Hometown: Columbia, SC

Year: Junior

College: Jonathan Edwards

Major: English

Extracurriculars: Tour guide; songwriting

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Profile

In high school, Louis DeFelice was first and foremost a dancer. He attended the South Carolina Governor’s School, a public boarding school for the arts, and trained in ballet. There, he also became interested in personal finance; in his senior year, he started reading books about investment to figure out how to handle the leftover money saved up from his dishwashing job. Ultimately, this led Louis to start WonderLearnInvest.com, a website for sharing tips on smart money-saving.

Halfway through his senior year of high school, Louis left the Governor’s School to train in ballet privately. He took a gap year, focusing on his dancing career and learning how to live independently, and ultimately received his high school diploma from an online school.

Louis was most attracted to Yale because of its curious, motivated students and the intellectual stimulation he knew he’d find there. “The financial, physical, mentorship, and human capital capacity of Yale is very high,” he remarks. “People are very generous with their time.”

Louis adds that he is especially appreciative of the social communities he’s found at Yale. He remembers that during his sophomore and junior years, when he underwent some difficulties in his personal life, he received an outpouring  of support from friends as well as professors, who were often forgiving when he had to miss class meetings and were willing to lend a listening ear at their office hours. At that time, Louis also learned to take advantage of mental health and counseling resources on campus.

At Yale, Louis has worked as a tour guide for the admissions office, performed as a member of Tangled Up in Blue—a folk music singing group— and produced original music in the Jonathan Edwards recording studio. Some of his favorite memories at Yale include playing gigs with his band at local venues, where he loves the energetic vibe and the enthusiasm of the audience. After graduation, he plans to live in New York and pursue a career in music.

Louis’s essays include his Common App personal statement.

ESSAY 1 (COMMON APP):

Personal statement

Discuss an accomplishment or event, formal or informal, that marked your transition from childhood to adulthood within your culture, community, or family.

I grew up in Columbia, S.C., but I moved away from home as a sophomore to go to a residential high school for the arts. Doing so gave me more independence than any of my peers or I had ever had. Until a few months ago, I would have said that moving away was my most significant transition toward adulthood; however, I realized a greater level of independence during the summer of 2013. I spent the month of June living with two other boys in an apartment in Salt Lake City. I flew to Utah on my own to dance on scholarship with Ballet West, and living there was the first time that I had been completely without the supervision of parents or teachers. From auditioning and meeting the director in March, to flying across the country on my own, it was a new and transformative experience, and one that I undertook on my own. I saved money, shopped for groceries, cooked my meals, and used buses and trains to get to class and rehearsal every day. I had the freedom to travel around the city at my leisure, but it was also up to me to get to class on time, take care of the apartment, etc. Although I’ve lived in a dorm since I was fifteen, the level of responsibility that I had in Utah was very different from what I was used to at the Governor’s School, especially the absence of curfews, cafeterias, and supervision. That, however, was only half of my summer. After I left Salt Lake City, I went to London to dance at the Royal Ballet School. I stayed with a host mother who provided my meals, but I was completely responsible for using public transportation to get across the city to school each day. Being able to spend my evenings and weekends sightseeing and exploring London with friends, or on my own, was incredible. The experiences that I had in London, and Salt Lake City, were formative and I feel that I accomplished what I hoped to in both places. The opportunities that I had to train with so many teachers and coaches was remarkable, but the time that I spent in each city, and the people that I spent it with, were equally influential. The independence was endlessly exciting, and the adventures that I had this summer taught me a lot about myself. I enjoyed meeting different people from around the world, and learning about their cultures, which were both so similar to and different from my own. In London, I loved going to lunch with three or four other dancers and having conversations that would involve five different languages. Being able to hear and practice foreign languages inspired me, and drove me to work harder at becoming multilingual. Experiencing so many new things, both in and out of my classes, required me to mature quickly and work hard, but also helped to shape my goals for the future, specifically what I want to study for the next several years.

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.