Hometown: Yaoundé, Cameroon

Year: First-Year

College: Benjamin Franklin

Major: Undecided

Extracurriculars: Yale African Students Association Board; African Association for Peace and Development

Sample college essay

Profile

Hailing from Yaoundé, Cameroon, Fred Ebongue is still unsure about what he wants to study. But he has nevertheless enjoyed several focused passions at Yale.

What made Yale stand out to Fred from other schools  he considered was his experience with Yale Young African Scholars, a summer program available to high school students across the African continent and taught by Yalies. The numerous African Yale students whom Fred met through the program convinced him that he would find a robust and dependable community of African students at the university.

Upon arriving at Yale, Fred became actively involved with the student body, serving on the board of the Yale African Students Association and with the African Association for Peace and Development. Through these engagements, he has kept in touch with developments and innovations across Africa. This, he says, has provided him with a sense of purpose and motivation that fuels his activities at Yale as well as his post-graduation goals.

Beyond his commitment to the African community, Fred has also persisted in his practice of golf, a personally beloved sport that has been a part of his life for many years. During high school, he even considered pursuing a professional golf career. Today, he plays with the 1701 Yale Golfing Society, which qualified for the finals of the National Club Golf Invitational for the first time this year. Fred also became a member of the First-Year Class Council during his first semester at Yale, where he worked on the Community Service Committee and coordinated a trip to Fair Haven to help renovate an abandoned plot of land into a garden.

Fred’s essays include four of his Yale supplemental essays.

ESSAY 1 (YALE SUPPLEMENT):
Why does Yale appeal to you?

The cultural diversity at Yale is probably what appeals the most to me. I am a very outspoken and open-minded person. I love learning about other people’s cultures because I always feel that I am a global citizen. When I learn about other cultures it gives me new perspectives. These perspectives from other countries I can then use or apply in my own community and bring in a wave of positive change. In a nutshell, I feel like at Yale I will meet people from diverse backgrounds with whom I can interact to become a better person.

ESSAY 2 (YALE SUPPLEMENT):
Short takes

Who or what is a source of inspiration for you?

My dad always inspires me. According to me, he is the definition of hard work; he spent ten years in various levels of higher education and got four degrees from three institutions, a feat which I want to emulate and even better.

If you could live for a day as another person, past or present, who would it be? Why?

Angela Merkel. She is the perfect prototype of what a leader should be: charismatic and imposing. Two attributes which I strive to copy.

You are teaching a Yale course. What is it called?

Leadership in Africa. In Africa, charismatic leaders are uncommon and this is a reason why our continent is falling. If people are shown how to lead then the world will follow the right path.

Most Yale freshmen live in suites of four to six students. What would you contribute to the dynamic of your suite?

Joie de vivre. I talk but also listen a lot. I crack a lot of jokes too and I am a great communicator. People around me are never moody and we can talk about anything ranging from politics to Beyoncé.

ESSAY 3 (YALE SUPPLEMENT):
Reflect on your engagement with a community to which you belong.

I will never forget the day I saw the smiles on these orphans’ faces when they saw their gifts; it was like Christmas had arrived earlier than usual for them. I live and school in the heart of the town. From this many would assume I live in a community where everyone lives comfortably; meanwhile, just a stone’s throw from my school, there is an orphanage which I pass by every day. I noticed the orphans here lived very modestly and  I decided to help. I then proposed the idea of a fundraising to my three schoolmates. We were only four in our new school  so I proposed we get help from the bigger school nearby. I then prepared a speech to convince the others to help then we went around their classes hoping for donations and were mostly received hostilely but persevered because we knew it was for something bigger than ourselves. The result proved us right as we brought smiles to kids who were not as lucky as us. It was the first time ever that this orphanage received donations from youths, much less from a quartet of fourteen-year-olds who left an incredible footprint in their community.

ESSAY 4 (YALE SUPPLEMENT):
Write about something you love to do.

I love playing golf. I have done tennis, basketball, soccer, table tennis, roller-skating, swimming and martial arts but no other sport has appealed to me like golf. This sounds quite ironical considering that just yesterday I cursed during my entire round and promised never to play again because of how bad I was that day. However, the next day, today, on a cold morning and in spite of a flu, I was the first to arrive on the course. This shows how much I love the sport I guess. Golf is a source of well-being for me. When I have a golf club in hand I think of nothing, not even my swing. It is on the golf course that I express myself best and it is on the golf course that I have lived most of the best moments of my life whether it is winning my club championship three years in a row from age ten against older men or winning a professional tournament while still an amateur. Golf is like school and life in general: those who work the hardest perform the best and this is an attitude which I apply to golf, academics and life.

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.