Hometown: Leland, WI

Year: Senior

College: Jonathan Edwards 

Major: Ecology & Evolutionary Biology

Extracurriculars: Yale Outdoors

Successful college statement

Profile

Angus Mossman says his hometown of Leland, Wisconsin, had thirty-five people, two bars, and a church.

“There are way more deer and bald eagles in the area than there are people,” he says.

Angus grew up in south-central Wisconsin and attended Sauk Prairie High School, an eight-hundred-person school about fifteen miles down the road from his home. He dabbled in athletics, playing tennis and running cross country, and played bassoon in the band. His passion for music—coupled with a love of nature that his parents, wildlife biologists by profession, had ingrained in him from an early age—has stayed with him throughout his life.

Angus had always assumed he would go to the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the highest achieving state school and the institution of choice for college-matriculating students at his school. But during his senior year, his mom brought home an anthology of the top colleges across the country. Although Angus began flipping through its monstrous pages only to appease her, he says he never would have ended up at Yale without that enormous book.

The book broadened Angus’s horizons, but friendly competition with a friend in his AP Physics class pushed him further down the path to seriously looking into Yale. In his senior year science class, his friend joked about having received her Yale recruitment letter in the mail. Short of knowing the school existed, he only remembered that the last time a person from his school attended the institution had been sometime in the 1960s. He knew nothing more about Yale, not to mention what “Ivy League” meant.

But his classmate had inspired him. Angus went home, looked up Yale in that big book of colleges, and saw notes of hefty financial aid, a solid study abroad program, and large numbers of international students. As a student interested in travel and international studies, Yale’s offerings, along with its smaller size, appealed to him. He applied to Yale and  the University of Wisconsin–Madison and was admitted into both.

Bulldog Days, Yale’s admitted students’ event, sealed his decision. Angus says that his visit made him understand why people thought of Yale as their home. Specifically, he recalls playing music in the Branford common room with some of  the students who would later form a band with him at Yale.

At Yale, Angus truly found his niche in Yale Outdoors, the folk music community, and various foraging activities (through the Yale Farm and otherwise). Academically, he enjoyed the university’s liberal arts focus, which allowed him to study topics unrelated to his major in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology. Despite Angus’s strong interest in the major, its classes were not among his favorites at Yale, as their confinement to the classroom made him feel cut off from the nature they studied. During his junior and senior years, he enrolled in classes at the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, allowing him to explore New Haven’s nature as he had desired. He befriended people through these classes and extracurriculars and opted to move off campus, away from his residential college of Jonathan Edwards, to live with friends from Yale Outdoors.

After graduating last fall, Angus moved back to Wisconsin to work with various local landowners in the area. He looks to begin work as a teaching fellow next year.

Angus’s essays include his Common App personal statement.

ESSAY 1 (COMMON APP):

Personal statement

Biting into a sun-warmed tomato fresh off the vine is one of the best things I’ve ever done. It is just as good to sit around the wood stove eating steaming homemade applesauce made from fruit off of my trees while an ongoing blizzard shakes the windowpanes and blankets the yard in fresh snow. I’ve lived with a vegetable garden on my family’s rural home all my life and have spent countless hours cultivating, harvesting, and preserving the wide variety of organic vegetables and fruits we grow: from cantaloupes to carrots and beans to bok choy. I’m always amazed at the difference between a cucumber from the garden and a store-bought one. A homegrown, well, anything has so much more flavor than the same item from a store. Knowing where my food comes from is reassuring, and when I go to the pantry to pull out some preserved food I think about where it came from and all the experiences that went with it. Gardening and using what the land provides made me interested in a sustainable lifestyle. I try to live as earth-friendly as possible and steer others in this direction, whether by recycling, carpooling, or buying locally. I believe everyone deserves the opportunity of eating local produce fresh off the land, and sharing food from my garden is one way for me to give others this opportunity. It’s so satisfying to give my retired neighbors a basket of rhubarb and green beans and to watch their eyes light up and their lips form a grin. Besides visiting with the neighbors, gardening has given me a chance to spend time with and learn from my parents. They have taught me so much about gardening and many life lessons during the hours we spend in the garden and kitchen preparing and preserving the bounty from the land. Working the land and eating the produce from it has been important to me since I was a child and even more so as I grew older and more interested in sustainable living. Eating a whole meal from the local land is inspiring, knowing that all the work I’ve put into the produce has paid off in the wonderful array of colors that covers the plate before me. But today the garden isn’t just a place to grow my own food; it presents a great educational opportunity for everyone. Because a garden has so much to offer, in the future I hope I can continue to share my experiences with others, especially that of a freshly picked, sun-warmed tomato.

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.