College essays that made a difference - Princeton Review 2010

Andrea Salas
The applicants

In high school, Andrea was varsity tennis team captain for four years, involved in student government, on the yearbook staff, and a “peer-educator” for the AIDS Awareness Club.

Stats

SAT: 1390

SAT Subject Test(s): 730 Math Level 2, 730 Chemistry

High School GPA: 3.80

High School: Santa Monica High School, Santa Monica, CA

Hometown: Santa Monica, CA

Gender: Female

Race: Caucasian/Latina

Applied To

Amherst College

Bates College

Bowdoin College

Dartmouth College

Tufts University

University of California—Berkeley

University of California—Los Angeles

University of California—San Diego

University of California—Santa Barbara

University of California—Santa Cruz

Williams College

Essay

Andrea used the following essay in each of her applications. She combined the following two questions from the Common Application:

1. Evaluate a significant experience, achievement, risk you have taken, or ethical dilemma you have faced and its impact on you.

2. Indicate a person who has had a significant influence on you, and describe that influence.

Dear Poppy,

I realize that this letter will not actually be sent to you at Walkley Hill road in Haddam, Connecticut. In fact, it will be sent to the Admissions Office at Dartmouth College. I also know that it has been over two weeks since I received your last letter, and I apologize for not responding sooner. I always have some school-related excuse as to why it has taken me so long to reply, but the truth is, lately it has been hard to write back immediately to my dear grandfather’s letters when so much else is pulling my attention away. But once I sit down with pen and paper, I know that thirty minutes later, when I seal the envelope and place it in the mailbox, I will once again be uplifted by feelings of accomplishment and renewed connection to you.

I remember that first letter I sent you ten years ago, thanking you for Christmas money and asking you to “please write back to me, and then I will write back to you, and we can keep a corespondance that way” (that was how I spelled “correspondence” at age six). Those early letters now seem so banal, inevitably beginning with “Dear Poppy, how are you? I am fine.” But after a few years, they progressed to “Dear Poppy, I read the most amazing book, The Count of Monte Cristo. Have you read it?” I must admit to having told you many commonplace things about myself—my school schedule, the books I am reading, how my sister is doing. But I have also shared with you my most uncommon moments, special moments that seemed removed from time, when I poured out my feelings without concern for what my peers and parents would think. You became the one person with whom I could share feelings back and forth, discussing life’s issues, without fear of censure.

When I write to you, I imagine you at your desk reading every word meticulously. Behind you hangs your chalkboard with those Calculus equations that always puzzled me as a child. Now I know that when I next see those equations, I will really understand them! On your desk, a photograph of me, cradled in your arms. When I write to you, I visualize these things and more. Writing to you opens up worlds past and present, yours and mine.

Once I wrote you a letter on a brown paper bag with ripped edges and pretended that I was ship-wrecked, the letter being my only communication with the outside world. In reality, it was only my communication outside my bedroom. There were also the letters written without lifting pen from paper, like the one I wrote when Grandma died. I never worried that I, an adolescent, was trying to console my far wiser grandfather about loss and death. This past August you showed me the folder where you kept all my letters. There at a glance was the Winnie-the-Pooh stationary, the crisp Florentine printed paper, the card of my favorite Alma-Tadema painting at the Getty Museum: the surfaces on which I showed you myself and the depth of my feeling. And all of the letters are addressed to you, Dear Poppy, and signed Love, Andrea, but each is from a different writer at a different moment in her life. Ever changing, yet with you always.

Love,

Andrea

See this page to find out where this student got in.