Hometown: Chandler, AZ

Year: First-Year

College: Morse

Major: Economics; History

Extracurriculars: Yale Building Bridges, co-president; The Yale Politic, editor; The Yale Globalist, editor

Common app prompts

Profile

Allison Chen believes that who she is today is a consequence of two main factors: Her Chinese upbringing and her love for Spanish culture, which she developed in middle school. Through Chinese dancing lessons and Spanish literature classes—plus her involvement in Model UN and student government in high school—Allison discovered a real passion for global affairs.

Now at Yale, Allison—who grew up in Chandler, Arizona— is double majoring in economics and history, with a specialization in international and diplomatic history. She also keeps her interests alive through the arts, especially theater and writing. A member of the Yale Dramatic Association, she has participated in numerous productions, and she regularly writes for three campus publications: the Yale Daily News, the Yale Globalist, and the Yale Politic.

Allison also tries to spend some time doing things that do not involve school or her extracurriculars. She says she loves walking down Broadway and exploring its many shops—the Yale Bookstore is her favorite place to browse. The year-end Spring Fling music festival held on Old Campus stands out as one of Allison’s favorite moments from her first year at Yale. She loved how the event gave people the chance to spend time with one another for a day without worrying about upcoming paper deadlines and exams.

In thinking about how her productive, academic self and her personal, fun-loving self coalesce, Allison still thinks of Spanish painter Francisco Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son, which captured her attention as a young student (and about which she wrote one of her Yale supplemental essays). She loves the dual registers on which the painting operates. It marks an important transition in the art world while also telling a compelling story. And Allison’s own history with the painting contains these two elements, too—the raw and unjustified curiosity she felt toward it as a child, as well as the intellectual and informed way she was able to engage with it as an adult. Allison feels that it perfectly expressed who she was as a child, and who she still is today.

Allison’s essays include one of her Yale supplemental essays.

ESSAY 1 (YALE SUPPLEMENT):
Write about something that you love to do.

Haunted romanticism, ravaged gaze, desperation bordering on lunacy, Saturn Devouring His Son first caught my attention as a bored nine-year-old wandering around a museum, and once again as a high-school student, after catching a glimpse of it in a textbook.

Because after looking at angelic frescos after more Church frescos, I could not stop myself from flipping back to the tiny printing of this unholy piece. I sought to discover the story behind it—what caused this artist to create something so raw and naked, in the age of staid royal family portraits?

I became immersed in unraveling each bit of the story, how Goya had long transitioned from a royal painter, to a harsh, but veiled critic of society, the desolation that occurred during the French occupation of Spain, the corruption of Charles IV— who was really only a puppet ruler to Godoy. I learned how kingdoms rose and fell—and rose again, how art is unafraid to capture the seditious attitudes of the common people, and how it has endured to teach us of past mistakes.

I fell in love with dissecting the messages from the past, and discovering how we still have not listened to them.

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.