College essays that made a difference - Princeton Review 2010
Lyman Thai
The applicants
In high school, Lyman was a National Merit Scholar and valedictorian of his class. He played clarinet in the marching and honors bands and captained his school’s Academic Challenge team to the national level three straight years. He attended Cornell Summer College between his junior and senior years and participated in Junior Achievement and Academic Decathlon. He tutored during the school year and spent a summer as a teaching assistant for children with autism.
Stats
SAT: 1550 (770 Critical Reading, 780 Math)
High School GPA: 4.00 unweighted, 4.79 (out of 5.00) weighted
High School: Alief Hastings High School, Houston TX
Hometown: Houston, Texas
Gender: Male
Race: Asian American
Applied To
Cornell University
Duke University
Harvard College
Rice University
Stanford University
University of California—Berkeley
University of California—Los Angeles
University of Texas—Austin
Essay
Lyman used a variant of the following essay in each of his applications.
Common Application: Topic of your choice.
A Simple Reflection on My Father and My High School Years
My father has instilled in me the importance of being thrifty. Whenever I made an unwise purchase, he would lecture me, relating his experience as a refugee during the Vietnam War in an attempt to make me realize how not wasting anything — food, clothing, or money — had saved the lives of my family members during their perilous journey from Vietnam to Malaysia and from Malaysia to the United States. After arriving in the United States, my father worked long shifts at a steakhouse to provide for my mother and infant sister and to pay rent on my family’s small, modest apartment. Four years later, my father began working for the United States Postal Service, which provided him a steady salary. He soon saved up enough money to buy his own house in southwest Houston. I was born a year after he moved my mother and sister into our new house. Because of my father’s hard work and careful management of the family money, I was fortunate enough to have not faced economic hardship while growing up. Even so, my father’s lectures stay within my heart. I never leave a grain of rice in my bowl, never throw away old shirts when they are out of style, and rarely purchase unnecessary items. So, I was completely surprised when, on my sixteenth birthday, my father decided to augment my limited possessions with my very own car.
Ever since my sister left home for college when I was nine years old, I have largely fended for myself. My mother and father work alternating shifts at the post office; my mother works during the afternoon, and my father works at night. During the day, my father, a devout Buddhist, makes a daily visit to his temple. Once he arrives home, he immediately goes to bed to rest up for a long night of sorting mail. When I entered high school, this situation made my extracurricular participation difficult. I relied on the bus to take me to and from school, which caused me to miss important meetings and events that happened in the afternoon. I often asked my friends for rides, but they had places of their own to go, and I felt awkward and burdensome. So, as soon as I could, I took a drivers’ education course. On my sixteenth birthday, with my license safe in my wallet, I received the keys to my car. It was a four-thousand-dollar, seven-year-old Honda Accord that had been flooded during Tropical Storm Allison, gutted and repaired by my uncle, and sold to my father at a steep discount. Clearly, my father had noticed I was not taking advantage of the opportunities that his struggle to America had opened up for me. He hoped I would use the car to learn about volunteerism, to learn interpersonal, organizational, and leadership skills, to meet people outside of class, to make friends, and to experience all I would have never experienced if he had stayed in Vietnam. The car represented my father’s values of social service and leadership, both of which soon became my own. With time, my car has become an extension of those values, for I use it to get to my tutoring jobs, my service projects, and my club meetings, in addition to just going to hang out with my friends.
Granted, I will not be taking my car with me when I go to college, but my father’s life lessons and values will stay with me even without such a tangible symbol. I know I have much farther to go in life before I will truly have made my father’s toil worthwhile, but I pray that receiving a college education will put me well on my way to doing so. Nothing I do will repay the debt I owe to my father, but when I emerge from college as a strong, independent, well-educated, moral adult, I am sure he will be fulfilled in knowing he raised me well.
See this page to find out where this student got in.