Touching Victories - Yale - College application essay help
Hometown: Wolfeboro, NH
Year: Sophomore
College: Saybrook
Major: Religious Studies
Extracurriculars: Yale Debate Association; Varsity Fencing
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Profile
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. Because her parents lacked access to education—her father didn’t graduate high school but has a GED—they placed a high value on Samantha’s education and academic achievements. Still, of all her activities in high school, Samantha was most proud of fencing. In her Common App essay, Samantha details her improvement and surmises that her fencing accomplishments brought her the most satisfaction because the sport, unlike her academic endeavors, did not come naturally to her at all.
Describing her success on the fencing mat, Samantha conjures up a tangible sense of pride, but her modesty also bleeds through her words both about fencing and about her overall character. “I was good for my small town but I wasn’t world quality in anything. I hadn’t done anything earth-shattering by the time I got to Yale.”
This modesty followed her to New Haven, where she hoped to continue the activities she was passionate about from high school while still expanding her horizons. Like many others, though, she feared she would not measure up to Yale’s lofty standards. Luckily, Samantha’s roommate convinced her to try out for the debate team, something she had wished to try despite having no prior experience. She recalls being so nervous she actually cried during her tryout, but she earned a spot on Yale’s debate team that she still holds as a rising junior.
In the classroom, Samantha also made major changes to the plans she envisioned when she first arrived on campus. Because biology and chemistry classes had always interested Samantha in high school, she set out in the fall of her first year as an intended biochemistry major. Taking the intro courses at Yale, however, proved less enjoyable than she had imagined, so she decided to enroll in classes that had not been available to her through the New Hampshire public school system. Exposure to a wide variety of religious studies classes soon opened Samantha up to a new area of academic study, and she eventually switched gears to begin pursuing a major in religious studies.
When she first visited Yale with her mom, Samantha was surprised at how genuinely happy the students looked, even in the midst of finals. She knew she wanted to be part of a place that emphasized the importance of balance and individuality, and she made sure to demonstrate these qualities in herself for her application. Already boasting impressive grades and an array of extracurriculars, Samantha believes she stood out because her essays showed personality and a quirky, upbeat voice, two things she has continued to carry during her past two years in New Haven.
Samantha’s essays include her Common App personal statement and one of her Yale supplemental essays.
ESSAY 1 (COMMON APP):
Personal Statement
The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?
LOSING AND LIKING IT
When I first started competing nationally, I was a pretty dreadful fencer. At the tournament, many of the girls—who had trained since they were somewhere between zygotes and elementary school students—knew before they’d even started fencing for the day that they would beat at least one person: me. This was an unusual position for me to be in because I had become accustomed to winning, or at least coming close, in every endeavor, from the geography bee to games of cards. While some things remained stubbornly out of my reach, such as singing on key, writing in pen without always wishing that there was an eraser, and applying mascara without poking myself in the eye, most of the time when I tried something, I would succeed almost immediately.
When I failed, or rather, didn’t succeed as much as I wanted, I would be quite upset with myself, wondering how I had misspelled a word so simple as “dimension” or missed a question on a math test. I knew that I was able to win and my inability to meet that potential disappointed me. Fencing, which required coordination, patience, and finesse, all things that I lacked, was the first endeavor in which I could initially expect nothing more from myself than losing with dignity.
I’d been competing for a year when I entered a large tournament in Kentucky, where I found myself fencing against the number one fencer in my age group. Tall, storm-eyed, and so fast that I didn’t recognize that she was attacking before she’d already hit me, Morgan Partridge was so frightening that when I was called to fence against her, I laughed as one laughs at her own impending doom. In the next two minutes, she thwarted my best efforts to stop her unstoppable attacks and scored touches on me pretty much whenever the mood struck. That was why I was so surprised when I realized that my hand had twitched in just the right way and I had scored a touch on her. I felt the purest, most baffling sense of joy because, for a second, the impossible had happened; something worked for me.
Morgan won the bout 5 to 1. She flipped off her mask, threw back her blond ponytail, and let out a long, bone-rattling scream. As I shook her hand, I was still wondering how on earth I’d scored a touch on the Morgan Partridge. After the tournament, despite the fact that I had scored only eight touches all day, I couldn’t stop smiling when I thought about my successful touches, though they were quite rare.
Learning that small victories hard earned are more valuable than blazing glory easily won was something I could only discover when I tried something that I had no natural talent for whatsoever. My fencing was painfully awkward; my coach called me “big brick” because of my slowness at learning new moves, my feet never seemed to move in the right direction and my ability to hit on target left plenty to be desired, yet I had never been happier.
Since that day in Kentucky, two years have passed. During that time, I fenced whenever my club was open, sometimes drilling actions with an endlessly patient teammate until our coach started jingling his keys and looking at the door. I entered every tournament I could and I was defeated both often and soundly. Agonizingly slowly, my victories became more common and less surprising. I started winning medals at local tournaments and my national results have become brilliantly mediocre. These are the things of which I am proudest. Though I have experienced greater success at school, I often discount these accomplishments because I know that they came easily. Fencing is the first thing in which I experienced failure and the thing from which I have gotten the most genuine joy. Satisfaction, I learned, doesn’t come from accolades (though they are undoubtedly nice), but from improving through hard work.
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.
I love data sets almost as much as chocolate. Seeing the numbers lined up in columns, with their meaning desperate to be brought to light gives me a bit of a thrill. They remind me of the coloring books that well-meaning relatives give to children who display little artistic talent, in which the outlines on the pages are filled with vibrant colors when a thin layer of water is added to the paper. Data sets have that sort of meaning, only instead of water, statistical analysis must be brushed onto the pages.
When I received a packet telling me that I had been selected as a National Merit semifinalist, I was excited by the news itself, but what interested me even more were the pages following the announcement. Is there anything more tragic than an unexamined booklet of data points? They float around, directionless, with meanings that almost cry to be revealed. With a paper, a pencil, and a spreadsheet, I set out to discover what they were trying to say, amplifying the voices of the all-but-silent numbers.
There were the states and schools of all of the other semifinalists, ready to give up meaning to people who wanted to look. First I counted the number of homeschoolers and discovered that they made up about a third of a percent of all semifinalists, but 6 percent of all teenagers. Next I looked for the high schools with the largest percent of its students selected as scholars, and tried to find a reason why they had so many. In all, it was a pleasant afternoon. There were reasons, causes and effects hiding right below the surface, and I was the one to find them.
Holding the darling little data set on my lap, I watched as it took on different shapes with just a bit of coaxing. Each iteration revealed a small, beautiful truth about the world, one that may or may not have been seen before, but that was undeniably there. There was a beauty in unexpected outliers explained by further research. There was a feeling of intrepid exploration when faced with an uncharted data set. There was life in the numbers if you could overcome their soulless facade. The multitude of truths shimmered on the page like raindrops on a waxy leaf, ready to drip off with a gentle tap.
I occasionally try to share what I’ve found with my friends, who are now barely surprised when I mention that I analyzed a really great data set over the weekend. I’ll share the most surprising things that I found from my analysis with them, then listen in turn as they tell me about their more eccentric tastes in clothing. We laugh, we smile, and we understand that it is unlikely that I’ll ever comprehend how one of my dearest friends makes two different patterns complement each other. She’ll never understand why the numbers make my heart flutter. There are some truths that cannot be found from data analysis, I suppose.
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.