"Nana, do you want a baby brother?" My answer for the past two years had always been no, but my parents never listened. The day I fractured my wrist, the day my sister Ramona threw up from drinking too many slushies and needed my attention because no one else was home, my brother was born. The irony was too obvious; I concluded that I had inherited an ounce of bad fate. My belief was bolstered a couple years later, when...

This is a supplemental essay I wrote for the Danforth scholarship application at Washington University in St. Louis. The prompt was to propose a program with a budget of $10,000.

By kindergarten, I was dancing to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and singing “Libiamo ne' lieti calici” on top of my sofa. During elementary school, I taught myself piano and sang everywhere—including the bathroom and school playground. When I was bullied, I sang. When my parents fought, I embraced my mp3 player. Coming from a low-income immigrant family, I initially struggled with communication and concepts that teachers taught to me. While I could not understand my teachers’ explanations, I could...

From my experiences, the interviews did not seem to play a very large role in the application process; rather, they were more of a way to just get familiarized with the schools a little better through discussions with alumni. One of my favorite interviews...

I asked my math and English teachers to write my recommendations. For your recommendations, you don't have to choose teachers...

I am currently a part of an a capella group, a dance...

I'm planning to take...

I think that most of my extracurricular activities weren't anything noteworthy, and I didn't have any "prestigious" awards that a few people had told me that I would need to have a shot at college. The thing that set me apart was probably my common app essay, which...