A ghost haunts me. My true identity became evident at age eleven during my life’s defining moment. This indelible otherworldly experience came as a dismaying surprise to me; it wasn’t a typical revelation or a horrific event that caused me to look at life differently. No, it was Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. After returning from the video store in North Carolina (where I was on vacation), my grandmother, dad, and I sat down for a family viewing...

Living a train ride away from New York City allows me to visit frequently, and I know it is my ideal college location. I feel I would fit in perfectly at Tisch. I love that NYU is an integrated part of the city – school and city life merged together in poetic harmony. Other colleges overwhelm with their largeness, and are essentially a forest of buildings. NYU allows students to breathe. Though its population is large, it doesn’t feel like...

A four page personal story about something that changed you: Some summers ago, when I was a strange thirteen year-old version of myself, I impulsively changed my life by telling a friend I was gay. It was the kind of impulsiveness that gets you in a car crash because you made a turn too quickly or that gets you ten pounds heavier because chicken fries sounded appetizing at two in the morning. I knew I was gay, but I hadnâ€...

For my CommonApp personal statement, I wanted to write something that would be specific to the school I was applying to, but would also be relevant to the person reading it. It was about The Shining and my love for it, but my aim was for any common person who doesn't watch a lot of movies to understand and relate. I wrote about being gay for my personal story because, let's face it, schools love that kind of thing not...

I was initially deferred after applying EDII, so I decided to send part of the...