College essays that made a difference - Princeton Review 2010

Ellison Ward
The applicants

In high school, Ellison was a Peer Leader and a member of the Cultural Awareness group, as well as a member of the soccer, basketball, and lacrosse teams. She was also extremely interested in Spanish language and culture and a studied abroad the summer after her sophomore year.

Stats

SAT: 1570 (780 Critical Reading, 790 Math)

SAT Subject Test(s): 770 Math Level 2, 740 Physics

High School GPA: Ellison’s high school did not calculate GPA, but she had about an A-minus average.

High School: The Nightingale-Bamford School, New York, NY

Hometown: New York, NY

Gender: Female

Race: Caucasian

Applied To

Brown University

College of William & Mary

Connecticut College

Duke University

Johns Hopkins University

Harvard College

Princeton University

Yale University

Essay 1

Ellison used the following essay in her application to Princeton and modified it slightly for each of her other applications.

Common Application: Evaluate a significant experience, achievement, or risk that you have taken and its impact on you.

So I’m sitting on my couch, wrapped in a blanket that I have somehow wrestled from my sister, enthralled by the electrifying activities taking place before me. The movie is Outbreak, and our star, Dustin Hoffman, is in the middle of a standoff with his superior officer, Donald Sutherland. Their argument centers on a certain town in California, contaminated with a certain deadly yet suddenly curable virus, and a plane carrying a chemical agent that will wipe out the entire population of the aforementioned town. “No!” my sister shrieks. “Don’t drop the bomb!” As the plane veers out over the ocean, the missile flies into the crystal clear waters and creates an immense, mushroom-shaped wave. “All right!” shouts my family, as out of the jubilee rises my tearful cry, “Wait! What about the marine life?!”

All right, so this is an overly dramatic version of the actual events, but the gist is the same. My bizarre attachment to the fictional fish is largely a product of my summer; I worked for eight weeks in the Coral Lab of the New York Aquarium on Coney Island. I’ll admit that my interest in the Natural Sciences was pretty general; I thought corals were beautiful, and I had fond memories of childhood trips to the Aquarium every time I visited my aunt and uncle in Virginia. I was thrilled to be working at the lab, but when you came right down to it, one truth remained: I had no idea what I was doing. No amount of ninth grade biology (or tenth grade chemistry or eleventh grade physics, for that matter) could have prepared me for the intricacies of the filtration system in a room full of corals being used for research projects or the manual dexterity required by the micropipeting process. But by the time August rolled around, not only had I mastered the fine art of maintaining a number of different filters and the rather painstaking procedure of micropipeting, but I had figured out what it is that has always drawn me to the sciences. Everyone I met, no matter how grating, overbearing, or bossy he might have been, could be reduced by the mere sight of a tank to an awed silence. And most that I met were not in any way grating, overbearing, or bossy. In fact, they were enthusiastic, dedicated, and friendly to anyone interested in their field to the point of annoyance. And they are just who I want to be.

The funny thing about this whole essay is that I don’t even want to be a marine biologist. What I really want to study are the Earth Sciences, but the specifics are not important. I learned this summer what it is to be passionate about what you are doing, to have an unchecked enthusiasm for even the dirtiest aspects of your work. To spend your life in the quest for knowledge that could make the world a better place may sound like a lofty goal, but when it’s a real possibility, it’s utterly amazing. Like any profession there are twists and turns, opportunities for frustration, disappointment, and conflict, but everyone in that lab knows he is doing something he can be proud of and that might help the world better understand how we can save our planet. Now that I have seen the kind of passion and love with which these people work at their jobs, I would never settle for anything less.

Essay 2

Ellison used the following essay in her application to Princeton. The prompt below is an approximation.

What book has had the most effect on you and why? It can be a book you read on your own, in class, or anywhere.

