//And then I said to him, “Sir, you cannot put that ocelot there!” Of course, he was rather miffed at the suggestion that his ocelot was unwelcome in such an establishment, and his face quickly flushed from his original pale blue to a deep, deep orange. This orange was like no orange ever seen before. We were not even sure that it really was orange, but it seemed like the logical choice at the time, and there were no other...

Classic Stanford questions: what matters to you and why, intellectual vitality, and a letter to your future roommate. For my "what matters to you and why" essay, I waxed poetic about the meaning of free thought. My opening sentence: "I’ve never wanted to know where I was going." My closing line: "I would be incomplete." Extrapolation of what could lie between is left as an exercise to the reader. My intellectual vitality essay was about wormholes. More specifically, it...

My personal statement was a bit of a struggle. Writing about an inherently depressing topic is always risky, but I decided that my application would be incomplete without some explanation of what went down and why my transcript wasn't quite "standard" (I included a short explanation in the "additional info" section of the common app, but it wasn't really satisfying, and I felt that leaving it at that would do me more harm than good). So I wrote. The first...

Black Holes and Extreme Astrophysics (Physics 17) has definitely been my favorite class so far, largely due to...

I would have ignored the prevalent views at my school regarding what and what not to include, how...

Apart from only taking the SAT once (a rarity these days), I submitted two arts supplements. One contained a series...

After graduation, I hope to co-term (stay on for a fifth year...

If I tell you what to write, it won't come through genuinely if you choose to...

This is hard to answer, since the students here are so diverse in their interests. One activity that's popular not just in membership numbers but with the entire student body is the Leland Stanford Junior University Marching Band (LSJUMB), or just...

I interviewed for Stanford, Brown, and Princeton, and the experiences I had were drastically different. My Stanford interview was first, since I applied Restrictive Early Action in October. My interviewer, a local alum, met me at a coffee shop in the area one morning, and it was NOTHING like what I expected. Sure, we started with the standard interview questions that college prep sites so often cite, but the conversation quickly became just that -- a conversation. Straying from the standard, we discussed a cappella, LGBTQ politics and music scenes in South America, why eating disorder treatments so often fail,...