Last April, I spent four days in the woods of New England’s White Mountains, alone. Perhaps you have read essays about students discovering their connection with nature on wilderness solos. This is not one of those essays. It is about the time I stayed in a sleeping bag for 17 hours, trying to forget I was outside.

Maybe it started when I read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books about her journey as a young girl from Wisconsin to various settlements in the western territories. Or maybe it has been the result of my 13 years at a school that introduced rigorous education for young women at a time when every other option was a finishing school. Just maybe it was finding out that I share a birthday with Neil Armstrong. Whatever did it, I have always wanted to...

For as long as I can remember, I have been obsessed with Ancient Egypt. When I was little, I tied together two rocking chairs and a cardboard box, piled in all of my books on Egypt, and called it the Egyptmobile. A friend and I dressed as reincarnated pharaohs and queens, mummified our Barbies, and acted out our favorite myths. In middle school, my friend moved on, but I never did. Whenever I had a chance to expand the curriculum...

I choose topics that I hoped explained who I was in diverse ways, in order to turn the length of supplements into an asset rather than a burden. I also knew that my chosen common-app essay topic could quickly become clichéd and so I worked to make the prose creative and engaging. To this end, I asked my favorite english teacher to look it over. Her advice made the essay much stronger, and made me more confident than I...

I would highly recommend interviews, especially with small, liberal arts colleges. Almost without exception, I was accepted to the schools I interviewed with, and did less well with those I did not....

Only apply to schools you would actually consider attending. I have friends who only got into...

In college, I joined the crew team, dj for the radio...

I reached out to a professor in a department I was considering majoring in at the school I now attend, and...

I wrote almost all of my applications between Christmas and New Years. While...

The most incredible thing about Brown are the people here; teachers, students, even staff. Everybody is part of a tightly knit community. I regularly meet with my professors, and feel that they care about me, and make an effort to...

The people...

It's hard to pick just one; I've loved different aspects of lots of classes. But the one class that really stands out is the course I took on Faulkner. What made it so special...

I think most Brown students...

I would try and do things during the summer that you care about and...

I was lucky enough to visit several schools I had gotten into. Those visits made some "no's" easy, if the culture just didn't feel right, or the programs didn't...