My childhood left three months ago on a plane to Austria.
It was a sad day, the end of June, when my baby cousins moved away. They had lived nearby for almost five years, and now they were moving to a country too far to visit with any regularity. My cousins were a fundamental part of my life; when they were not with me, they were on my mind. A week had never gone by without a visit from them and I doubted my life would be the same without them. They brought back the untroubled days of my childhood, through games, adventures, and silliness; and yet they helped mature me from an at-times selfish teenager into a responsible, mature adult.
My aunt and uncle moved to New Jersey from Boston, with their 1-year-old daughter Yasmeen, in the winter of 1998. They lived in an apartment on the side of our house and I was ecstatic to have our family, especially a baby girl, so close to us. Yasmeen had close friendships with each of my sisters, but I knew the one that developed between us was the strongest. As she began to walk on her own and talk in full sentences, I realized the extent of my influence upon her. I would notice her syntax and mannerisms mimicking mine. I also noticed when she’d copy some of my more unpleasant actions, arguing with her mother after I had done the same. Yasmeen made me realize what being a role model really was.
When Maya was born in 2000, Yasmeen had a hard time adjusting. She was jealous of the attention we all paid to her new younger sister, so I did my best to pay attention to her when she might have not been noticed. Once Yasmeen overcame her jealousy, she was able to enjoy Maya’s presence in our lives, like we all did. Maya grew up fast, too, it seemed. Each day, they got a little bit bigger, doing my best to free my schedule for my two favorite people.
My experience with Yasmeen and Maya has brought me to realize the importance of influential people. I know that I have helped Yasmeen and Maya grow, but “the babies” have made an even great impact on my own life. They have shown me how to be a parent, a sister, a cousin, a babysitter, a child, and most importantly, a friend. My relationship with my cousins has made me a better person-a more patient person, with the ability to tolerate endless questions and spilled juice; an exuberant person, able to have fun and be happy with others and sometimes, when I’d rather not, for the sake of others; a role model, showing the babies the ethics of life, right, wrong, and in between; and a compassionate person, able to be responsible, forgiving, and loving. Yasmeen and Maya made me know that I can and do affect people’s lives and emotions. They are where I leave a lasting impression. And maybe, as they grow, they won’t remember all the fun times we had, but I do know they’ll remember the things I tried to teach them about life and love and family.
Things to Notice about This Essay英文点评
1. The essay has a sharp, strong beginning and a fresh honesty that conveys the events of the author’s life and her outlook.
2. The style is simple and the topic is, too. But we believe in this story because of its simplicity.
3. The author proves that this has been a significant experience by the lessons she enumerates in the last paragraph.
4. The reader needs to know a little more about the circumstances of these moves from Boston to New Jersey to Austria, in order to understand the context of the essay.
5. A few more specific examples in the second and third paragraphs would give them the same strength and vividness as the “spilled juice” reference.
6. Having shared this interesting story, the author might find a few more insights and results to add to the last paragraph. The events seem affecting; the effects might be multiplied.
中文点评：
1、 这是一篇带有感情描写的申请Essay，属于我上课讲的三种最厉害的Style（Professional, Appealing to Emotion, and Creative）中的第二种。
再贴一篇
My most important experience sought me out. It happened to me; I didn’t cause it.
My preferred companions are books or music or pen and paper. I have only a small circle of close friends, few of whom get along together. They could easily be counted “misfits.” To be plain, I found it quite easy to doubt my ability to have any sort of “close relationship.”
After the closing festivities of Andover Summer School this past summer, on the night before we were scheduled to leave, a girl I had met during the program’s course approached me. She came to my room and sat down on my bed and announced that she was debating with herself whether she wanted me to become her boyfriend. She wanted my reaction, my opinion.
I was startled, to say the least, and frightened. I instantly said, “No.” I told her I on no account wanted this and that I would reject any gestures she made towards starting a relationship. I would ignore her entirely, if need be. I explained that I was a coward. I wanted nothing whatsoever to do with a relationship. I talked a lot and very fast.
To my surprise, she did not leave instantly. Instead, she hugged her knees and rocked back and forth on my bed. I watched her from across the room. She rocked, and I watched. Doubts crept up on me. Opportunity had knocked and the door was still locked. It might soon depart.
“I lied,” I said. “I was afraid of what might happen if we became involved. But it’s better to take the chance than to be afraid.”
She told me she knew I had lied. I had made her realize, though, how much she actually wanted me to be her boyfriend. We decided to keep up a relationship after Andover.
Even then, I was not sure which had been the lie. Now I think that everything I said may have been true when I said it. But I’m still not sure.
