Seemingly effortless - Yale - Successful college entrance essay
Hometown: New York City, NY
Year: Senior
College: Silliman
Major: Psychology
Extracurriculars: Danceworks; Korean American Students at Yale; UNITY Korean Drum Troupe
Successful college entrance essay
Profile
Katherine Oh knew when she began the college application process that she wanted to find a place where students were supportive of each other. She found that place at Yale, where she graduated in 2018 as a psychology major.
“[Yale] did give me what I was looking for. It was a nurturing environment,” she says.
Katherine attended Stuyvesant High School in New York City, where, outside of the classroom, she focused on math and Korean traditional dance. Eager to promote diversity in her school’s math team, Katherine was not only a teammate but also a trusted mentor, motivator, and friend to the younger girls on the team. After making the move to college, however, Katherine spent most of her time exploring new interests and extracurriculars. She became a psychology major and experimented with new forms of dance with Danceworks, a multigenre student dance ensemble.
Even after graduating from Yale, Katherine is continuing to explore new passions. She studied in Beijing during the summer after her senior year and is currently spending an academic year studying Chinese in Taipei.
Katherine is taking this time to reflect. “I’ve come to realize what I don’t want and that my interest was really in discovering what I liked in life,” she says.
Katherine says that becoming involved in different groups on campus as an undergraduate helped her discover her passions. She also became involved in the Korean American and Asian American communities, which helped her embrace her Korean heritage and learn about issues like Asian American activism that she was unfamiliar with in high school.
“It’s not always in the classroom that you learn new things. It’s through your peers and your community that you learn new things,” she notes.
In fact, Katherine says that one of her favorite parts of Yale was the student community itself. Forging through college alone is “really hard” and, having a supportive community “really made my Yale experience,” she explains.
Katherine also emphasizes that despite the stress most college students experience, “in the end, everything works out.” She adds that canceling out stress and maintaining a healthy mindset is imperative.
“That’s what I would want to tell any future Yalies and current students—just that some of the hardest times at Yale you’re going to feel like you’re going to fail … but at the end of the day, you realize you’re just as fine as everyone else, and you’ve made it to this really incredible university,” she says.
Katherine’s essays include her Common App personal statement and one of her Yale supplemental essays.
ESSAY 1 (COMMON APP):
Personal statement
In October of 2000, at the eighteenth annual New York Korean Festival, I trailed behind my mother as I voraciously scarfed down my corn dog. My wandering eyes landed upon a grandiose stage, where two young women in opulent, full-length, red silk dresses were twirling their paper fans. Mouth agape, I squeezed my mom’s hand as tightly as a four-year-old possibly could, and begged to take dance lessons.
Apparently, I hadn’t been the only one awed by the gorgeous costumes that day. The following weekend, in a studio in Flushing, Queens, I entered a room packed with other eager, young aspirants.
After each lesson, I was amazed at how much precision was required to be considered even mediocre when performing this art. From perfecting the width of our footsteps to hitting the same angle between our forearm and bicep, I practiced for fifteen hours a week to make these complicated moves appear simple and natural. I even had an entire class devoted solely to our breathing techniques: how to inhale with our entire bodies, how to hold that breath with our core muscles, how to match the timing of my breathing with everyone else’s. Needless to say, many of my elementary-school-aged classmates started dropping like flies, but I remained intrigued by the challenge to make the difficult look beautiful.
Moving on to middle school, our ranks continued to be decimated as classmates were lured away to mainstream dance genres, from ballet to hip hop. When I’d run into them in my Asian-American enclave of Flushing, they would poke fun at me for sticking with the old-school dance that our grandmothers had performed. Still, I maintained that Korean dance was more than just alternating the pace of my footsteps to express a specific emotion in one split second. I was drawn to this activity since it made me a cultural ambassador not just to non-Koreans, but also to Korean-Americans who weren’t aware of this particular facet of our shared heritage.
But, when I enrolled at Stuyvesant, my mother’s requests for me to help out in her Chelsea convenience deli grew louder. She asked me to quit dance since it was just a hobby that wouldn’t help me get into college. Although I understood her practical attitude, I knew dance was too important for me to give up. Since I see myself as a role model for other youth, particularly when I teach workshops at local schools, I implored her to think about which activity best portrays the image of immigrant Koreans: working behind the cash register selling gum, or performing on stage in front of non-Koreans and sharing one of our treasured customs. We struck a compromise: I’d continue to dance, but commit to one evening shift a week.
This past April, one of my close friends recruited me for Stuyvesant’s Culture Festival. Performing in front of hundreds, I was nervous that the audience might not appreciate this relatively unknown art. However, their booming applause proved just the opposite. That weekend, my confidence still soaring, I volunteered to perform at my Queens studio for a visiting class of ten young African-American girls from a Bronx Charter school. I was overjoyed when the second graders eagerly approached me afterwards not only to touch my ruby embroidered dress, but also to learn more about the stories behind my dances. Thus, sharing my heritage with those from outside of my cultural demographic and seeing their sincere interest confirmed for me that the past thirteen years of twirling and focused breathing have been well worth the effort.
ESSAY 2 (YALE SUPPLEMENT):
Please reflect on something you would like us to know about you that we might not learn from the rest of your application, or on something about which you would like to say more. You may write about anything—from personal experiences or interests to intellectual pursuits.
I was within earshot when Aaron groaned to Brad and Chris, senior members of Stuyvesant’s math team, that, “even though I’m better at math, colleges are going to take Katherine over me just because she’s a girl.” Earlier, I had considered asking their advice on how to compute f(0) when the quadratic polynomial f(x) has a real zero at x=2, and when f(f(x)) has only one real zero at x=5, but hearing this chauvinism, I tackled the ARML question by myself.
The following Saturday, Ally hosted the fencing team’s first sleepover of the season at her luxurious condominium. We sprawled out on her bed to watch our perennial favorite, Mean Girls, which was a particular treat since I rarely commandeered my home’s sole television from my overworked father.
I started to anticipate the part of the movie when Cady recognizes that “the limit does not exist” and clinches the win for her team; I had joined the math team hoping to experience similar intellectual triumphs. Unfortunately, the hyper-competitive clique of Aaron, Brad, and Chris became my own version of the “Plastics.” After they befriended me in my freshman year, their barbs quickly came out once our coach started placing me on the upper-level teams. Feeling that my presence undermined their entrenched pecking order, the three would arrogantly mock me as inferior, or worse, claim that as a girl, I enjoyed special treatment.
Interestingly, after watching Mean Girls at Ally’s that night, I had an epiphany: I needed to stop seeking Cady’s glorious victory and instead embrace my role as the ever-enthusiastic “pusher,” Ms. Norbury. I focused on how much pride I take in providing a support system for teammates, especially younger female members whose skins haven’t thickened the way mine has over the past three years. Knowing how difficult it was for me to drown out the negativity of certain team members in the early weeks, I approached our coach in my junior fall and asked if I could personally mentor incoming novices.
After he named me one of his NYC team captains, I hit the ground running at the first practice. Seeing Jasmine, a freshman, sitting alone as her three male teammates huddled to solve a problem, I waved her over and advised, “You belong in that group. Never forget that and don’t let them forget it.” She sheepishly smiled as my supportive nod encouraged her to join the group without their invitation. At that weekend’s tournament, I saw Jasmine sitting alone again, despondent after she had scored a 3/10 on a mock test. Patting her on the back, I slyly pointed to Aaron and said, “That senior who just pulled off a 9/10 got a 2/10 when he was your age.” Her smile reminded me why I push myself to surmount the obstacles that others put in my way because of my gender.
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.