May 12, · Each year, we issue an open casting call for high school seniors who have dared to address money, work or social class in their college application blogger.com the large pile The shortest word limits for college essays are usually around words (less than half a single-spaced page). Rarely will you see a word limit higher than around words (over one single-spaced page). College essays are usually pretty short: between and words. Admissions officers have to read a lot of them, after all! Feb 01, · College Essay Example #3. This is a college essay that worked for Duke University. (Note: Learn about how to get into Duke). As soon as the patient room door opened, the worst stench I have ever encountered hit me square in the face
The Best College Essay Length: How Long Should It Be?
Each year, we issue an open casting call for high school seniors who have dared to address money, work or social class in their college application essays. From the large pile that arrived this spring, these four — about parents, small business, landscapes and the meaning a single object can convey — stood out. At 9, I remember how I used to lounge on the couch and watch Disney cartoons on the sideways refrigerator of a TV implanted in a small cave in the wall.
At 12, I remember family photographs of the Spanish countryside hanging in every room. At 14, I remember vacuuming each foot of carpet in the massive house and folding pastel shirts fresh out of the dryer. I loved the house. I loved the way the windows soaked the house with light, a sort of bleach against any gloom.
I loved how I could always find a book or magazine on any flat surface, best college application essays ever very. We never paid for cable. The carpet I vacuumed I only saw once a week, and the pastel shirts I folded I never wore.
My mother was only the cleaning lady, and I helped. My mother and father had come as refugees almost twenty years ago from the country of Moldova. My mother worked numerous odd jobs, but once I was born she decided she needed to do something different, best college application essays ever very. She put an ad in the paper advertising house cleaning, and a couple, both professors, best college application essays ever very, answered.
They became her first client, and their house became the bedrock of our sustenance. Economic recessions came and went, but my mother returned every Monday, Friday and occasional Sunday.
She spends her days in teal latex gloves, guiding a blue Hoover vacuum over what seems like miles of carpet. In Moldova, her family grew gherkins and tomatoes.
She spent countless hours kneeling in the dirt, growing her vegetables with the care that professors advise their protégés, with kindness and proactivity. Today, the fruits of her labor have been replaced with the suction of her vacuum. They were rarely ever home, best college application essays ever very, so I saw their remnants: the lightly crinkled New York Times sprawled on the kitchen table, the overturned, half-opened books in their overflowing personal library, the TV consistently left on the National Geographic channel.
I took these remnants as a celebrity-endorsed path to prosperity. I began to check out books from the school library and started reading the news religiously. Their home was a sanctuary for my dreams. It was there I, as a glasses-wearing computer nerd, read about a mythical place called Silicon Valley in Bloomberg Businessweek magazines.
It was there, as a son of immigrants, that I read about a young senator named Barack Obama, best college application essays ever very child of an immigrant, aspiring to be the president of the United States. The life that I saw through their home showed me that an immigrant could succeed in America, too. It impressed on me a sort of social capital that I knew could be used in America. Ultimately, the suction of the vacuum is what sustains my family.
The squeal of her vacuum reminds me why I have the opportunity to drive my squealing car to school. I am where I am today because my mom put an enormous amount of labor into the formula of the American Dream.
Someday, I hope my diploma can hold up the framework of hers. When it comes to service workers, as a society we completely disregard the manners instilled in us as toddlers. For seventeen years, I have awoken to those workers, to clinking silverware rolled in cloth and porcelain plates removed from the oven in preparation for breakfast service. I memorized the geometry of place mats slid on metal trays, coffee cups turned downward, dirtied cloth napkins disposed on dining tables.
I knew never to wear pajamas outside in the public courtyard, and years of shushing from my mother informed me not to speak loudly in front of a guest room window. I grew up in the swaddled cacophony of morning chatter between tourists, professors, and videographers. I grew up conditioned in excessive politeness, best college application essays ever very, fitted for making small talk with strangers. I grew up in a bed and breakfastbest college application essays ever very, in the sticky thickness of the hospitality industry.
And for a very long time I hated it. I was late to my own fifth birthday party in the park because a guest arrived five hours late without apology. Following a weeklong stay in which someone specially requested her room be cleaned twice a day, not once did she leave a tip for housekeeping.
Small-business scammers came for a stop at the best college application essays ever very several times. Guests stained sheets, clogged toilets, locked themselves out of their rooms, and then demanded a discount. There exists between service workers and their customers an inherent imbalance of power: We meet sneers with apologies.
At the end of their meal, or stay, or drink, we let patrons determine how much effort their server put into their job. For most of my life I believed my parents were intense masochists for devoting their existences to the least thankful business I know: the very business that taught me how to discern imbalances of power.
