Latin—see also: “dead language” and “useless party trick.” Outside of the cadre known as the Latin Club, this is the only reasonable definition of Latin, or so my friends tell me. I cannot deny that learning Latin has little direct application in my world. After all, I live in California, not the Vatican. At best, with my round Bengali cheeks and abundance of melanin, I look displaced among the white students of my Latin class. While my high school...

Words have weight. Some words, like "the" or "a" are light, frivolous enough that some languages omit them entirely. Others, such as "diagnosis," are a bit heavier. They carry an infinite weight and inertia—the ability to crush entire past lives and change the angle of tilt our solipsistic worlds rotate on. Since the third grade, I've borne the burden of not one word, but an entire phrase, the capture of a condition: cerebral palsy.

“Answers can only aspire to be important. Questions remain forever relevant, forever eloquent. Answers are science, questions are poetry.”—Guillermo del Toro, Best American Non-Required Reading of 2014 (foreword) These words strike me as not only true, but contradictory to most of the formal education that I’ve undertaken. The thirteen years that I have spent trekking to school nearly every day have taught me about mitochondria and molarity, Milton and Martial. In short, I spend three hundred and fifty minutes...

I strongly believe that my essays were the crux of my application. After all, I did not have the standout honors, athletics, or academics of so many of my peers. At best, I had test scores--a surplus of test scores that served to exemplify my test-taking talents, but did little to convince the admissions office of my humanity. My essays were answer to that: a clarion declaration of my humanity, of my philosophy, and of my lens on life.

Whatever university you go to, you need to fit in--academically, socially, culturally, etc. I strongly believe in the safety, match, reach system. A safety school is one where you are beyond the seventy-fifth percentile in test scores and grades. It is also one where, although it may not be your first choice, you know that you could be happy--or at the very least, you could find something there that will make you happy. For me, this was any school with an acceptance rate between 25 and 50 percent. A match school is one where you are between the median and the seventy-fifth...