Acceptance - Yale - College application essay editing
Hometown: San Diego, CA
Year: Senior
College: Timothy Dwight
Major(s): Ethics, Politics & Economics
Extracurriculars: Timothy Dwight, head of college aide; Pi Beta Phi sorority
College application essay editing
Profile
Rosa Vargas is an Ethics, Politics, & Economics major from San Diego, California, who recently graduated from Yale. Her college essays highlight a long-lived interest in immigration and policy, which she continued to pursue at Yale. After volunteering for Amigos de las Americas in high school, she brought her passion for service with her to college, and she became active in groups such as the Yale Democrats and Latina Women at Yale. Rosa also enrolled in Directed Studies in her first year of college.
Rosa was drawn to Yale because of the strong community, especially within the residential college system. She helped to create that community by becoming involved as a buttery worker and office aide at Timothy Dwight residential college. Rosa also joined the sorority Pi Beta Phi and played club volleyball. One of her favorite memories at Yale was the Yale–Harvard game. She remembers the joy she felt experiencing the school spirit of her classmates. She has attended all but one home football game during her time at Yale, and loved seeing everyone have the same enthusiasm for the sports teams as when they played against Harvard.
Rosa’s experiences with academic advising at Yale also had a major influence on her senior year. She was unsure of her post-graduation plans until the summer after Commencement. The dean of Timothy Dwight and other academic advisers helped her decide to take at least one year off before law school. In the two years between undergrad and law school, Rosa worked as a pro bono program assistant at Casa Cornelia Law Center, an immigration law firm in San Diego.
Rosa’s essays include her Common App personal statement and one of her Yale supplemental essays.
ESSAY 1 (COMMON APP):
Personal statement
Some students have a background or story that is so central to them that they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, please share your story.
One of my first memories is trying to figure out how to pray to Allah. My parents had just adopted a Muslim family from Kosovo who barely escaped ethnic cleansing. I learned we would not be praying our usual prayers so we could make the new family living with us feel welcome. Now I was praying to a new God and listening to two adults and two children of six and eight years old who only spoke Albanian and SerboCroatian.
This type of experience was commonplace in my life. I was born into a politically active family three weeks after my father tried and failed to become the first Latino ever elected to the US Congress to represent the California–Mexico border. It would take him three more attempts and three more elections to win. I grew up on protest marches against poverty, racism, inequality, and a lack of compassion for immigrants. I spent many weekends either placing jugs of water in the California desert for immigrants trying to cross the border undetected or on precinct walks first being carried, then walking by myself, and finally leading others.
My parents made a conscious decision to live in a high-crime neighborhood to make a difference for the people who live there, which meant that from an early age, I was exposed to the deep challenges our country and neighborhoods face. When my father led the San Diego City Council Public Safety Committee, he helped initiate community policing, placed more street lights on dangerous corners, and organized community trash pickup days, making our neighborhood a much safer place to live. However, my father’s commitment and principles have come at a cost to my family. I was never allowed to play outside our house unsupervised because of the danger of gangs and drugs. My father’s push for change has resulted in threats against our family, even to the extent that the police needed to be stationed outside of our house for protection.
The commitment shown by my family informs the decisions I make every day. For a short period of time I played club volleyball, and it helped bring out the competitive spirit I knew I had in me, but I gave it up when I heard about a program, Amigos de las Americas, that needed volunteers to travel to Latin America during the summers to help the poor and marginalized. I raised money for the needed projects by selling chocolate and Nicaraguan coffee.
My first year with the Amigos program, I trained all year on topics such as leadership, cultural sensitivity and health and safety. That summer, I traveled to Los Lipes, a jungle community in Nicaragua, to improve water purification for the community. During these six weeks I was immersed in the culture and fell in love with the people there; the experience was so rewarding that although it is unusual to sign up for a second year, I did. As a veteran volunteer, the next year I trained and then traveled to Santa Elena, Paraguay, to work in an isolated, indigenous community. Finally, as a senior, I am now training others to do similar work in other Latin American countries.
I don’t know what my life would have been if it was filled with Saturday soccer games instead of delivering water jugs in the California desert. When I was younger I would often think of how different my life was from the lives of my friends at school. I was embarrassed that my family lived in the barrio; none of my friends knew the homeless by name like I did. Now I wear my experiences like a crown. I love the upbringing I had and I cannot wait to get a college education to continue solving the problems of the real world.
ESSAY 2 (YALE SUPPLEMENT):
Please reflect on something you would like us to know about you that we might not learn from the rest of your application, or on something about which you would like to say more. You may write about anything—from personal experiences or interests to intellectual pursuits.
My first day in Paraguay went like this: I took a bus for forty minutes from the town of Villarica to the edge of a community called San Luis off a long dirt road. I walked for thirty minutes until I met up in the center of San Luis with a seventy-nine-year-old lady and her granddaughter, neither of whom spoke Spanish nor wore shoes—despite the fact that we had an hour hike in front of us to the mountain community of Santa Elena. I walked that last hour with my companions in the hot sun carrying my belongings past stray dogs, cats, pigs, horses, cows, and chickens.
I was a volunteer for Amigos de las Americas, a mini Peace Corps that sends students to impoverished areas of Latin America. Volunteering in a rural community in Latin America may not have been a common aspiration for most fifteen year olds, but it was my dream; I overcame my fears and garnered the courage within me to do it. My first summer I volunteered for six weeks in Los Lipes, Nicaragua, and although it is uncommon to volunteer for a second year, I did, this time in Paraguay.
My summers in both communities in which I worked consisted of teaching health, environment, and self-esteem related subjects at the school each day and working with the local community to solve water purification problems.
The people in Nicaragua and Paraguay taught me much more than I ever taught them. Although they often lacked running water, electricity, latrines, or reliable roads, they had all they needed in strong families and compassion for people even poorer than themselves. In Paraguay, the people in my village even had their own language—Guarani. This experience has brought out the courage and confidence within me to more seriously solve the problems of the real world starting with my own community.
From 50 Yale Admission Success Stories: And the Essay That Made Them Happen, edited by the Yale Daily News Staff. Copyright © 2020 by the authors
and reprinted by permission of St. Martin's Publishing Group.