I could only watch as my parents sent my friends away. I was to practice the piano, not waste my time watching the hummingbirds go by. I was supposed to be a model student, and digging mud holes was apparently unnecessary in achieving that goal. I was, unlike my friends, going to be someone happy. Except I wasn't. By keeping me captive, my parents deprived me of a typical childhood, one that could have been filled with the company and...

For Amherst, they give you five quotes to which you are required to respond to with a personal argument. The prompt for the supplement below is as follows: “Difficulty need not foreshadow despair or defeat. Rather achievement can be all the more satisfying because of obstacles surmounted.” - Attributed to William Hastie, Amherst Class of 1925.

It all started when my father announced he would go back to school. And it wasn't until he started attending that I found out that he had to commute to Los Angeles to attend, eventually moving over a hundred miles away from our home in San Diego in order to save money. That year, the rest of my family moved into low-­income housing. As a freshman, I felt paralyzed, watching my family disappear before my eyes. My mother took...

I declined more selective, presitigous schools, like UPenn Wharton, Northwestern and UC Berkeley, and chose Amherst because...

Do what you want. No, really. Don't worry about what colleges want. I was accepted...