The standard "I love Yale!" essay. Included concrete details from my visit there.

Opened with an amusing description of my utter failure in drawing a horse. (Think the stick figure of horses.) Talked about how I later fell in love with art history and how I related that aesthetic appreciation to my love of biology.

For my Common App essay:

If you were lucky, as I was, to go to a solid public high school...

Most of my interviews were held at Starbucks. They were not too stressful, we mainly went over my resume (be sure...

My school offered many scholarship opportunities, and I was lucky in that regard. I applied for...

I chose the standard HYPS because their financial aid package is generous. The other Ivy Leagues were reputed to not be as generous in their aid packages. I also picked...

Yale has been expanding its STEM program enormously, so if...

Won the Yale English Department's J. Edward Meeker Writing Prize. SCIENCE AND HEALTH POLICY EXPERIENCE Health Policy Consultant, Yale School of Public Health and Center for Patient Partnerships (Fall 2013 – present) o Worked to improve the national Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers & Systems (CAHPS) survey from the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality o Helped develop a coding schema to analyze patient interviews o Only undergraduate on a team of professors and Ph.D. students Intern, MEDASSET, an international environmental nonprofit in Athens, Greece (Summer 2013) o Authored a 4,000-word policy paper evaluating potential coastal engineering projects in Chrysochou Bay,...

Watch "That's...

Harvard was a sad, sad place. I went during Visitas and everyone was just...

Given that I don't really have a compelling hook (Asian America female from suburbia and upper middle class background), for me test scores and grades were a prerequisite. I more or less had a perfect academic record in high school, but that alone will not get you into Yale (and I know many people...