Accepted! 50 successful college admission essays - Gen Tanabe, Tanabe Kelly 2008
Essays about places
57 successful admission essays
Emanuel Pleitez
El Sereno, California
In his essay, Emanuel appreciates the view from the top of a hill, where he goes to exercise and think. He has had a lot to balance in his life.
At Woodrow Wilson High School, he was the captain of fi ve varsity athletic teams and earned 19 varsity letters. A fi rst-generation college student, he was raised by his single mother, an immigrant from Mexico.
His efforts have resulted in him not only getting into his dream college but also winning almost $30,000 in merit-based scholarships. Emanuel hopes to enter politics or return to teach at his high school.
My Hill
Stanford University
I am pumping my arms, trying to keep my legs moving. I feel lightheaded and frail needing to catch my breath, but I am only half the way up. I will not stop. I will keep going and going until I reach the top. These are some of the feelings I get as I am running up my hill. The community of El Sereno, which I live in, is full of hills. The biggest one with the antennae on top is “my hill.” I use it to work out, to refl ect upon things and just to be alone. As I am running up my hill, I remember how hard my mom has worked all her life for my sister and me. I remember playing basketball as a fi fth grader amongst teenagers and grown men, learning to believe in myself and to stay on the right path. When I reach the top I look around and appreciate the beauty, tradition and all the hard workers of my community. I realize that I am part of it. I must contribute to the tradition and give back.
Sometimes I feel that I am not in tip-top shape, but I know I must be to play all my sports. At these times I say to myself, “Let’s hit the hill.” I have to work the hardest. That is just how I am. This comes from my mom. I always think of her when I am running my hill. She is the hardest worker I know. I remember the times we got off the bus at 10 o’clock at night coming from downtown L.A. after a full day of shopping for the things my mom sold throughout the week to support us. We would still have to walk about a mile as my mom carried my little sister and a bag in one arm and held me by the other hand while I carried another bag. Besides earning a living, my mom went to school to learn English. She has gone to school for as long as my sister and I to try to earn her high school diploma. Even though it has been a tough road, she has never given up. I take that feeling with me going up my hill and in life.
Another refl ection I have when I am on my hill is of when I was a fi fth grader playing basketball every day at my elementary school until it was too dark to see anything. All the older guys would come and play too. They tossed me around, but it made me tough. I will not be afraid of anything after playing with them. It was a great challenge, and I love challenges.
They taught me to believe in myself and never let anything put me down.
They were not the greatest of role models as they did drugs and basically did not have a future, but they always talked to me as if I was their little boy. I could have ended up like them as other childhood friends have, but I just took the advice and stayed on the right path. One guy told me, “Keep on practicing and one day you can make it to the NBA.” I probably will not be a professional basketball player, but just the belief that they had and actually still have in me has given me the boost to always excel. Being on my hill helps me refl ect upon what has shaped me in my community.
On top of my hill I can see all of El Sereno on one side and the rest of Los Angeles on the other. I love to look at my community, especially my high school. My high school represents the place in which I live. It represents the whole community, as it holds our future. It also holds our past, as many of our teachers are Wilson alumni. It is a great tradition at our school that allows our teachers to teach with more passion since they are back to where they started. They really want to help our youth and that is what makes the place where I live special. It has shaped me to look at life as a mission to help people succeed. It has given me a positive outlook that has motivated me to give back to my community as much as I can as I get older.
My hill gives me my motivation, lets me refl ect on my past and lets me see the future. It is a long journey in life as it is a long run up the hill. My hill starts off pretty easy, although I cannot see how far it is or where exactly I am headed because of the tall grass. Eventually though, I see the top and what path I have to take to get there, but I realize I still have a long way to go. I face obstacles and doubts, but I do not let them stop me. I am determined. When I get to the top, always knowing that I will, I feel unstop-pable. I know the hard work will pay off.
Why This Essay Succeeded
A location can be a powerful topic for an essay because you can make connections between all of the sights, sounds and even smells and your life. Emanuel creates a touching portrait of his family and himself through the vignette of the views he sees from the top of the hill. By using the hill as an analogy, he is able to show the admission offi cers a number of different vistas of his life that otherwise would not ordinarily be related. Through each of the views—his family’s late-night shopping trips, playing basketball and his high school—Emanuel is able to share what is really important to him and what he has gained from each experience. And that’s really all that the admission offi cers are asking for in an essay.
Gabriel D. Carroll
The Crossroads
University of Chicago
Down around the intersection of Broadway and Embarcadero, between the chimneys and the channel, lies one of the few scenes that Oakland displays with pride to the outside world. It is Jack London Square, a 10-block area occupied by shops and offi ces, which looks out on the Alameda Channel and, beyond it in an appropriate direction, on San Francisco Bay. It is the site of numerous happenings, from the weekly Farmers’ Market to the Fourth of July fi reworks, and for the remaining time it somehow maintains an air of hospitality—even festivity—foreign to most of the city. But to me, the Square is more than a physical location; it has a variety of connotations, all somehow connected to Oakland.
