The secret to getting customers to buy your Costco samples, I’ve realized, is by doing pull-ups on the sample stacks. I wear the company apron. My parents seem to think that since it has our family’s coconut coffee logo on it, somehow I’ll be blessed with magical toddler-coaxing powers, and everyone knows that if you employ the right tactics—i.e. start the trend of pull-ups yourself—to entice babies to turn your sample table into a...

Princeton University supplemental essay: We are burning zhiqian again. Dad drags a lighter gently across the joss paper stack's edges, and flames leap to interrupt the blue-bruised twilight. The zhiqian curl, fire hungrily charring their edges, outlining my dad’s face in a tapestry of blood red and ebony. Mom and I hold each other's hands as we both think of gonggong, my grandpa. We remember different things, but our pain is the same: sharp and bitter, infused with a...

Supplemental essay about my fight against uveitis, a debilitating inflammatory eye disease that rendered me blind more times than I can count.

I tried to write completely from my heart, and I think that's what really matters. If you care about what you're writing about, that will come through. Sincerity is so rare these days, I think it can really be what makes an essay stand out.

I interviewed with every school except for the UCs. Frankly, I didn't really prepare for any interviews, but that's because I had already thought a lot about what I want out of life...

I mainly applied to Princeton early and everywhere else regular because of Princeton's tuition-free gap year program. I wish I wasn't so fixated on just that...

I'll tell you one thing I DON'T recommend: going to an "exotic" country to "volunteer." If you're going to go abroad, have a real reason instead of ...

Most private colleges only let scholarships replace the student contribution part of the financial aid package--AKA about $5000 or so a year. After that, if you are getting any sort of grant from the school itself, any outside scholarship replaces that grant first. When...