<ol>
<li><p>Tennis, and how it has made me a better person and debater (tied into debate team)</p></li>
<li><p>virtual reality, and how i made a "virtual reality machine" in making a home theater integrating the sense of feel(cold, warm, humid) with the sight and sound(watchin ice age while feelin cold).</p></li>
<li><p>Trip to Italy duirng world Cup. THe italians' casual yet pasioante attitude, and how i took up their lifestyle!</p></li>
</ol>
<p>11a.
Founding a club in my school, and how seeing my robot(part of the club) come to life gives me pleasure. Very uniquely writen(thats all ill say for now...the format was....interseitng).</p>
<p>wow, everyone came up w/ some awesome topics. i gotta agree w/ you, pyleela, everyone's so interesting! mine seem kinda tame..</p>
<ol>
<li><p>academic decathlon. i got 2nd place overall in my sophomore year for our region and my essay was basically about how hard i worked to get it (like learning calc by myself, etc.)</p></li>
<li><p>creation v. evolution. my family is die-hard catholic.</p></li>
<li><p>a random day at six flags, lol. me and my friend were late to our bus and ended up chasing it haha.. good times!</p></li>
</ol>
<ol>
<li> My japanese jamaican heritage</li>
<li> Playing with my food ("I play with my food therefore I am!")</li>
<li> A highschool jobsearch organization I created</li>
<li> My dad going to afghanistan</li>
</ol>
<p>I live really close to the exploratorium and basically lived there when I was little. When I had to do an I-search paper, I decided to do in on who builds and designs the exhibits. Through an interview I met the guy I interned under. It was a lot of fun!</p>
<p>hey i just saw what all of you wrote for ur essays. </p>
<p>I am applying regular decision but i wanted to know how my essays rate?? so much worried right now.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>i raised funds, bought computers, accessories, and other materials and donated those comptuers to a rural school in Nepal.</p></li>
<li><p>an imaginary thing about my existence.</p></li>
<li><p>wrote about how i adapted to a hostel environment.</p></li>
<li><p>wrote about a pic taht portrays my family during difficult circumstances and what i learnt from it.</p></li>
</ol>
<ol>
<li><p>Talked about a soccer competition that my friends and I organised for cadet scouts.</p></li>
<li><p>A school programme (called Innovation Programme) in which I got to do a prototype to "attempt" to solve a particular problem (I am lazy to describe it :D).</p></li>
<li><p>About the value of determination and related it to my scouting experience.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>11b. About achieving dreams. Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs appeared here lol. Linked them to my own dream as well.</p>
<p>I can't find my old Stanford essays anywhere =[ I should have been more careflu to keep them. Let this be a lesson to you... keep your essays! They'll be good for reminiscing later!</p>
<ol>
<li>My passion for language(s)</li>
<li>My family's second home in the Ecuadorean Andes and the loss of the Quechua language (and my hopes to someday study the language at a school I know of in Cuenca, Ecuador)</li>
<li>This is what I'm thankful for... (a lot about my childhood and my brother, who passed away from leukemia when I was 12)
11a. A photo of me, age 12, looking really, really bored in the Prado museum in Madrid; a contrast of my reluctant, shy ways then with my more outgoing, adventurous current personality (featuring my solo language study trip in Europe last summer)</li>
</ol>
<p>You know, rereading my essays... only two of them seem very good. (I'm using myself as the standard, though, and what everyone says is that my writing is the strongest part of any application I fill out.) </p>
<p>Although the ones that were good were very good, I think. For instance, in the first short essay (8) I revealed a bit of kind of funny linguistic research I'd done: the etymological connection between "astounded" and "thunderstruck," through the Latin tonare and the French *</p>
<p>1) I wrote about swimming, and our relay being the fastest in school history. But also that what I took away from that was not the medals or records, but the relationships between our relay members, and the work and sacrifice one makes for another teammate.</p>
<p>2) Just a lighter essay about how I spend all my freetime getting sidetracked in "manias" where I explore a certain topic that catches my fancy, until the next mania distracts me. Manias include bump keys, sewing, building a computer, etc.</p>
<p>3) Wrote about missing my family, and realizing how much I need them only when they're not here anymore.</p>
<p>4) Wrote about living alone, and experiencing the challenge of having to fend for myself and pay bills, balance finances, shop for groceries, etc. I talked about how in the midst of such a troubling time, I'm too busy to notice myself maturing, but in quieter moments, I realize the experience has left me a stronger individual.</p>
<p>I thought they were ok. I mean, they got me in, so they can't have been THAT bad..</p>
<p>Something I did like was the nice continuity across my essays--they worked together, rather than being disparate little chunks. </p>
<p>vadox6466: Three of the four essays were one or two-paragraph things-- less than a third of a page each. The fourth essay was about one page long. (There were spaces on the application where you were supposed to affix the essays, so it was literal size rather than word count that was the issue. I had to fiddle with the font and spacing and such, and finally cut them out and glued them onto the application with a glue stick. :p)</p>
<p>"art from a neurological perspective, the parrallels between my interest in art and in science"
Olive_oil, that's awesome- we'll probably be in some of the same classes next fall. One of my passions is art history/art psychotherapy! </p>
<p>Oh, here were my essays:</p>
<p>8)I wrote about my experiences in the Telluride Assn. Summer Program (TASP) I attended this last summer.
9) Here, I talked about art psychotherapy and the Art After School program I head at the local art museum that gives free art lessons to disadvantaged elementary students.
10) I "wrote a note" to my roommate explaining why I wasn't there yet- since I lived in the frontier of West Texas, 2 1/2 hours from a mall/Wal-Mart/movie theater.
11a) I wrote about a picture that was taken when I was in the hospital- I have an undiagnosed neuromuscular disease that inexpicalbly causes the myelin sheath around my nerves to unravel, thereby costing me function and feeling in my legs. High doses of steriods reverse the problem, and 90% of the time i'm an active, avid tap dancer, etc., but the picture I wrote about was taken when my younger, cheerleading sister was pushing my wheelchair through a park. So, yeah, it was one of those sappy, tug-your-heartstrings essays!</p>
<p>Hmm... can anyone say "longwinded"? That was accidental, I assure you.</p>
<p>None of my essays were about such amazing things as everyone else's were lol, but i guess they worked!</p>
<ol>
<li>I was doing a fencing demo, and one of the little girls who was watching came up to me afterwards and asked me for my autograph. I was just so amused and touched, so I wrote about the demo, and kind of about seeing fencing through the eyes of a fencer just starting out. And about how that adorable lil girl reminded me why i fence...kinda shmaltzy. </li>
<li>The mountain lion that patrols my back yard and scares the crap out of my chickens. </li>
<li>I wrote a letter to my roommate explaining my bizarre eating habits because of my celiac disease...it sounds kind of serious but it was actually really lighthearted and kind of worked for some reason.
11 (the quote one). I wrote about this quote from this level 2 reader that really traumatized me when i was three "where are we now? we don't know, we don't care. we just go." ack! does that quote bother anyone else or am i just unique?</li>
</ol>