I learned, that night, that I could be close to someone. I also realize, now, that it doesn’t matter whether or not that person is a misfit; the only important thing is the feeling, the closeness, the connection. As long as there is something between two people--friendship, love, shared interests, whatever else--it is a sign that there can be some reconciliation with fear, some “fit” for misfits. And it shows that fear need not
always win, that we can grow and change, and even have second chances.
I am still seeing her.
Things to Notice about This Essay相关点评
1. It follows the standard essay pattern: an introduction (short), a series of supporting paragraphs for the body, and a conclusion (here, a summary paragraph and an end sentence).
2. It has a focus: his anxiety about relationships.
3. It has proof: the story of his conversation with a girl. Again, focused narrative development has made the proof vivid.
4. It is short, to the point, simple, and yet memorable. It is interesting without being grand, noble, or cosmic.
5. The style is simple and direct, employing short sentences and simple words to tell a simple story.
6. It coordinates and enriches an application full of academic achievements and high scores and grades. It is information definitely not found elsewhere in the application.
说明：本文选自The College Application Essay一书作者: Jessica8905 时间: 2014-1-27 15:29
Undergraduate College Application Essay Sample
From the time I was able to realize what a university was, all I heard from my mother’s side of the family was about the University of Michigan and the great heritage it has. Many a Saturday afternoon my grandfather would devote to me, by sitting me down in front of the television and reminiscing about the University of Michigan while halftime occurred during a Michigan Wolverines football game. Later, as I grew older and universities took on greater meaning, my mother and uncle, both alumni of the University of Michigan took me to see their old stomping grounds. From first sight, the university looked frightening because of its size, but with such a large school comes diversity of people and of academic and non-academic events.
In Springfield High School, non-academic clubs such as the Future Physicians and the Pylon, both of which I have belonged to for two years, give me an opportunity to see both the business world and the medical world. These two clubs have given me a greater sense of what these careers may be like. In Future Physicians, I participated in field trips to children’s hospitals and also participated in two blood banks.
Currently I hold a job at Maas Brothers. This lets me interact with people outside my own immediate environment. I meet different kinds of people, in different moods, with different attitudes, and with different values. This teaches me to be patient with people, to have responsibility, and to appreciate people for what they are.
In the community I am active in my church Youth Group. As a high school sophomore, I was our church’s representative to the Diocesan Youth Fellowship. I helped organize youth group events, the largest being “The Bishop’s Ball”, a state-wide event for 300 young people. I also played high school junior varsity soccer for two years. As a senior I will be playing varsity soccer, but in the off-season. As a junior I coached a girls’ soccer team for the town. This gave me a great deal of responsibility, because the care of twenty-four girls was put into my custody. It felt very satisfying to pass on the knowledge of soccer to another generation. The girls played teams from other parts of Florida. Though their record was 3-8, the girls enjoyed their season. This is what I taught them was the greatest joy of soccer.
The past three years of my life have given me greater visions of my future. I see the University of Michigan as holding a large book with many unread chapters and myself as an eager child who has just learned to read. I intend to read a probe into all the chapters. The University of Michigan offers me more than the great reputation of this fine school, but a large student body with diverse likes and dislikes, and many activities, both academic and non-academic, to participate in. With the help of the University of Michigan, I will be successful after college and be able to make a name and place for myself in our society.
Things to Notice about This Essay中文点评
1. It follows a general essay organization, with an introduction, several body paragraphs about different activities, and a conclusion that returns to the earlier idea of Michigan’s diversity.
2. It has no focus but rather jumps around from the school to the writer and from point to point.Notice especially the lack of transition from the first paragraph to the second: how did we get from Michigan’s diversity to the writer’s clubs?
3. The body paragraphs lack proof: What are these clubs and jobs, what did he do in each one, how many field trips were taken, and what was his role?
4. What’s Pylon? What does he do at Maas Brothers?
5. There are plenty of generalizations but no evidence to back up any of them. How did these activities give him a greater sense of the career world? “Participated” and “interact” are pretty vague words. Compare the discussion of Maas Brothers with the hockey ref’s story
6. There is very little specific knowledge of what the University of Michigan has to offer.
7. The style is rather stuffy and awkward (“while halftime occurred”, “the care of twenty-four girls was put into my custody”).
8. Most important, nearly everything described here appears elsewhere on the application, under sports, jobs, extracurricular activities, and alumni connections.
