one fell swoop but she also knows that there are things she can do to help. This essay is not so much a display of her writing ability as it is of her ability to think, feel and analyze.
Donald H. Matsuda, Jr.
Public and Private
Stanford University
Public or private, which is better? I began to ponder the social ramifi cations of the distinctions between life in the public sector and life in the private sector, having recently experienced both sides of the issue.
I can clearly recall my ambitions as fi rst-year editor of my high school yearbook, an organization that I soon discovered was identical in process to the public sector. My prevalent suggestions on improving the effi ciency of the Copy Design Department had to be thoroughly evaluated and approved by a large hierarchy of administrative individuals prior to even being considered by the moderator or fellow editors. Such a dilatory process evoked an understandable sense of frustration among several yearbook staff members, and many more felt the contravening effects of strictly imposed regulations.
My employment at a privately owned business provides a stark contrast to the editorial inhibitions and prescribed responsibilities of managing a high school publication. In this private sector enterprise, decisions must be made swiftly and effi ciently in order to maximize the profi t for the company.
Thus, the workers are free to make their own corporate decisions; however, they must be willing to accept both the positive and negative consequences of their actions.
My experience has intrigued me to consider the more signifi cant question: public or private, which is better for me? I strongly believe that both the public and private sectors have myriad opportunities to offer, and consequently my ambition of a career in the fi eld of medicine will hopefully permit me to experience both sectors. This would not only be possible in a medical career, but it would also establish a most effective practice, a perfect balance between guidelines and freedoms. The regulations established and enforced by HMOs currently provide important guidelines for physicians to adhere to, while at the same time, a private practice gives them the fl exibility to operate their business as they please. This vision gives me great hope for an exciting future career in the public and private sectors that uniquely combines the best of both worlds.
In tackling complex issues, it helps to simplify them and avoid writing in the abstract. Donald does this by providing concrete examples of his experience with the bureaucracy of the yearbook and the quick
decision-making of the business world in the private sector. He further personalizes the essay by rephrasing the question from: “Which is better public or private?” to “Which is better for me?” This allows Donald to take a stand based on his own understanding of himself and which would fi t his approach and style better. When it comes to large issues there is nothing wrong with reframing the question so that you can answer it on an individual level.
Anonymous
On Prejudice
Princeton University
Prejudice is not something that people are born with. In the argument of nature versus nurture, prejudice is the product of environment and experience. This year, one of my good friends passed on. She was a beautiful elderly Jewish lady whose experiences in life taught me a great deal. She is one of the nicest people I have ever met, and yet she did not like black people.
Most people think that prejudice is the result of ignorance and stupidity, but she was very well educated. The reason she hated black people was because almost 20 years ago, a black man that she had helped to fi nd a job and a home beat her mercilessly and stole many of her precious belongings, including sight in one eye. From that one horrible experience, she closed the door on black people and refused to like them. No one can even begin to improve relations between races until people realize that someone’s race does not account for their individual actions. The color of my skin does not make me any more prone to violence or intelligence. In the age of statistical accuracy, people are so used to making generalizations that they don’t realize that it’s not a matter of black, white, brown or yellow. Everyone is different and you cannot blame the actions of one on many.
There is this program in LA where gang members who want to improve their place in life bake bread. A local priest began the program. It is amazing because people who would have killed one another six months ago are now working side by side and even becoming friends.
My school is diverse in terms of racial background and there has always been some racial tension. A lot of my good friends think that there is no way to improve race relations because of those individual experiences I mentioned above. But I think that it is from those individual differences that improvement will spring. I think that if we can have individuals working together towards some common goal, to clean up a local elementary school or to bake bread, they will learn that there are good as well as bad people in every race.
We must not forget the children in our society either. Schools need to be diversifi ed so that kids will be forced to interact with other kids of every race and learn on their own that the racism that their parents or friends feed them is not always the truth. Everyone needs to learn that it is the individual, not the race that he or she is categorized under, that makes them who they are.
An issue that is as complex as race relations can be diffi cult to tackle in the short space of a college admission essay. The key is to avoid being general and instead be specifi c. This writer gives the examples of the prejudiced senior citizen, the transformation that occurs in former gang members and the opinions of the diverse students at school. By using these examples, the issue of race becomes an individual one.
The writer also gives opinions on the problem and possible solutions.
While these solutions are not designed to be matters of public policy, they are the type of individual actions that everyone can do to address the problem in their own small way. Nobody expects you to solve the world’s problems in a 442-word essay. But the admission offi cers do expect you to be able to analyze the key issues, give examples from your own life and present the conclusions that you have arrived at in your own opinion.
Jeff Bozman
The Hawaiian Good Luck Sign
Princeton University
Of all the apparent junk mail that fl ows through my e-mailbox, one particular anecdote stands out as a very entertaining story. The tale of the Hawaiian Good Luck Sign highlights the importance of good communication. The story concerns a clueless woman who, while driving, accidentally cuts off another driver, who in turn fl ips her off. Not knowing what that means, she asks her street-savvy daughter. The girl tells her mother that it is the Hawaiian Good Luck Sign. “Oh,” the woman thinks, “how nice of him!” She proceeds to give the Hawaiian Good Luck Sign to everyone she passes, and—how about that!—everyone gives it right back to her! About the same time, she spies a bumper sticker that reads: “Honk if you love Jesus.” Since she was in such a good mood already, she decides to spread the Good News of Jesus with everyone else. All of the other cars must be on their way to a religious convention, she imagines, because all of them REALLY love Jesus! What a wonderful day!
While a bit farfetched, the story emphasizes the fact that communication (or miscommunication, as it were) is at the heart of every aspect of daily life. Thus, in order to prevent another disaster like the one above, I would invest my time and talents into a traveling study of languages. Not only would my language skills enable me to converse with people in their native tongue (one of the highest compliments one can pay a foreigner), but they would open up opportunities for a more comprehensive liberal arts education. So far, my studies have been extremely Western-focused. In part, I blame the Anglo-American arrogance associated with the prominence of our language for this egocentric approach to education. Gregg Cox, who holds the world record for speaking the most languages (64) says, “People are so surprised—not that I speak so many languages, but that I’m an American and I speak so many languages!” If I were able to read the teachings of Confucius, Buddha and Mohammed in their original contexts and converse with people who have lived all their lives with these philosophies, I would undoubtedly gain a more erudite perspective from which to evaluate the confl icts of our modern global society.
While this essay begins with a lighthearted story, it also introduces the core of Jeff’s thesis: the importance of good communication. An “important issue” does not have to be one that headlines the evening news. You can do as Jeff has and pick a less-obvious topic. Notice, too, that Jeff ties in his own skills and goals of traveling and learning new languages. Like all of the essays in this section, Jeff is providing a solution to the problem that is very personal. It represents his contribution to improving the world’s communication problem starting with himself.