It was no baptism in the traditional sense, but my midwinter dunking in the frigid waters of Lake Winnebago sure felt like a rebirth. Mere seconds earlier, I had been perched on the precipice, gooseflesh raised against the biting chill. The rubber traction on my sneakers struggled to cling to the slick platform as I peered into the dark, whipping waves below. “Ice Ice Baby” blared – a malevolent touch. My primeval impulse was to flee, to bundle myself in a...

[Harvard optional essay] Clackclackclack. The mahjongg tiles make a satisfying clatter as they skate across the wood, stacking into miniature fortresses. My grandmother’s mischievous smirk taunts me from across the table: she does not have a poker face, nor does she need one; her luck is bottomless today. To my left, my mother shakes her head, frustration mingling with amusement in her black coffee eyes. I puzzle over the etched Mandarin on the tiles – the graceful window of the...

[Why UChicago?] I was attempting to gracefully maneuver an unwieldy slice of Edwardo’s into my maw after a tour when my father asked me to summarize UChicago in a word. It had been an unseasonably warm April day; sunlight deluged Hyde Park as tour groups jostled for the shade. Brighter still was the megawatt intellect of my tour guide, who could crack jokes about dollar shake days and wax rhapsodic on the multiverse theory with sunny ease. But most...

[Why Northwestern?] I have often felt like Goldilocks while scoping out colleges. Too distant, too close, too expensive, too small, too many push-ups (the Army was ruled out rather quickly) – each school seemed to have a fatal flaw, until I found the one that was just right. Northwestern combines the superlative resources of a large research university with the personable professors of a small one, the spirit of a Big Ten school with an intense academic focus, and the vibrancy...

[Stanford: Letter to your future roommate] Dear roomie, I am so sorry. You’ve ended up with an only child for a suitemate – a girl who has never shared a bedroom in her life. I’m sure I’ll learn the ropes of cohabitation soon enough, but I’d like to issue a few preemptive apologies. 1. I usually chomp down a bowl of Kashi Crunch for breakfast. This is, by my estimation, the loudest cereal in the known world. Multigrain...

[UChicago: Tell us some of your favorite things] When I can’t decide between magical realism, metafiction, and nerdy sci-fi, but am definitely in the mood for full-page, half-Spanish footnotes: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a novel by Junot Diaz When I want to boil with righteous fury at the injustice and bigotry of our world: Slam poetry, like Sonya Renee’s “What Women Deserve”, Rachel Rostad’s “To JK Rowling, from Cho Chang”, and Katie Makkai’s �...

[What matters to you?] I’ve always been stoic, perhaps to a fault, so I was as surprised as anyone the first time I broke down in school. I was interviewing a student for the spread in the school newspaper; this month’s topic was mental illness. The student was telling me her nightmarish story with astonishing honesty – an abusive father, three foster homes, two suicide attempts. Her voice cracked. That was all it took for both of us to...

Genuinely passionate...

I talked with alumni interviewers from Harvard and Princeton, both of whom were extraordinarily kind and helpful folks. In my area (northeastern Wisconsin), at least, both...

Ask early and have people in mind -- and no, you shouldn't suck up to a teacher just because you think she'll...

No -- we don't have those where I'm from, to my knowledge, and my high school guidance counselor did just...

After signing up for like forty things at the freshmen activities fair, I've finally narrowed my extracurriculars down to two main ones -- The Crimson newspaper and The Harvard Undergraduate Drummers (THUD). I'm a Central Administration reporter on...