Miasmal Maverick “Pride’s a little fire. Extinguish it and you shiver unbelieving, ignite it and you shout unthinking. But light a candle with it and you shine understanding.” After writing that line of dialogue, I felt a sobriety that lingered through the rest of the chapter. All at once I realized how familiar it was—from stuttering unconfidently during my first debate competitions, from eating my words after poor performance on a linear algebra test I’d boasted about,...

Telewarped Cashes In on Holofilm Following the sale of its film rights for an undisclosed sum to Hollywood last week, Robert Mao’s dimension-bending tale has made its decades-overdue leap to the 3D world. “Never thought I’d see something I wrote in my 20s make it to holograms,” laughed Mao. “It’s been my dream ever since I saw Harry Potter and The Hunger Games on the old big screen as a kid.” With a bachelor’s degree in...

Lines upon lines of prose, all on an Asus laptop. In the quiet, lamp-lit solitude of my home office, surrounded by character biographies on people from a Swiss private military contractor to an Armenian merchant, with pages upon pages of chapter outlines written 6 months ahead of time to ensure the author’s best friend of continuity and to keep at bay the author’s worst enemy of the plot hole, I sit at my own desk and smile as I...

Smashing My Canadian Cuckoo Clock Perhaps it was a result of a speech impediment I had going on as a kid, despite my best efforts to rectify it and speak clearly and confidently. Or it could have been being bullied back in elementary school, being framed and forced to apologize for breaking pencils I never touched. Who knows, maybe it was even a result of being Canadian. “Sorry.” Whatever the cause, I found myself using it more often than I...

Unimpressed by the clocks from a land far removed from the Middle Kingdom, a silk-robed Qianlong emperor dismisses the high-nosed foreigners—led by a certain George Macartney. Uninterested in repeating the Opium Wars and decades of foreign aggression from their ignorance of foreign culture, a pair of men in four-pocketed jackets negotiates with the business-suit clad, yangren counterparts from across the sea—the talks between the Mao-Zhou and Nixon-Kissinger duos that opened China to the world. Uninclined to commit the...

Inhale, exhale. Align the sights…lower the buttplate. Everything looked good. Squeeze the trigger. Check the spotting scope. A 9 point shot. Hmm. Adjust the sights a click higher. Inhale, exhale. Points to refute…think about counterarguments. Clear my throat. “The affirmative contends that NSA has violated the 4th Amendment…” 7th place. Not bad for the first time. Inhale, exhale. Check the last question…erase a mistake, brush away the shavings. 5 minutes left. With blood pounding a crescendo of panic, scribble...

“I cannot offer you a position within my project this year.” Dismayed, I reread the message hoping I’d misread it. I sighed. No dice. All my hopes of turning my AP Computer Science skills into something real, of common vocabulary with my database administrator father, of work and accomplishment for this. A rejection letter from SDSC’s REHS internship opportunity. I made myself some tea. Dimly I recalled that the letter was from the individual program manager—not from...

I learned English through a computer game. I was five years old when I discovered the joys of solving puzzles in Dr. Lunatic. (Evidently I’d started learning English before I fully mastered potty training, because my father told me that I had a little accident after learning the phrases “Pants up!” and “Hammer down!”) But what I acutely remember from the game was my exposure to the sheer realm of possibility in technology. I glimpsed mechanical exoskeletons and directed-energy...

Blue eyes, large and strained by candlelight. A craggy castle of rainy medieval England. A tapestry of the lord’s archbishop ancestor. A university-educated tutor teaching a boy English through religious lessons in an heirloom copy of the Bible and Latin, through sword and sorcery in an invaluable copy of King Arthur. Brown eyes, narrow and relaxed under sunlight. A gated community of temperate southern California. A painting of my employer’s Native American relatives. A realm where I, a...

“My sister’s studying chemical engineering at Rice University—it’s very hard to get in.” “Wait, you said it’s called Rice? And very selective?” “Yeah, why?” “Well, suppose I head there, order myself a bowl of noodles.” “Er…” “On top of what you said—can’t think of a better way to live out the stereotype, eh?” At that the green-eyed girl and I shared a laugh. Though time and life have since come between us, my curiosity�...

Looking back, I cringe a little every time I read over most of the essays I wrote for college. As a writer, I suppose that's a good thing; it means that I've made progress in the craft since those unhappy and stressful times. But as a college applicant, it makes me wonder how I could've crafted them better. Though I've been told before

As a whole I don't regret too much about my application process; I wrote about the things (marksmanship experience, the process of creating a novel, etc.) that were most precious to me and felt that I had few things better that would reflect who I am. That said, If I could travel back in time one year and do the whole process all over again to try for better results, I'd do so. And I'd do so with the following changes. Firstly, I'd cut down on the number of schools I was applying to. College application fees these days are...

At the seven schools I was waitlisted for, I sent in letters detailing what I'd done since turning my applications. These included things such as becoming valedictorian, shooting in a national...

Don't use a private admissions counselor. They charge thousands of dollars, and college admissions officers can smell an essay tweaked by them from miles away. In my personal experience, many of my...

At all of the schools I interviewed with (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, UPenn, and MIT), I walked away liking the interviewer and feeling good about what I'd said. There's really not much to an interview (it's my opinion that you...

Do whatever you like. But give yourself the self-discipline to ACCOMPLISH in what you like. If you like studying foreign languages, research Spanish/Latin/Chinese/German/*fill in language here* competitions online and try to place in...

Don't feel pressured to think about what you will do post-college without even being in college yet. Try out many different things in college itself and figure...

I believe that several activities in particular made me a more unique applicant: shooting an air rifle in NJROTC marksmanship, having an interest in foreign languages, and writing a whole novel in my spare time. On the other hand the first (given the wave of school shootings lately)...

Out of the 20 schools I applied to, I was accepted to five: UCSD w/ Regents, UCLA, Berkeley, Amherst, and Cooper Union. Amherst stiffed me on financial aid (would've had to pay 50 grand a year to attend, even after much wrangling and negotiating), and Cooper Union is unknown in my neck...

I'll state outright that I have the benefit of "daddy's money." My father saved and scraped 20 years to pay for my education, and so while paying for Berkeley will be a financial squeeze it is one...

Pick the teachers/coaches/employers who you feel like you can sit down and have a drink with when...