It is not accurate to say that Jack London Square is a symbol of Oakland; rather, it is a gathering place for a variety of individual representatives of the intellectual and economic mediocrity on which the city frugally survives. To one side is the Port of Oakland, the heart of the city’s commercial signifi cance. It irritates me that this metropolis of 400,000 functions as a distribution center, a mere intermediary for the business of the outside world. The largest store on the Square is the Barnes & Noble, but I prefer to frequent its smaller counterpart in downtown Berkeley; the selection at the Oakland site I fi nd generally too mainstream and not particularly enlightened. Several years ago, when the Cirque du Soleil presented their performance, “Quidam,” in Oakland, they were honored with a colossal statue in the Square of the show’s protagonist, a headless man. I found headlessness particularly appropriate in a city whose public school system is justifi ably lambasted in the headlines at regular intervals. If you go north on Broadway, you pass several adult-video stores. There is a homeless man here, a huge man smothered in blankets, sitting impassively near the entrance to the underground parking lot. This is what Jack London Square is: a point of convergence for things that, for better or for worse, are Oakland.
The irony is that, despite the implications of these symbols, I like Oakland.
It is home. It offers me a sense of familiarity, of being somewhere. It contributes to my sense of identity. In the summer, when I come home from warmer places, it is refreshing to inhale the brisk air and know that I am in Oakland. Moreover, I have a tendency to assume the vantage point of the observer as often as that of the participant; I thus can look at Oakland’s eccentricities in amusement. Why is it that East Oakland covers approximately half the city’s area (and its position relative to the remaining portion is more southerly than easterly), while West Oakland is a tiny corner? Why is “East” Oakland full of numbered avenues running east to west, while, in the northern part of the city, east to west are numbered streets, and the numbers increase in the opposite direction? Caring to contemplate such trivia is what makes me identify with the city. And as for the pessimism I appear to glean from Jack London Square—well, this place is not that bad. Perhaps I say this only because familiarity induces one to come up with defenses, but Oakland tries. It takes pride in the commercial vitality that does exist.
It enjoys its ethnocultural diversity despite being plagued by racial conten-tion. The name of the Square—for indeed Jack London did spend part of his life here—reminds one that, historically, Oakland has been somehow important. Finding positive sides to the city adds to that inexplicable sense of satisfi ed familiarity.
Jack London Square suggests the whole city to me in another, more personal way. I have a habit of taking “urban hikes.” Walking around provides physical exercise. It also is essential to cognition—I use long walks to work on math problems, musical compositions, planned additions to my website, school essays or just to introspect aimlessly on the events of the past few days. I fi nd fresh air much more conducive to these activities than the cramped indoors. And it allows me to take in the sights and sounds of the city. One of my favorite destinations is Jack London Square, not because of the terminus itself so much as the process of getting there. From my house, the walk is an hour each way, and it traverses Oakland. I walk by Lake Merritt, the county courthouse, the public library, the museum, the BART subway station and a dim building whose barely discernible plaque reads “City of Oakland Electric Department, 1911”; across Chinatown, under Highway 880, past huge, barren-walled warehouses and by the Amtrak station. Though any feeling of having absolutely seen the entire city is illusory, experiencing these different facets still justifi es and augments the sense of familiarity, and Jack London Square provides an excuse to do so.
Am I permanently tied to Oakland? No. When I am away from home, I can hardly claim a longing to return. In fact, I feel a fresh desire to explore, to know the ins and outs of my new environment and to fi nd the same sort of indicators of the social and cultural entity that constitutes whatever other city as I have done in Oakland. What I experience is perhaps nothing more than a form of academic interest. Just as I have tried to expand my academic experience—while focusing on mathematics, I have also taken interest in chess, CX debate and programming, among other things—I want to know other places as well. I am not an inseverable part of Oakland. But it is a part of me, a fragment of my experience and my identity. Years from now, after I have fi nished college and graduate school, perhaps long after that, it is quite likely that I will return to Oakland. I will make the pilgrim-age on foot to Jack London Square. And I will sit at one of the outdoor tables of the Barnes & Noble Café, sipping an Italian soda and remember what Oakland is.
From his essay, the admission offi cers can tell that Gabriel is extremely observant. He fi nds meaningful insights in his surroundings that others often overlook. In addition, he is able to recognize both the positive and negative aspects of his community, and yet he embraces them all.
He is not judgmental but instead accepting—which is a valuable asset.
Given that Gabriel’s primary talent is mathematics this essay is an
excellent showcase of his writing skill—which is often lacking in typical science types. If you know that English is not your strong point or that people may stereotype you as a science nerd who can’t write, you need to spend extra effort on perfecting your essay. Gabriel leaves no doubt in the admission offi cer’s mind that he is talented in both science and writing. While this may not have been easy, it was certainly worth the extra effort.