College essays that made a difference - Princeton Review 2010

Nitin Shah
The applicants

Nitin was editor-in-chief of his high school newspaper and president of its Amnesty International chapter.

Stats

SAT: 1590 (800 Critical Reading, 790 Math)

SAT Subject Test(s): 760 U.S. History, 800 Math Level 2

High School GPA: 4.60 weighted

High School: La Costa Canyon High School, Carlsbad, CA

Hometown: Carlsbad, CA

Gender: Male

Race: Asian American

Applied To

Harvard College

Stanford University

University of California—Berkeley

University of California—Los Angeles

Yale University

Essay

Nitin used the following essay in his applications to Harvard and Yale.

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

Christmas in India

I never understood how my culture and background were different from everyone else’s until a visit to my parents’ mother country of India opened my eyes. Before that, I was just another kid in Southern California’s suburban wilderness, in which parking spaces, large backyards, BMWs, and a strange sense of surrealism abound.

As I, age nine, stared out of the jumbo jet’s window at the puffy white cloud tops and into the pale blue late December sky, I pondered back over the intense activities of the previous few days, including Christmas. That holiday was always perplexing for me as a child. Judging by what I could gather from my primary source of reliable information, cartoons, this Christmas thing involved a confused fat man forcing a bunch of moose to be his partners in crime as he broke into people’s homes only to leave things, instead of take them. The most puzzling feature of all to me, as a San Diegan, was that white substance everyone was walking in and building real live snowmen out of.

It was all oddly interesting, but what did all this have to do with me? I asked my mother, my backup data source. Christmas, she told me, can mean certain things to certain people, but to most people, it’s a religious day. Is that what it is for us? I asked. No, she said flatly. Upon further pressing, all she would say was that we believed different things than some people. She would not explain those different things, though. My parents never did much explaining; they preferred rather that my sister and I figure things out for ourselves in our own way.

Things in India were a far cry different from back home. This was apparent from the moment we departed from the airport into a hot Bombay night so muggy there was no need to stop for a drink; I need only open my mouth to take in all the moisture I would need.

It was like this, with my mouth and eyes and ears wide open, that I took in the tastes and sights and sounds of India, conscious for the first time of my background and identity. I watched from a filthy, rust-covered train as a tiny cross-section of Indian life passed me by, a virtual slide show of the people here and their way of life, much removed from my own.

Dozens of dark-skinned naked children, many about my age, engaged in a playful shoving match in a waist-high brown-colored river. They cared not about getting dirty or sick or about the passing train they undoubtedly saw many times a day; their only care was about the moment. On an overlooking hill, old and wrinkled women watched them coolly in the sweltering heat as they milked cows and swiftly unleashed words that I could not have understood even had I been able to hear them over the train’s drone and the children’s screaming. Nearby, the women’s husbands repaired the proud yet cramped dried-mud homes that stood chipped and battered from a recent earthquake. The men functioned as a single unit, concentrating completely on one building before moving on to the next. The entire village had perhaps twenty of these constructs, and the cows and bulls grazing in the surrounding pasture seemed to outnumber the people 2-to-1.

I realized that this place, not the life back home, was where I really came from, yet I was still awed with the people’s contentment. They had so little in the way of material possessions, yet were so happy. They didn’t need a car, or fence, or swanky home to be satisfied. Every day was their Christmas, and the gift was life.

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