9. The writer would be well advised to focus on one of the things discussed in this essay. Perhaps he could show the reader his work with the girls’ soccer team. What he did to make Jennifer and Gretchen and Courtney enjoy soccer even though they only won three of their games would be more vivid than a lot of talk about passing things on to future generations.
10. In short, the essay seems full of information and displays adequate form, but it lacks focus and proof.
说明:本文选自The College Application Essay一书,内容仅供参考作者: Jessica8905 时间: 2014-1-27 15:29
I guess it was inevitable that I’d be on hockey skates at some point in my life, but I did not expect that I’d become one of a rare group of female ice hockey officials before I even reached high school. Being born into a family of hockey players and figure skaters, it seemed that my destiny had already been decided.
Right from the beginning, my two older brothers and my father strapped me up and threw me onto the ice. I loved it and, in my mind, I was on my way to becoming a female Gretzky! But my mom had to think of something fast to drag her little girl away from this sport of ruffians. Enter my first hot pink figure skating dress! That was all it took to launch fifteen years of competitive figure skating. Even though figure skating soon became my passion, I always had an unsatisfied yearning for ice hockey. It took a great deal of convincing from my parents that competitive figure skating and ice hockey didn’t mix.
My compromise became refereeing ice hockey; little did I know that I was beginning an activity that would influence my character and who I am today. When I began, I would only work with my dad and brothers. Everyone was friendly and accepting because I had just started. I soon realized though that to get better I needed to start refereeing with people I wasn’t related to, and that’s when my experience drastically changed. An apologetic smile and an “I’m sorry” wasn’t going to get me through games now. As I began officiating higher-level games and dealing with more arrogant coaches, I suddenly entered a new male-dominated world, a world I had never experienced before. My confidence was shot, and all I wanted to do was get through each game and be able to leave. Sometimes I was even too scared to skate along the teams’ benches because I would get upset by what the coaches would yell to me. “Do you have a hot date tonight, ref?” was a typical comment that coaches would spit at me during the course of a game. In their eyes, I did not belong on that ice, and they were going to do whatever they could do to make sure no women wanted to officiate their games. I was determined not to let them chase me off the ice.
I made the decision to stand up for myself. I never responded rudely to the coaches, but I did not let them walk all over me and destroy my confidence anymore. I started to act and feel more like the 4-year certified Atlantic District Official that I am. There were still a few situations that scared me. One time I called a penalty in a championship game during the third overtime and the team I penalized ended up losing because they got scored on. I knew I had made the right call, even though I was unnerved when I saw the losing teams’ parents waiting for me at my locker room; for the moment I wished I hadn’t called that penalty. Although it was scary at the time, I stood my ground and overcame my fears. That was an important stepping-stone in my officiating career and in my life.
After four years of refereeing, I still can’t say it’s easy. Every game hands me something new and I never know what to expect. Now I have the confidence and preparation to deal with the unexpected, on and off the ice. I now also know to take everything with a grain of salt and not let it get to me. I have learned that life is just like being out on the ice; if I am prepared and act with confidence, I will be perceived as confident. These are the little lessons that I’m grateful to have learned as a woman referee.
Things to Notice About This Essay 中文点评
1. The author tells an interesting story about her experiences as a referee.
2. A sense of her personality—determination, flexibility, good humor—comes through in the narration.
3. Details like “Do you have a hot date tonight, ref?” make the narration memorable (we’d love to hear more of these kinds of details).
4. The essay needs a faster start. The first paragraph (three sentences) says the same thing in both the first and third sentences—and gives away the essay’s surprise in the second! A good revision would delete all of paragraph one and start at paragraph two.
5. There’s too much frame here and not enough picture. The essay needs further development, especially about the difficulties of becoming and being a ref, to keep it vivid.
6. The author should “dwell” in the meaning of the experience a little more at the end—“I wonder about…I also think…Sometimes I believe….” Significant experiences like this one, woven through many years of the author’s life, don’t mean just one thing—there are more insights and lessons to explore here.作者: Jessica8905 时间: 2014-1-27 15:30
Undergraduate College Application Essay Sample 6
I used to be a pretty deep guy.I watched foreign films, read Nietzsche, and stayed up all night “contemplating jazz”.I was Jack Kerouac living in a fire hut on top of Desolation Peak.I was Gary Snyder seeking enlightenment in a Buddhist monastery in Thailand.I was Ken Kesey, Jimi Hendrix, and Timothy Leary all rolled up on one gigantic mess of pseudo-intellectual, adolescent, fancy boarding school beat poet wannabe.I was a moron.
