Common Application Essay Prompt: Reflect on a time when you challenged a belief or idea. What prompted you to act? Would you make the same decision again? (250-500 words) As a timid tomboy, fiction was my childhood stronghold. The stories that my mom encouraged me to embrace were where I could escape my schoolmates’ blunt inquires as to why I only wore boys’ clothes, or why my mom had a funny accent. As an assimilated Brazilian immigrant, this was the...

While all rigorous institutions of higher learning enroll intelligent people, I like that Swarthmore celebrates the offbeat individual. As someone who dresses up for midnight film releases and frequently regurgitates Lord of the Rings battle speeches, I was nearly sold on the school purely for the clever names bestowed upon the peer-tutoring programs in computer science and engineering: ninjas and wizards, respectively. Throw in a Quidditch team and the school suddenly transforms into a mecca for a geek like me....

Stanford "Intellectual growth/idea:"Outside my kitchen, towers of iron-crusted bicycle frames obscure a copse of overgrown plum trees. Alongside the house, wheels rest in stacks sorted according to diameter-width, and the front brick patio is strewn with odd mechanical pieces. My house is a way station for lost bikes, and my dad, a life-long thrifter, is their guardian. His mission to repair and sell them in his spare time results in a view more like a junkyard than a...

What Matters to You, for Stanford: As a passionate person, many overlapping concepts matter to me. At the heart of the colorful web diagram, however, is the word “Tolerance”, double-underlined in thick marker. Like any self-absorbed teen, I matter to myself. But, on many levels, who I am puts many at a predisposition to dislike me, which affects my self-perception. Therefore, tolerance matters because I need it to facilitate the blossoming of legally grounded acceptance so that I don’t...

I was always on track to attend a small liberal arts college, so until I heard back from Stanford - which, aside from Brown, was the only private, top-tier institution that I applied to - I had eagerly settled on Swarthmore. But then the Stanford decision was a...

Perhaps one of the most important things you can do to increase the viability of your application in this highly competitive application climate, is to get an internship. Securing an internship will show colleges (and future employers) that you are proactive, ambitious, and committed to heightening your learning outside of the classroom. It takes initiative, which colleges will respect....

When it came to securing my letters of recommendation, I ignored the general principle that you are suppose to get one from a humanities teacher and the other from a science or math teacher. I am, always have been, and always will be a humanities student, so I didn’t think it was entirely necessary to ask my Precalculus or Honors Chemistry teacher for a letter that wasn’t terribly...