Emily Allen - The applicants

College essays that made a difference - Princeton Review 2010

Emily Allen
The applicants

A National Merit Scholar, Emily was active in her church’s youth group and lead worship services. At her high school, she acted in school plays, played in the school band and flute club, and took six Advanced Placement courses. She went to Bolivia for a summer with Amigos de las Americas, and attended the National Young Leaders Conference. A Girl Scout for eight years, she earned the Silver Award.

Stats

SAT: 1600 (800 Critical Reading, 800 Math)

High School GPA: NA—Emily was in the top 10 percent of her class

High School: Henry M. Gunn High School, Palo Alto, CA

Hometown: Palo Alto, CA

Gender: Female

Race: Caucasian

Applied To

Georgetown University

Harvard College

University of California—Berkeley

University of California—Los Angeles

University of California—San Diego

University of Pennsylvania

University of Southern California

Yale University

Essay

Emily submitted the following essay, in response to various generic prompts, to every school to which she applied. The version she sent to UC schools, however, was slightly longer than the following version.

My summer partner and I stood, watching the truck rattle away, leaving us alone by a rural Bolivian farm. We turned to each other, matching expressions clear on our faces: What have I gotten myself into? Did I ever think volunteering for eight weeks in a Spanish-speaking community would build my language fluency and sense of responsibility? Claro que sí.

Last summer I participated in Amigos de las Américas. In Amigos, two teens stay with host families in a Latin American country and work on projects chosen by the local community. Eight months of training sessions led up to the summer experience; I attended fifteen evening meetings, five Saturday workshops, and three retreats. At the same time I raised over $4000 by selling grapefruit, oranges, and poinsettias and by writing letters asking friends and family to sponsor me. I also engineered an additional $2000 grant from my dad’s company to help with scholarships in my chapter of Amigos. I enjoyed preparing and giving presentations to parents and fellow trainees, especially because I got to improvise a cohesive talk out of a bare outline of information.

I put Bolivia as my first choice, so I was pleased that I got to go there. My Bolivian community chose two projects for my partner and me: facilitate the completion of the community building—a doorless, windowless, two-room project abandoned several years earlier—and hold English classes for local kids at the school. The latter project succeeded because the students showed an eagerness to learn. With classes held for an hour, six days a week, we soon discovered the difficulty of creating new lessons and activities. In addition, the lessons had to be adaptable for an age range of six to sixteen and a group size range of three to forty-three. When we had enough high school students to make a separate class, I would take them into another classroom to help them with their English homework and questions. When I had difficulty eliciting requests for what they wanted to learn, I would spontaneously use my background in drama to create a lesson such as touching each body part as I named them or creating family trees to remember the words for various relations. The younger students especially enjoyed the games we taught them, and I occasionally overheard a spirited game of Perrito (my loose translation of Red Rover) being played during school recess. One time, before class, the school gatekeeper (who never complained about having to come back in the evenings to re-open the school after-hours for our classes) brought a set of dominoes to me and asked me to translate the English playing instructions. I felt thrilled that I could provide that small service for him.

Our other project, the community building, took longer to show progress. We had a hard time getting workers to come to the building site to use the materials we had bought. We would visit one town leader’s home, and after making polite conversation we would finally ask for and receive a promise to send workers the next day. When no one showed up to work with us, we would look for the man we had talked to, only to discover he had left for the day and wouldn’t be back until dark. This happened several times with different leaders, so we finally held a town meeting, with our field supervisor present, to explain the urgency of finishing the construction before we left in three weeks. Apparently the meeting worked, because three to six workers started showing up every day at the site. When we left, the doors and windows were installed and the interior walls were painted.

I expected that my summer with Amigos would be more fulfilling than, for example, a week-long “mission trip” to Mexico with a youth group because the personal accomplishment would be clear. I would wake myself up, set my own schedule, and take care of the details of completing projects. I saw myself taking on a comparable level of responsibility for projects at college and in a future business setting. As it turned out, I found no such clarity about who was responsible for events. Perhaps, if I had pushed harder, the community would have worked on the building faster. However, that might have led to a lack of community responsibility and sustainable interest in and maintenance of the building after my partner and I left. The community played such a large role in the work that I soon realized I could take care of my end of things, but only encourage them to work on their parts. Once they got going, it was exciting to see their growing enthusiasm extend to new plans to add on a kitchen, bathroom, and patio to the existing building. When I left, workers had already dug the hole for the bathroom, bought the supplies for the kitchen, and arranged to continue the shifts of workers. When I look back at my summer, I can admit that I didn’t do everything single-handedly. Nonetheless, I still take pride in my participation in the whole community effort. Even without the expected results, my experience will help me when I work on projects in the future. I also have come away with more confidence in my adaptability: if a truck dropped me off in a rural village today, I know I could move past any initial uncertainties to explore new ways of understanding my world.

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