I blew off my schoolwork not because I was lazy, but because I thought that schoolwork was shallow, too insignificant for me, the vivacious intellectual, the dharma bum, the Zen lunatic wanderer.How could my teachers expect me to do their homework, when life around me was all so futile, so meaningless?I was sure that I was a tortured soul destined to lead a life full of angst and pain.
That was last fall, more than a year ago now.In February of last year, I left my hipster friends and their coffeehouse conversations behind, to move back to the suburbs of Philadelphia and my conservative, unhip public high school.Suburban Philadelphia is not the easiest place in the world to be sixties cool and stylish.There aren’t many smoke-filled coffeehouses or hippie wanderers.It’s clean here, upper middle class-you know, the Ford Explorer, Saturday evening Mass, country club for dinner scene.I came back to Philadelphia because it isn’t all that “hip,” because there is nothing “profound” to do.I came home to get myself together.It was time to grow up.
I’m not as cool as I used to be.I never do anything very exciting or off the wall, at least not by my old standards.My friends from boarding school have for the most part become nothing more than distant memories.They’re all off in New York City or Mexico pretending to work on their spirituality, but really just partying their lives away.I stay home a lot.I’m at the library a couple of nights a week.I read, I write letters, I do some painting.
Last weekend, I watchedThe Color Purple with my mom, collected some weather data for a chemistry project, and had a tea party with my little sister.I’ve been spending time with the people I met in my high school production of Arsenic and Old Lace, too.I feel balanced; I feel like myself.I no longer want to tend bar in Tangiers or meditate in Sri Lanka . . . all right, maybe I do, but not right now.For so long, I wanted to be other people, to be a cultural icon, a legend in my own time.But in reality, I’m nothing like Keith Richards.Honestly, I’m a little scared of sex and drugs.I worry about pimples, whether my parents are still happily married, where I’m going to be next year.
I came home, I grew up, I got my life back together.I’m still trying to find a balance, but I no longer feel like a reckless child.I was sure that I could get away from myself by just pretending that I was someone else.But right now, I’m not looking to be “on the road”.I’m pretty happy being right where I am.
Things to Notice about This Essay
1.The story this writer tells seems sincere.It explains things from his transcript:a change of schools, improving grades.
2.The essay expects the reader to know all the references here to people (Gary Snyder, Keith Richards) and literature (On the Road, Dharma Bums, the line from poet Allen Ginsberg about “contemplating jazz”).The writer has a real depth of knowledge, which is good, but in some of these references, he may be expectingtoo little but in some of these references, he may be expecting a little too much from the reader. . . who won’t be 17.
3.The essay has a clear focus (“It was time to grow up”), extensive use of specifics and descriptive details, and a strong sense of a writer who has thought about his life experiences.
4.The essay doesn’t follow a traditional organization pattern and there are a few liberties with word choice and spelling (“wannabe”).A bit of a “risk”, this essay does match a writer who himself has taken chances.He tells his story with grace and conviction.作者: Jessica8905 时间: 2014-1-27 15:30
As a seventeen year old, I don’t yet have the experience or vision to know exactly what I want to accomplish. What I hope college will do for me is to broaden my base of knowledge with a solid liberal arts education. I would like to have the power to explore Drake’s equation for extraterrestrial life while at the same time analyzing the similes used in Virgil’s Aeneid. Or maybe I could investigate the applications of integral calculus or the themes of self-sacrifice in Shakespeare. From the combination of courses I decide to take, I expect to find one or two true passions that I can extract from the rest and then expand my knowledge exponentially in that field.
While I am working towards an academic concentration, I would like to focus my athletic efforts on swimming. At Springfield High, my intense training in swimming is interrupted every winter by my commitment to the basketball team. I am confident that concentrating solely on swimming will enable me to improve my past performances and times. If I could post a University record at Blodgett Pool and also find those one or two academic passions, I will have attained what I wanted from Princeton. And I am hopeful that in combining and completing these goals, I will have given something back to the school.
Things to Notice about This Essay
1. The writer’s use of specific topics from a liberal arts curriculum suggests that she has thought about what’s going to go on in college (Drake, Virgil, calculus, Shakespeare). Weaker sentences are those lacking specifics (Sentence 2: “broaden my base of knowledge with a solid liberal arts education”. Final sentence: “combining and completing these goals, I will have given something back to the school”).
2. The writer is honest about her plans and her inability to predict a future at least four years away. But she is also positive about what she isn’t sure of, emphasizing the future possibilities rather than her indecision.
3. It’s a good idea to show a familiarity with the buildings and programs of the school to which you’re applying. But if you write several essays like this one, be sure to proofread carefully, Isn’t Blodgett Pool at Harvard?
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