Waking up at 5AM to go to study on test days: the highlight of my junior year. Disguising a study session as "getting coffee with a friend" helped me look forward to three hours of studying biology. I rushed to get ready to meet my dorm-mate and fellow biology victim, Justine. We departed through the silent campus for Starbucks which, thankfully, opened at 5:30AM on weekdays, providing us with the perfect setting to realize we did not understand the summary...

University of Virginia: “What work of art, music, science, mathematics, or literature has surprised, unsettled, or challenged you, and in what way?”

University of Virginia: "The Honor Code at UVa. states that students will not lie, cheat, or steal. This strengthens our Community of Trust. What would you add to the Honor Code and why?"

University of Chicago: "In a famous quote by José Ortega y Gasset, the Spanish philosopher proclaims, "Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia" (1914). José Quintans, master of the Biological Sciences Collegiate Division at the University of Chicago, sees it another way: "Yo soy yo y mi microbioma" (2012). You are you and your…?"

1. The video game Shadow of the Colossus challenged me to explore the ethical gray area between good and evil. The game invites the player to interpret the character’s actions both ways: the protagonist knowingly released an evil god to revive a girl, the evil god fulfilled his promise to revive her, and the girl herself, who was just a dormant neutral figure throughout the game, chooses to raise a cursed child. The decisions the characters make initially appear selfish...

If you know what you want to do/study in college,...

Instead of just trying to take every single difficult class I could, I instead built my schedule in a way that demonstrated my...

My school's counselor was not very helpful for me since I knew I specifically wanted to study computer science, but she usually helped people who did not know what they wanted to study. I used a private college counselor because my aunt was one, so...

I did not take the standardized testing as seriously as I should have. I was a very strong applicant in every other regard, but my test scores would vary immensely. While...

I knew what I wanted to major, and thus could search each departments' rankings. I would weed through the list of top computer science schools based...