Soon I recognized this stem of injustice in all sorts of everyday interactions. I became passionate. Sometimes enraged.
I stumbled upon nonprofits, foundations, and political campaigns. I devoted my time to the raw grit of helping people, and in the process I fell irrevocably in love with a new type of service: public service.
At the same time, I worked midnight Black Friday retail shifts and scraped vomit off linoleum. When I brought home my first W-2, I had never seen my parents so proud.
The truth, I recently learned, was that not all service is created equal. Seeing guests scream at my parents over a late airport taxi still sickens me even as I spend hours a week as a volunteer. But I was taught all work is noble, especially the work we do for others.
I envied their ability to wear the role of self-assured host like a second skin, capable of tolerating any type of cruelty with a smile. I realized that learning to best college application essays ever very people looks a lot like learning to trust them. I had never had a computer of my own before, and to me best college application essays ever very prospect symbolized a world of new possibilities. I was the only student from my public middle school I knew to ever go to an elite boarding school, and it felt like being invited into a selective club.
My first week at Andover, dazed by its glamour best college application essays ever very newness, I fought my way to the financial aid office to pick up the laptop; I sent my mom a photo of me grinning and clutching the cardboard box. Back in my dorm room, I pulled out my prize, a heavy but functional Dell, and marveled at its sleek edges, its astonishing speed. But the love story of my laptop came clamoring to a halt. In the library, as I stumbled to negotiate a space to fit in, I watched my friends each pull out a MacBook.
Each was paper-thin and seemingly weightless. And mine, heavy enough to hurt my back and constantly sighing like a tired dog, was distinctly out of place. My laptop, which I had thought was my ticket to the elite world of Andover, actually gave me away as the outsider I was.
For a long time, this was the crux of my Andover experience: always an outsider. When I hung out with wealthier friends, I was disoriented by how different their lives were from mine. While they spent summers in Prague or Paris, I spent mine mining the constellation of thrift stores around New Haven. The gap between full-scholarship and full-pay felt insurmountable. But I also felt like an outsider going to meetings for the full-scholarship affinity group.
My parents attended college and grew up wealthier than I did, giving me cultural capital many of my full-scholarship friends never had access to. At home, I grew up middle class, then became the privileged prep school girl. But at Andover, suddenly, I was poor. Trying to reconcile these conflicting identities, I realized how complex and mutable class is.
When I managed to borrow a slim Mac from my school, I felt the walls around me reorient. Instead, I felt a new anxiety: I worried when I sat in the magnificent dining hall with my beautiful computer that I had lost an important part of my identity.
When I started at Andover, these constant dueling tensions felt like a trap: like I would never be comfortable anywhere. The school sensed it too, and all full-financial aid students now receive MacBooks. I live at the place where trees curl into bushes to escape the wind.
My home is the slippery place best college application essays ever very the suburbs and stone houses and hogans. I see the evolution of the telephone poles as I leave the reservation, having traveled with my mom for her work. The telephone poles on the reservation are crooked and tilted with wire clumsily strung between them. As I enter Flagstaff, my home, the poles begin to stand up straight.
On one side of me, nature is a hobby. On the other, it is a way of life. I live between a suburban land of plenty and a rural land of scarcity, where endless skies and pallid grass merge with apartment complexes and outdoor malls. A layer of earthy powder settles over the wildflowers and the grass. The stale ground sparks ferocious wildfires, best college application essays ever very.
Smoke soars into the air like a flare from a boat lost at sea. Everyone prays for rain. We fear that each drop of water is the last. We fear an invasion of the desert that stretches around Phoenix. We fear a heat that shrivels the trees, turns best college application essays ever very to cactuses.
I exist at the epicenter of political discourse. Fierce liberalism swells against staunch conservatism in the best college application essays ever very of my high school and on the streets of the downtown. When the air is warm, the shops and restaurants open their doors.
CRUSH the Common Application Essay! 8 Tips.
, time: 8:27Common Application Essay Option Two: Learn from Failure
May 12, · Each year, we issue an open casting call for high school seniors who have dared to address money, work or social class in their college application blogger.com the large pile Studybay is absolutely reliable, in fact, it's commonly used by the students of the world's top universities. Our processes are very transparent so you can see the final price right after you fill your project request form. We don’t charge any hidden fees or anything like that, and you Aug 17, · A student who can learn from failure is a student who will be successful in college. Every single one of the thousands of applications a college receives will highlight successes, awards, honors, and accomplishments. Very few will show the type of confidence and introspection required to explore setbacks and failures
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