“You don’t belong.” How often I would say this to myself when I looked in the mirror. Sometimes it would be after the agonizing experience of a lavish Moroccan wedding with all of its superficial etiquette, or after an all-American family reunion in the summer, complete with hotdogs and references to inside jokes that I can’t take part in. This won’t be your typical teenage, self-pitying speech about being overweight, having an exceptionally large nose, or not...

Sculptor Jacques Lipchitz once said, "Cubism is like standing at a certain point on a mountain and looking around. If you go higher, things will look different; if you go lower, again they will look different. It is a point of view." With this in mind, describe a moment when your perspective changed.

There is nothing more seemingly banal than a back yard, or so I thought for many years. I spent summers mindlessly crushing the grass with my bare toes, indifferent to the microscopic ecosystem under my feet. That is until one summer night, when I lay awake in bed, unable to sleep because of the Moroccan heat. After hours of flopping around like a fish in the bottom of a skiff, some invisible force pulled me out of my stifling room....

It is essential to be yourself during an interview; don't try to pretend to be someone you're not. You want a school to accept you for...