Right of passage - Yale - Successful college admissions essay
Hometown: Houston, TX
Year: Senior
College: Benjamin Franklin
Major: Political Science
Extracurriculars: La Unidad Latina service fraternity; Public School Internship Program
Successful college admissions essay
Profile
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. He later achieved that goal, living in Vanderbilt Hall as a first-year and then Saybrook, Silliman and, finally, Benjamin Franklin. (Only about 1 percent of Yale students transfer to a new residential college each year.)
Edgar’s love for architecture developed in his hometown of Houston, Texas, where he grew up cycling across the city. The son of two immigrants from Mexico, Edgar worked odd jobs as a teenager to help support his family financially. At ten years old, he started his own lawn-mowing business, using his “cute little looks” to appeal to customers. Though he eventually outgrew his boyish charm, Edgar loved cutting grass and continued doing it until he left for college.
At Yale, Edgar majored in political science and participated in the Education Studies Scholars program. “I found Texas interesting as a political case study. I grew up in a Mexican barrio surrounded by Mexicans and a lot of people who were really progressive. Why is this state that’s 40 percent Latino voting so drastically different compared to California, which is also roughly 40 percent Latino?” Edgar says. “I think that contrast, that contradiction, drew me to political science.”
Edgar’s college experience at Yale was defined by his involvement in two student groups: his service fraternity La Unidad Latina and the Public School Internship Program. With other fraternity members, Edgar was able to discuss his upbringing and the culture of machismo, which he says was “really productive for me in terms of learning how to become a better man and a better human being in general.” Edgar adds that his internship, which placed him in a local elementary school for two years, helped confirm his desire to become an educator.
Upon graduation, Edgar will work as an eighth-grade science teacher in his hometown. Edgar’s own eighth-grade teacher helped change the trajectory of his life, he says, by pushing him to apply to a top-tier high school. Without her intervention, he “may have not gone to college, much less Yale University.” Now, as an educator himself, he hopes to inspire his own students—most of whom live under the poverty line—to dream big.
Edgar’s essays include his Common App personal statement and one of his Yale supplemental essays.
ESSAY 1 (COMMON APP):
Personal statement
CUTTING
Rivers of sweat snake around my body, soaking my ragged belt, drenching my grass-encrusted shirt, simmering as they channel into the scalding blacktop road that slowly fries my feet. My fingers loop themselves around the string and tug. The gas trimmer coughs and gurgles to life with a black outburst of grime.
I cut. I cut away at the lumps of unruly vegetation. I cut a circle of lawn around the mailbox post. I cut, ignoring my parched throat, which begs for hydration. I cut away at my uneasiness, forgetting in this moment of toil my father’s state of health. I cut, trying to dig my mother out of a mound of hospital bills.
I trudge home for two miles, dragging the lawnmower in one hand as my stiff arm desperately clutches the weed-eater with the other. My mother sits on the trailer steps, blank, listless, unreadable. I reach into my pocket, hand her the wad of crumpled bills, and stagger to the sofa, falling into a deep sleep.
The next day, I stride into my high school and flash my typical smile, crooked teeth and all. For now, nothing is wrong with me; I’m back in my oasis of comfort. I cheerfully go through the motions of a regular school day: wolfing down factory-manufactured cafeteria food, spending lunch in the library to bury my nose into a random volume of the World Book Encyclopedia, chuckling at my teacher’s chemistry jokes.
I am two-faced. At home, I speak Spanish, wear a face of exhaustion, work with my coarse hands, cut grass, and refuse to speak from fear, fear of what will befall my father, who is in the Neurological ICU. At school, I communicate in English, manifest my happiness with a constant grin, work with my sharpened brain, cut incisively into the meaning of various books, and ramble about hyperbolas, the Houston Rockets, and Hemingway to distance myself from my reality at home.
Honestly, it is rather difficult to juggle my family world—where nobody is educated, where books are seen as good firewood, not mental stimulation, where my hands, not my mind, are my most powerful tool, where I cut up pancakes with my grubby fingers—with my school world, where everybody is expected to think critically, to read, to learn, to be sophisticated and cultured, where people cut up their pancakes with the fine, precise maneuverings of a knife and fork. However, I continue to inject optimism into my life. The school, my last bastion of contentment, wonder and carefree inquiry, is still there to embrace me with its culture of curiosity.
Countless manicured lawns, sparkling cars, and various odd jobs later, rays of hope emerge. My father has pulled out of his coma. He stammers out one word: “agua.” He cups his hands and pleads for it. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, does it? Water, the thought that tortures my mind most as the sun bakes me while I cut grass . . . water, what unites father and son. Finally at home, my father sits in his chair, the one that wobbles and has Spider-Man and Pokémon stickers plastered on it. I lay sprawled out on the plastic tile kitchen floor. As always, we do not talk much. He leads through example, not the opening and closing of his mouth. My father simply stares at me. I simply stare back.
He waggles his thick finger. I report to his side immediately; he places a cold metal object in my palm. It’s a two-peso coin, the same coin his own father had given to him before he set off for the U.S. from Mexico at the age of sixteen. No words need to be exchanged; the message is clear. I have fended for my family, working outside endlessly, cutting through the thickets of life’s hardships. In the eyes of my father, I am now a man.
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.
The first time I explored Houston on my own, my butt flattened, my arms and face were burned into globs of pink, purple, and painful tenderness by the sun, and my legs were immobilized. I set out on my bike in August 2009 with a specific plan: to pedal aimlessly around Houston. I filled a jug with ice and tap water, placed it in my backpack, and churned away, on my way to unintentionally biking fifty-five miles.
My motivation was not exercise, but curiosity. I set out to discover the usually unnoticed details in the streets and structures, to feel the throbbing pulse of the city. As I began to pedal, I was drawn into a world of wonder. My eyebrows went up, and I could not get them to come back down again!
The city mirrored my passions. Williams Tower, enveloped by webs of sparkling blue glass, resembled the sheer complexity of the blue clock of Yale’s Harkness Tower. The endless mazes of warehouses and oil refineries in the East End reminded me of my blue collar background. The Beer Can House in Montrose fed my never-ending hunger and near-obsession with public art. The seas of domino-like bookshelves in the Jesse H. Jones Library took me back to my childhood, when I would sneak into the library’s third-floor private conference rooms to admire the pictures in the architecture books and slowly trace the outlines of the many buildings with my stubby index finger.
The route maps on the Metro bus stops wrenched me from my bike with the force of their simple beauty; my eyes carefully inspected the loops, twists, and turns of the labyrinthine street grid—just as they had done with countless other maps of Harris County and Houston. The mural on the Fiesta supermarket near Airline Drive, which depicted a Mexican family, reminded me of the innumerable piñatas, bowls of spicy salsa, rooster-like ranchero singing, tapatio hat dances, and the backbreaking yet fortifying construction work I had enjoyed over the years.
Houston’s public transportation leaves something to be desired. My bike rides have convinced me that the city needs a better mass transit system. After all, the freeways aren’t going to expand forever. The invigorating bike rides have cemented my decision: I want to become an urban planner. I want to be involved in laying out streets, in fomenting the creation of sustainable buildings, and, more than anything, in making efficient public transportation a reality in Houston.
Yale would be a perfect laboratory. I would have easy access to a phenomenal mass transit system: the MTA Metro-North Railroad. New Haven, snuggled between Boston and New York City, would be a perfect launching pad; from there, I would be able to go explore the trains of multiple cities. I want to investigate how in the world the Northeast has built up such an impressive rail-based mass transit system! My bike and I are ready to hop on New Haven’s MTA train and find out.
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.