Please Critique My College Essays!!

<p>Hi! I’m applying to a really hard scholarship called the “Questbridge” scholarship for low income students. It requires several essays. I would really appreciate any of your advice on them. Thanks:</p>

<li><p>describe the significance of your favorite photo (i copied a photo of me and my brother when we were young. Tell me if this essay sounds too depressing or if there’s something i can do to lighten it up a little bit. Is there something I should add?)</p>

<p>Pictures say a thousand words yet hide a million more. This is a picture of me and my brother. My brother is in jail.
It wasn’t always like that. As a young girl, I’d whimsically chase my blatantly cooler older brother, interested in everything he did. I’d watch the Chipmunks with him when he felt sick, convince him I truly had enough of “the force” to use his light saber, and pout when he labeled his murmurs to my father “Grown men’s talk” and made me leave the room. As I reached adolescence, Adrian became that archetypical mentor you see on TV shows. I’d knock on his door, sleeping bag in hand, and lie about a cockroach lurking on my bed whenever I needed a midnight conversation to make things better. In turn, when he arrived back from dates, clearly distraught, he’d snag some grapes, plop next to me, and ask a random question you knew would ignite a till-2-AM chat (“Amanda, why are girls so lame”).<br>
One evening last April, I sat on the sidewalk watching Adrian open his car and stuff two suitcases in the trunk.<br>
“Leaving already?” I said.<br>
“Yup, Miami’s waiting for me.” he replied. He kissed me on the top of my forehead like he always did and sat in the driver’s seat.<br>
“Don’t get into trouble.” I remember joking.
Adrian said those four words were all he thought about the following month he stayed in jail.<br>
Stopped by the police with his friend, they found marijuana in the car and took them both in, inferring it was his. My brother, already on probation for a case my parents won’t give me details about, stayed in jail. For one month, he has left me.<br>
My parents forbade me to speak about this. “Que va a pensar la gente” they would say (What are the people going to think). Yet, it was our strength that weakened us. I didn’t want to cheer up my mother. I wanted to cry with her. I didn’t want to smile in the hallway and pretend I was happy. I didn’t want to tell people “Adrian’s on vacation”. I didn’t want to casually chat about people’s dating problems and prom dresses without screaming that some things are more important, that my brother was more important and that my silence insulted how much I loved him. Pretending all was well felt like I was denying every time I thought about him, each time I assured myself after a bad day “I’ll talk to Adrian and It’ll be alright” before remembering that Adrian wasn’t there……that he was over there instead. Hearing his voice whenever he called only made it worse. I couldn’t endure the painful operator’s voice each time echoing “This is a call from the Broward County Jail”. I saw how each moment with his voice killed my mother’s spirit. She would hang up the phone with such a peace to her face that you knew her mind was all but peaceful. I learned to loathe the ringing of a phone and cringe each time I heard it. I knew it meant more pretending, more blinking back and swallowing hard, more I-love-you’s I couldn’t bear to hear.<br>
It still pains me to think of my brother as a man who’s been to jail, as a criminal. Sometimes, words are too harsh for the picture they carry. I rather see this picture, a picture of a time when life was simple, when my brother was simple, when he was nothing but my hero who let me play “Space Commando” if I proved I wasn’t “just a girl” and anything more complicated would be restricted as “Grown Men’s talk.”… I wish my brother was nothing but the guy in this picture. I wish he could stroll through each job interview, flash this photo and say “that’s all you need to know”. This picture is all I know…that he is my brother, hugging me, his little sister, who wants to be just like him. </p></li>
<li><p>finsish this quote and describe an idea that has sparked your intellectual curiosity
"one can not help but awe when he contemplates the mysteries of …perspective</p>

<p>My father used to always say to me and my brothers “You may be comfortable now. You just wait until you enter the real world. Things are entirely different.”
I used to brush this comment off as just random lecture until this year. I drove to school one morning and noticed a man, sitting on the curb of a busy intersection, gently strumming on his guitar. At that moment, my father’s comments rang in my head. To this man, the real world was nothing but him and his guitar, so different than the world I knew. Did that make my world any more real than his?
That morning made me understand the power of perspective, how the world can change so drastically when viewing it from different eyes. My parents moved me to my predominantly white upper-middle class neighborhood so I could attend the best public school in the county. Ironically, this made it difficult for me to experience the “real world” they had described. Until that point, most of my friends were straight out of a Thomas Kinkade painting and I, scared of exclusion, imitated their conventional ways.<br>
But after that day, I changed. I developed an interest in seeing life in all of its angles, not only the ones in which I had grown accustomed. I began noticing life instead of only living it. It provoked me to start writing all my observations in any way I could whether it be in diaries, poem journals, or newspaper articles. I joined the newspaper staff so I could make a hobby of meeting different people with different worlds that are all real to them. I began to realize that the most fascinating stories begin on the disregarded walkways, in the crevices of ordinary society, and with people whom you never care to see.
John Kieran said “I am a part of all I have read”. Now, to me, I am a part of everyone I have met. My favorite pastime has become having an interesting conversation with someone new then writing what I have learned. I convinced my parents to let me visit my father’s native country of Ecuador so I could learn more about my heritage. I attended a diversity camp over the summer to meet people with stories different to mine.
It amazes me how perspective makes our understanding of the “real world” unique to everyone else. There is no real world. The world is real wherever you go and that is what makes life so fascinating. Now I can respond to my father’s comments by saying that I am not afraid of entering the “real world”. Instead, I am simply excited of experiencing a different one.</p></li>
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