College essays that made a difference - Princeton Review 2010
Alison Kaufmann
The applicants
Alison was a National Merit Finalist and was inducted into the Cum Laude Society her junior year of high school. She spent part of the summer before her senior year in Croatia working at a camp for children who had been through the wars in the Balkans.
Stats
SAT: 1590 (800 Critical Reading, 790 Math)
SAT Subject Test(s): 680 Chemistry, 800 French
High School GPA: 4.00
High School: Marin Academy, San Rafael, CA
Hometown: Berkeley, CA
Gender: Female
Race: Caucasian
Applied To
Amherst College
Brown University
Stanford University
Swarthmore College
Wellesley College
Wesleyan University
Yale University
Essay
Alison used the following essay in each of her applications.
Evaluate a significant experience, achievement, risk you have taken, or ethical dilemma you have faced and its impact on you.
Global Children’s Organization runs a camp on an island in the Adriatic for children who lived through the Bosnian civil war. Last summer I went to Croatia to be a volunteer counselor there.
The two weeks of camp were over and I was bumping along in a bus full of children en route to Sarajevo when the first glimpses of the horror that had taken place in Bosnia finally began to make the situation real. Until then, I had sympathized with a vague, history-book tragedy. Now I tried desperately to memorize the scratches on the window rather than think of my friends who lived here. I could almost smell burning. The houses crouched with mottled walls, lone chimneys stabbing skyward. This was not, could not be, someone’s home.
We drove along the Sarajevo hillsides where the snipers had been and then down through the town. I kept my face toward the window as my friend Fedja pointed out the site of the first massacre, and the second, and the achingly empty hulls of brick and cement where people had once lived. Where were they now? Did they still live? Had they managed to leave or were they, like so many others who walked these streets, trapped in their city as the bombs exploded and the shells rained down?
Fedja’s cousin keeps a piece of a bomb in a glass-doored cabinet, the way someone might store a china vase. It was from the time a shell fell into the dining room. When the air cleared, Fedja found his chair studded with scraps of twisted metal where he had been seated only a moment before. I would not touch the piece when they held it toward me. I did not want to touch this death, this confirmation of the horror I would have to acknowledge if I held it in my hand.
I lay in my bed that night in the reconstructed building that had been Fedja’s grandmother’s home, and I thought of screaming and fear and laughter and silence. I tried to remember to breathe.
At camp I had played with the children, helped them learn to swim, twirled them upside down and sat with them looking toward the sea. I had changed from an outsider who could not understand what was being said to a friend who often found no need for words. I had grown to love the feeling of being needed. I was fed by it, fed by the sense that I was making a difference and fed by the exultation that came from constantly stretching myself.
Now, in Sarajevo, I struggled to accept what had happened to this hill-cupped town. Each conversation brought another wave of denial; each added another layer to what I felt when I heard the phrase “three years under siege.” As I listened to the stories, I also realized the significance of what our camp worked to achieve. It gave the children a second chance at a stolen childhood, and it gave me the opportunity to help give this gift. After seeing Sarajevo, there is nothing I would rather give.
At camp and in Sarajevo I was completely independent for the first time. I had come because I wanted to come; I wanted to feel that independence and I wanted to see a change I was helping create. I had raised the money myself. I was there without parents and without anyone I knew. The opportunities to challenge myself were everywhere—in leading activities, in forming friendships with people who knew only three words of English, in conveying to little Nino that he still could not swim beyond the rope … even though it had been three minutes since he last tried. I felt myself bloom in that environment, and no one else’s impressions of what was possible or impossible for me could affect that.
I came back to Berkeley with photographs and memories. I have a picture from camp of 11-year-old Amra holding my guitar and pretending to play. I have memories of my three oldest boys presenting me with a seashell they found near the pier, of playing soccer in the hallways, and of singing my kids to sleep. I have the hope and the conviction that I will go back next year.
I also brought back a new level of confidence: a place within me that I have slowly been creating throughout my life and that has finally taken root. I can stand on it now, even jump, perhaps, and stretch my arms to the sky. Each day I am catching more glimpses of what I might reach.
See this page to find out where this student got in.