In writing, war has always moved me more than any other subject. In elementary school, I was picked to read ‘In Flanders Fields’ at our Veterans Day assembly. As I started reading, “we are the dead” knocked the breath out of me. Few, if any, topics have such power behind them. As poets stepped back from war to document the human cost, they showed me the strength words can have, the truths they can force into light. I wrote often...

This summer, six months after hatching the idea, my best friend and I traveled around the globe. Departing for Saint Petersburg on July 1st, we rode the Trans-Mongolian Railroad across Russia and Mongolia, reaching Beijing three weeks later. When we brought the fledgling idea to our parents the winter before, I still hadn’t really believed they’d let two seventeen-year-olds make that trip alone. My parents are big advocates for travel, though, and I’d already suggested I use...

On reflection, I realize that what I hope to gain from college has been shaped by one underlying trend, the rise of S.T.E.M. and subsequent waning of the humanities. One hardly needs to be in my place to notice the development; national newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and New York Times run regular commentary on the humanities’ decline, and they’re not wrong. As a soon-to-be undergraduate, I’ve spent the last year fighting the lure...

This was a Stanford supplementary essay: "What do you care about, and why?" I love poetry for its immediacy, its access to sensations we don’t or can’t otherwise express. Great writing bridges those spaces between strangers, locating the words for the complications of love and fear and so giving them substance. To me, writing matters as our best way of understanding each other. In the best books I’ve discovered connection, the words for experiences I’d never...

This was a Stanford supplementary essay, with the prompt, "Stanford students possess intellectual vitality. Reflect on an idea or experience that has been important to your intellectual development." First to intrigue me was the cover, a fleshy orange spilling from an apple skin, the subtitle promising to reveal “the hidden side of everything.” Second was the fact I’d heard my parents discussing it, tossing ideas across the dinner table after my sisters and I had left. Third, however, was...

I wrote about the experience of traveling through Russia, Mongolia, and China with another high school when I was seventeen. Though I changed the essay depending on word counts, the essential topic and ideas remained the same. I've already included the longest version, from my accepted application to Harvard. Here's an alternative version, one of my shorter supplementary essays to Stanford. Prompt: "Virtually all of Stanford’s undergrads live on campus. Write a note to your future roommates that reveals...

Passionate, hardworking,...

I ultimately felt, revising schools, that I simply wouldn't be as happy at other schools. Though it can...

Though I'd been extremely torn before,I knew almost immediately when I revisited Stanford that it was where I wanted to go to college. Being on campus, I knew I was...

I came from a school where college applications could be a stressful, competitive process. During junior spring and the summer before...

I love that while everyone at Stanford is always working harder than I'd think was possible (everyone you know here is always doing something amazing on their own time, whether it's starting up their band,...