Rosa Vargas is an Ethics, Politics, & Economics major from San Diego, California, who recently graduated from Yale. Her college essays highlight a long-lived interest in immigration and policy, which she continued to pursue at Yale.

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.

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

Marianne Konikoff came to Yale from an all-girls Catholic high school of roughly eleven hundred students in her hometown of Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

As a high schooler, Elijah Gunther was the type of kid who loved math so much he quite literally dreamed about it. But math was not enough to take up all of Elijah’s time during the day.

When Edgar Aviña first arrived at Yale, he had an unconventional goal for his next four years. Edgar’s interest in architecture and urban planning drew him to Yale’s campus as a senior in high school, and as a student he was determined to live in a different building each year.

Yvonne Ye graduated from high school in Shanghai and lived there for three years, so on most official records, she’s an international student because she applied from abroad.

Neche is a junior in Berkeley College majoring in applied mathematics. Her favorite book is Firegirl by Tony Abbott, she listens to a lot of EDM music, and she’s never seen the end of a movie because she always falls asleep in the middle.

While Kendrick Umstattd was thinking of where to apply to college, an alum from her high school who attended Yale came to give a talk about her time at the university. The alum brought along a copy of Yale Scientific Magazine.

You can say a lot about Paris, and you can say a lot about New Haven, but only one of the two cities has Yale. And for Yannis Messaoui—a Paris native, born and raised—Yale was enough.

During their senior year of high school, Bri Matusovsky—who uses they/them/their pronouns—received two life-changing surprises in just one day. On that fateful afternoon, Bri sat alone in their apartment when smoke began pouring out of a wall.

“I was definitely not considering Yale in high school,” says Jacob Hillman, who transferred to Yale in 2017 from Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Jacob grew up in Plano, Texas, and attended a “massive public school” with a graduating class of about fifteen hundred students. Most of his classmates elected to stay in Texas for college.

Tony Grant applied to Yale understanding that his application showed an unconventional path to New Haven. Tony—a Massachusetts native whose father served in the navy throughout his childhood—matriculated at Yale through the Eli Whitney Students Program.

Politics has been a passion since high school for Nick Girard, who views public service as an effective means of becoming truly engaged with his community. Politics has shaped Nick’s trajectory at Yale—he served as vice president of the Yale College Council and president of the College Democrats of Connecticut—and still informs his career choices as he completes his senior year.

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.

Born and raised in New Haven, Hacibey (Haci) Catalbasoglu is the city’s youngest ever representative to the Board of Alders—New Haven’s legislative arm. As Ward 1 alder, Haci represents the only all-Yale ward of the city, and works to improve the town-gown relationship between the university and the Elm City.

For James Barile, the most challenging aspect of the college application process was having to use the first-person “I” in his essays. “I think I wrote my applications on December 31 [the day before they were due],” he says, laughing, “because I didn’t want to hear about myself and couldn’t fathom that anyone else wanted to.”

Samantha Wood, a Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, native, is a self-described “really typical nerd.” Besides genuinely enjoying her classes, her high school activities included editing the literary magazine and competing on both the math and quiz bowl teams.

Applying to Yale University was Jacob Malinowski’s attempt to thwart destiny. Most people from his small town of Greendale, Wisconsin, never stray far from home—and, Jacob says, most are destined to return to his town soon after finishing college to start families of their own.

During her childhood, Serena Ly would hear stories from her father about living under the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.