Floodgates - Yale - College admissions essay tips
Hometown: Ridgefield, CT
Year: Junior
College: Pauli Murray
Major: Political Science
Extracurriculars: Lightweight Crew; Yale Project Bright, president; Yale Undergraduate Legal Aide Association, founder
College admissions essay tips
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For James Barile, the most challenging aspect of the college application process was having to use the first-person “I” in his essays. “I think I wrote my applications on December 31 [the day before they were due],” he says, laughing, “because I didn’t want to hear about myself and couldn’t fathom that anyone else wanted to.” James, who grew up in Ridgefield, Connecticut, recalls feeling that the strong focus on self-promotion throughout the college process often seemed “absolutely irreconcilable with all that I’d been raised to believe at the time.”
Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that when James arrived at Yale, he found that he tended to most admire not the students and faculty who performed best academically, but those who excelled in other arenas at Yale—specifically those who made a point of giving back to their communities. As a result, James says, he has also prioritized “the immense resources at Yale for service work and far beyond that” during his years at the university.
A member of Pauli Murray College, James serves as the president of Yale Project Bright, an initiative that aims to increase the amount of solar energy generated by Yale. During his tenure, the project received seed funding from Tesla to expand solar energy to thirty private homes. James also helped start (and then led) the Yale Undergraduate Legal Aid Association, which provides free legal services to people in the Greater New Haven Area who are threatened by detention or otherwise ensnared in the immigration legal process. James remembers having to choose on several occasions during his sophomore year “between going home and doing a problem set or calling a detained family . . . in Texas, to counsel them on their right to asylum.” However, James adds that for him, “it was always a simple choice, and [the answer] wasn’t academics.”
Not all of James’s activities at Yale are quite so high-stakes, however; as a member of the crew team, James also mentions that many of his favorite memories from the university involved time spent with his teammates, gliding down rivers on beautiful afternoons. Other favorite encounters include giving a piggyback ride to a professor’s daughter right before going onto a Ferris wheel at the Guilford Fair—an experience he calls “surreal.”
James’s essays include two of his Yale supplemental essays.
ESSAY 1 (YALE SUPPLEMENT):
What in particular about Yale has influenced your decision to apply?
One hundred and twenty-five years ago, my great-grandfather watched his Nile crops wither. With every drop of talent I’ve been endowed, I seek to clean the rivers into which he wept.
The dialectic acuteness of student research at Yale’s School of Forestry (ie Prof. Shimon Anisfeld’s sediment fingerprinting for East African watershed) and breadth in the humanities suits this end.
Yet I crave Yalies too: meaningful and intimate exchanges with classmates (per residential colleges) who, like me, hang their cleats above a copy of Plato’s Republic—and with professors (by lunch, co-authorship, or Master’s Tea) impelled by one lodestar across many skies.
That is Yale.
ESSAY 2 (YALE SUPPLEMENT):
Short takes
You have been granted a free weekend next month. How will you spend it?
Mitigating erosion with a friend at Bennett’s Pond State Park, while playing an analogy game (e.g. proton : clock = relative : proportional motion)
What is something about which you have changed your mind in the last three years?
A perpetual high note becomes no sound at all; low notes make the music. (Adversities should be embraced, not feared/hidden, for our limits define us)
What is the best piece of advice you have received while in high school?
“Jump.” (Standing on an iceberg over a 38-degree glacial lake in the Grand Tetons. I did.)
What do you wish you were better at being or doing?
Fluent in more languages. Language is the currency of thought, and thought governs our mind, so I think monolingualism pre-limited my human experience.
What is a learning experience, in or out of the classroom, that has had a significant impact on you?
At UChi Summer School, taking a coffee break at 1 a.m., and ending up talking with a 20-something for ½ hr on a bus about why he carried a gun (Pride).
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.