College essays that made a difference - Princeton Review 2010

Jessie Seymour
The applicants

In high school, Jessie was a four-year letter winner and senior captain in field hockey, a four-year academic letter winner, and senior captain of the track and field team. She was president of the National Honor Society, a four-year member and senior president of the chorus, a National Merit Scholarship Program Commended Student, and the recepient of various academic awards.

Stats

SAT: 1370 (730 Critical Reading, 640 Math)

SAT Subject Test(s): 710 Literature, 620 Math Level 1

High School GPA: 95.0 (out of 100)

High School: Central High School, Corinth, ME

Hometown: Kenduskeag, ME

Gender: Female

Race: Caucasian

Applied To

Cornell University

Dartmouth College

Middlebury College

University of Maine

Essay

Jessie used the following essay in each of her applications.

Common Application: Topic of your choice.

To say that my summer at Gould Academy was an eye-opening experience would be the understatement of a lifetime. It’s more like for four whole weeks I didn’t even blink. I signed up for a summer of intense learning, intense play, and the chance to get away from my flat, eastern Maine home and live in my beloved Western Maine lakes and mountains. At least this is what I told my friends at home, who couldn’t begin to comprehend why someone would WANT to go to Summer School for FUN. Summer and school are two words that clash in the ears of the average 14-year-old, but to me it was the opportunity of a lifetime. To quiet my friends’ disapproval, I told them it was kind of like summer camp with classes and went happily on my way.

I arrived with big expectations. Meeting my dormmates on the first night there was the first indication that my expectations weren’t big enough. My roommate was a girl from Eastern Maine with a background similar to mine, so we understood each other. The rest of our floor, however, we met with awe and appreciation. Maine is not a state noted for its racial or cultural diversity, yet here we were surrounded by several girls from the Dominican Republic, a girl from Spain, one from France who was of Asian descent with an American name (she alone was diverse enough for several people), and lots of girls from Western Maine, New Hampshire, and the rest of the U.S., all of different social classes and carrying with them their fascinating life stories. We were all incredibly different, but we all had one thing in common: we were nuts enough to want to go to school during the summer.

The novelty of the situation didn’t end with the many faces of different colors. The class I took was an immersion in Creative Writing, which also included interpretation of literature and cultural analysis. Eight students sat around one enormous table and we read, wrote about, discussed, and interpreted literature and the world around us on a level that none of us had ever been on before. On my first paper I got a B on what would have been a definite A+ at my home school. The class was drastically different from anything I’d ever experienced. Like taking up a new sport, it hurt at first. Gradually, though, the playing field became familiar territory and I got grades like any I had ever achieved. In every English class I’d ever had, teachers were too concerned about where kids put their commas to worry about seeking deeper meaning. At first I was skeptical about what I was supposed to be learning. I didn’t think that E.B. White’s “Once More to the Lake” was about something other than a man who takes his son to the spot where he spent his summers as a kid, or understand the truth behind pop culture. It took awhile, but my young, sparkly-eyed teacher finally convinced me that there was meaning behind the words. It was quite a revelation.

The teachers, the students, and the energy at Summer School forced my mind to contort itself into new positions that it had never been in before. I was used to effortless A’s. While that fueled my self-esteem, it wasn’t satisfying. If I could get A’s with no effort, what could I do with effort? At summer school, I learned more about my potential than anything else. At my regular school, I was a big fish in a small pond, but by doing well at summer school, I realized that I could be a big fish in a big pond too. After summer school, my whole outlook on life was different. Like in “Once More to the Lake,” there was meaning behind everything. I saw the world and my future in a broader perspective. Suddenly I saw that there are people who care about learning, and they are interesting. It is possible to bask in the pleasures of life and challenge yourself intellectually at the same time. That is what I learned in Summer School. This is also what I seek in college.

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