This past summer I participated in the Assisting Individuals with Disadvantages (AID) Summer program which provides English lessons to disadvantaged children in Taiwan. The first week was a crash course not only in how to develop a curriculum, but also in how to bridge the cultural and socioeconomic gap between us and our students. When the time came to choose classes, my partner and I told each other, “We like challenges,” as we confidently and naively volunteered to take on...

In English class of junior year, we read “The Loss of the Creature,” by Walker Percy. In his essay, Percy discusses how every traveler “will only be conscious of the disparity between what it is and what it is supposed to be [or]… the measuring up of the thing to the criterion of the preformed symbolic complex” (Percy 566). Our journey will always occur in the context of our expectations. The more I thought about this, the more I realized that...

S a family friend who passed away recently, is my first choice partner for a tutorial. Since I rarely see my extended family, S was my stand-in aunt; her home was even the venue of my first “real” Thanksgiving. S never minced words. While many found her blunt, I appreciated her insistence on truthfulness. She was never afraid to let my mom know that yes, fashion has evolved since the eighties, or to ask me if I had gotten a...

This is the full essay from which I excerpted essays that I sent to the school I eventually got into, but I did not get into Harvard (this was the supplemental optional essay I submitted to Harvard). I started working on my essays pretty late, so I did not have as much time to edit them. Additionally, my older siblings and teachers at my school helped me make extensive edits and helped with brainstorming quite a bit.

I would have started much earlier and approached the process with much less stress. Sometimes, I think...

I interviewed with 4 of the 7 schools I applied to. Two of my interviews (Harvard, MIT) went pretty badly and that's mostly because I was stressed out (they were my top two choices) and did not prepare well and did not act the way that I usually...

I did not use one, but many of my friends did. The private counselors seemed to be...

Greek...

Do not waste your summers!! If you are not working and saving money for college, then at least try to do some volunteering or go to some...

I was waitlisted/deferred at two schools, both of which I was ultimately denied from. For one my schools, I submitted some more awards that I did not list on my application awards section. In retrospect, I do not think that this was a very good idea as these awards were all awards from my school (i...

Ask early, be polite, be responsive and communicate clearly. Make sure you ask people...

A large part of my decision was financially based; however, if a school's financial package is not good enough or enough for you, I believe that...

Good reputation, best financial aid...