Of all the books that I have read, the one that has affected me the most is Native Son by Richard Wright, which I read for my Harlem Renaissance English elective junior year. Never have I read a book in which the protagonist has such a wildly different sense of the world than the expected norm. Suddenly I was exposed to a way of thinking that was extraordinarily different than my own, and Wright’s compelling portrait made it easy for me to understand this startling point of view. Before reading this novel, I had always closed my mind to those who did not agree with my liberal yet stringent morality; I could not (or would not) allow myself to explore a mindset that would allow someone to commit a crime so egregious as murder. Native Son has allowed me to face the fear that comes with venturing into the unknown, and to explore a variety of opinions before settling on one of my own, rather than automatically following that which I feel best fits my profile of convictions. Open-mindedness and the ability to withhold judgement are extremely important qualities in a world where so many cultures and ideals mix, and Richard Wright’s novel has helped me to work towards gaining both of these qualities.

Essay 3

Ellison used the following essay in her application to Princeton. The prompt below is an approximation.

Name one thing that you wish you understood better. Explain.

Of the many things that I wish I understood better, the one that I am faced with the most often is my sister. I see her everyday; we attend the same school, share a room, and share our parents. I feel as though I should understand her feelings and be able to identify her moods with ease after thirteen years of living with her, but she remains one of the biggest mysteries in my life. She’s talented, intelligent, and undoubtedly the wittiest person I know. Yet she is also picky, stubborn, and prone to outbreaks that I am powerless to stop. Not that I think these outbursts are a sign of some underlying psychological problem; they are hardly that serious. But when I am coming closer and closer to moving out of our room and thus putting a hole in our relationship that may not be refilled, I can’t bear to watch our days together wasted on her bad moods. Maybe it is because I am too close to her that I can’t see the way my own actions affect her, but I simply do not know how to behave so that I won’t set her off. My parents seem to have some idea; they often think that I am trying to aggravate her on purpose. But I want nothing more than to have the harmony (and that truly is how I would describe the situation) that we often live in be permanent. I’m just not sure how to make that happen.

Essay 4

Ellison used the following essay in her application to Princeton. The prompt below is an approximation.

If you could hold any position in government, what would it be, and why?

If I could hold any position in the government, I would be the President. Opportunities such as this do not present themselves very often; it seems only natural to choose the position in which I could effect the most change. Although I have nothing but respect for the principles of our government, there are many aspects of the actual governing of our country that have room for improvement. The corruption, partisan hostility, and sordid scandals that have come to characterize our government are an embarrassment. The most effective way to increase the esteem in which the world and our own people hold the administration is to place in the most visible position someone clearly dedicated to the upkeep of the noble ideals upon which our country was founded. This is where I come in. Although the actual fulfillment of the duties of this office would be by necessity far less idealistic than my diatribe on the Founding Fathers, the government is in dire need of someone who has at least some small sense of the merits of such antiquated conceptions as liberty, freedom, and limited power. If I could, in my stint as President, represent citizens of the United States as the open-minded, intelligent, respectful, and more-interested-in-foreign-affairs-than-the-private-life-of-our-president people that many are convinced we are not, than I would have succeeded in fulfilling one of the most important goals our Presidential candidates should have.

Essay 5

Ellison used the following essay in her application to Princeton. The prompt below is an approximation.

Name one thing that you would do to improve race relations in this country.

The problem of race is one that has plagued our country since its inception, and it is virtually impossible to come up with one or two simple steps to that would lead to its repair. It seems that virtually every solution opens a Pandora’s box of new problems, and it is difficult to sort through the insanely numerous opinions, stereotypes, prejudices and points of view that constitute our population. This being said, no real progress can be made without small strides, as controversial and tiny as they may be. The best solution would be a spontaneous dissolution of prejudice and the opening of people’s minds; a slightly more realistic solution might be to rearrange the zoning of public schools, and to then promote diversity within those schools. Arranging school districts by neighborhood in many cases results in an uneven balance between different ethnicities, which in turn results in increased hostility and divisiveness. By instead creating magnet schools that draw from a variety of neighborhoods, diversity of race, as well as socioeconomic class, religion, sexuality, and all the other characteristics that make people different, would be increased. Forcing the truly complete integration of the nation’s schools may be one of the only ways remaining to break down the barriers separating the vast groups that populate the United States. Although it may create resentment, disagreement, or discomfort at first, it seems a somewhat feasible way of promoting the harmony to which we aspire.

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