Khmer Rouge - Yale - College admissions essay help
Hometown: Santa Ana, CA
Year: Sophomore
College: Branford
Major: Molecular, Cellular & Developmental Biology
Extracurriculars: Dwight Hall at Yale, student executive committee co-coordinator; community health educator; Yale EMS; Yale School of Public Health, research assistant; Alliance for Southeast Asian Students at Yale
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During her childhood, Serena Ly would hear stories from her father about living under the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
When she embarked on an International Baccalaureate research essay in her senior year of high school, Serena “immediately” chose the Khmer Rouge as her research topic to learn more about her Cambodian roots—and the violence that had affected her family so deeply.
“How could I not write a piece about a time in history that killed millions, devastated a peaceful country, and continues to affect my family and many others to this day?” Serena asks.
She threw herself into her research, methodically gathering books and setting up interviews with family members. Still, despite her preparation, Serena said she had “no idea” how emotional an interview with her father would be.
It was Serena’s desire to better understand her intense response to the difficult past of her father that ultimately inspired her Yale supplementary essay.
“I felt [my father’s] pain, the horror he felt, the slow cracking of his spirit,” she recalled. “I knew that I had to synthesize some sort of piece where I could attempt to delineate these emotions and the way this interview brought me closer to both him and my Cambodian roots.”
Reflecting on her life since applying to Yale, Serena says that she has gained a deeper understanding about contemporary issues facing Cambodia—many of which represent leftover legacies of the Khmer Rouge. She says she now feels an even greater “duty to help” her country.
Serena, a Molecular, Cellular, & Developmental Biology major, takes helping others within her community seriously, whether it be in New Haven or Southeast Asia. As co-coordinator of Dwight Hall, Yale’s student-run umbrella service organization, Serena plans and implements service projects at Yale and throughout New Haven, working with Dwight Hall’s member groups to ensure that they have the resources necessary to carry out their missions.
“I feel that I have found the most happiness and growth in my experiences off campus as an involved New Haven resident,” Serena said. “There are lessons that are simply impossible to learn on campus that can be taught in the city if you just take the chance to immerse yourself as a New Haven resident.”
At Yale, Serena is also a community health educator, a member of Yale Emergency Medical Services, a Yale School of Public Health research assistant and a member of the Alliance for Southeast Asian Students at Yale, or ALSEAS.
As a member of ALSEAS, Serena hopes to strengthen Yale’s Southeast Asian student community and encourage outreach from the Yale Admissions Office to Southeast Asian students in the United States and internationally. According to Serena, Yale College has not enrolled a Cambodian international student in decades.
“I hope that changes,” Serena said. “I also hope that soon, more and more Cambodian-Americans like me will be given opportunities to attend universities like Yale and to bring the spirit of Cambodian resilience forward and into the public eye.”
Serena’s essays include her Common App personal statement.
ESSAY 1 (COMMON APP):
Personal Statement
I LISTENED
Equipped with a notepad and blue ink pen, I began my interview with my father, a former refugee and survivor of the Cambodian Killing Fields, to supplement my research project. Inexplicably nervous as I shifted in my seat, I gripped my notepad and locked my eyes on the first question.
“To begin the conversation, prior to the communists’ takeover of Cambodia, how would you describe your family life?”
My father replied in a formal tone, clearly struggling to mold his story into the frame I had imposed on him. I had heard stories about the time he broke his leg at his refugee camp and my journalist uncle who disappeared during the regime, but I never fully listened to his attempts to illustrate the past.
I knew about the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge but failed to completely understand its repercussions. The gap between two generations with vastly different experiences always clung to my conscience, exacerbated by the fact that I cannot speak Khmer fluently. I hesitated to speak, fearing judgment for my American accent and imperfect grammar, and desperately desired to liberate myself from this stigma.
As soon as I was assigned the International Baccalaureate Extended Essay to fulfill my diploma requirements, I immediately scribbled in my topic—the economic, political, and social repercussions of the Khmer Rouge’s reign in Cambodia—on my proposal sheet and slapped it onto my advisor’s desk.
During the interview, I quickly realized the impotency of my questions, which could not capture what I had failed to face my father with: empathy. I slid my notepad aside. In his thick accent, which had traversed thousands of miles and transcended more than thirty years of adversity, he allowed his words to fall limply, as pieces of his story cascaded into pools of raw emotion.
One hour glided by, as he divulged the time he was beaten by a Khmer Rouge soldier. His voice broke.
“It was . . . It was hard.”
These laconic words rendered me speechless. I envisioned the prison my father was kept in and the bullets that whizzed past him from a mile away. I felt the agony that surged in him as he watched his mother wither away from starvation.
I had observed Esperanza’s coming-of-age as a young Latina woman in The House on Mango Street. I had explored Bigger Thomas’s tragic bildungsroman in Native Son, and in one hour and thirty-eight minutes, I had experienced the most devastating period in Cambodian history from the eyes of one of its lost children.
“Orkun chraun, Pa.”
Thank you. I may mispronounce a phrase in Khmer. I will definitely misspell every other Khmer word I throw myself at. However, as I have gradually grasped the language, I remember that singular moment of tenderness that introduced me to a sentiment that remains universal. A pen and paper cannot capture the tears we shed for those we have lost, but words can allay the tempestuous memories time has helped us accept and convey to others.
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.