Comfort and Joy - Yale - Example college statement
Hometown: South Orange, NJ
Year: First-Year
College: Jonathan Edwards
Major: Archaeological Studies
Extracurriculars: Magevet a cappella; Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity
Example college statement
Profile
Jake Kalodner’s first Yale connection developed during his sophomore year at high school, when he started doing research with William Honeychurch—a professor in Yale’s archaeology department. Though Jake calls it “pretty lowlevel stuff”—he was mostly analyzing “sherds,” or shards of ceramic—it still helped him cultivate a relationship with the university. Professor Honeychurch really wanted Jake to attend Yale and even wrote him a letter of recommendation. Now a sophomore in Jonathan Edwards College, Jake majors in archaeological studies.
Jake attended a public high school in South Orange, New Jersey, with around five hundred students per grade. In high school, Jake’s main extracurricular activity was robotics, a passion which he has had since sixth grade. Around that time, he watched his local high school win second place in the FIRST Technical Challenge World Championships, which, as he explains, is “a robotics competition in which small robots are constructed to run in both autonomous and driver control modes in order to complete certain tasks.” Although he was too young to join the high school robotics team at the time, he and his friends started their own team. They joined other robotics competitions like VEX, and in his senior year of high school, Jake himself captained the high school robotics team at the FTC World Championships.
Jake says he realizes that there are very few places in the world that have the resources that Yale does. Going into Yale, he knew he wanted to study archaeology and is still set on that track. He worried, though, about having to choose a specific region in which he wanted to work because so many places around the world interested him. Luckily, Jake stumbled across a new branch of archaeology: the archaeological sciences, such as paleoethnobotany and osteology. By studying these fields, Jake does not have to bind himself to one region and is hoping to explore more during the rest of his time at Yale.
At Yale, Jake’s main activities are singing in Magevet, a Jewish-Israeli a capella group; participating in AEPi, a fraternity; and writing for the Yale Daily News’ Weekend section. He has also taken Directed Studies (DS), which “really whupped my ass the last two semesters,” he says. Now that he is moving on from DS, Jake looks forward to trying out new activities and deepening his involvement in research.
Jake’s essays include three of his Yale supplemental essays.
ESSAY 1 (YALE SUPPLEMENT):
Why does Yale appeal to you?
The two things I want most from college are academic rigor and breadth of study. Yale’s shopping period encourages students to be curious and try out classes that may be out of their comfort zone with no academic repercussions. Clearly, Yale also has a rigorous curriculum, and I am eager to immerse myself in Yale’s archaeological laboratories and it’s major in Archaeological Studies—I’m already familiar with the program due to the research I am doing with Professor William Honeychurch, and I’m eager to continue my studies with him and the other members of the department.
ESSAY 2 (YALE SUPPLEMENT):
What is a community to which you belong? Reflect on the footprint that you have left.
I work as a teacher’s assistant at a Hebrew School that takes place at the synagogue I belong to. The idea is that, because I’m closer in age to the kids than the teacher, I may be able to control their behavior more. Currently, I’m assigned to the fourth grade class, and recently, I helped the teacher plan a trip to bring the kids to a local home for the elderly to perform for them. During the walk there, the kids were rambunctious and ill-behaved, as fourth graders tend to be, and I was worried about how the performance would go. But when they began to sing, the faces of the elderly lit up with joy. Once the performance was over, the kids sat down with some of the audience, and chatted with them. As we were leaving, one of the audience members ushered me aside to thank us. He told me that holidays were always depressing for him because his kids no longer came to visit him, but our performance had brightened his day. It may not have seemed like a big deal to the kids, or even me, but for our audience, our performance had meant everything.
ESSAY 3 (YALE SUPPLEMENT):
Write about something that you love to do.
When I was in sixth grade, the robotics team at my local high school came in second in the world championships for FTC. At that age, I wasn’t very involved in extracurriculars. However, something about robotics struck a chord with me. That spring, four of my friends and I formed a First Lego League (FLL) team and competed in our first competition the fall of our seventh grade year. By eighth grade, we had moved onto the VEX robotics competition. Last year, I spent almost every single day of the season, from September to February, in my high school robotics room, and I helped craft one of the best robots that we ever built. Using a tape measure as a hook, we were able to hang our robot from the hanging bar and score points by knocking plastic pieces down zip lines. We came in fifth at the state competition, and we learned a lot about how to improve our engineering for this year. I’m back at it now, designing a robot that will shoot balls into a basket. What can I say? I’m a sucker for intellectual challenges, and robotics is one of the biggest ones I’ve found.
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.