Around 2005, my house was constantly strewn with Polly Pockets and Legos. My sister and I liked Polly Pockets, my brother liked Legos, and the amount of time we all channeled into our respective activities was astronomical.

What is love? A promise at the altar? The soft kiss of water on parched lips? A flash of his shadowed gray eyes, or the tender caress of pink pigment on her cheekbones?

Spencer Hagaman applied to twenty-three colleges, but says that he is glad he ended up at Yale. Born and raised in Huntington Beach, California, he graduated from a public high school of about sixteen hundred students, where he was an International Baccalaureate student, varsity tennis captain, and student council vice president.

I didn’t see many rainbows in India. They hide in the monsoon rains, or are too frightened by the hot, stifling climate. Likewise, I was terrified of showing that side of myself in a homophobic country, especially to the host family I had grown to love.

“It was a little overwhelming to try to capture the entirety of my four years in one essay,” Meghanlata Gupta says.

Hailing from Yaoundé, Cameroon, Fred Ebongue is still unsure about what he wants to study. But he has nevertheless enjoyed several focused passions at Yale.

Catherine de Lacoste-Azizi says that her high school career was disorganized but, more importantly, outspoken. A lot of her extracurricular activities involved her voice: She started a competitive speech and debate club, took part in an a cappella group, and starred in seven musicals.

In high school, Cosette Davis was, she says, “that kid who did everything.” At a small high school in Queens, New York, she was involved in almost all of the school’s extracurricular offerings—from dance groups to marine biology research.

Once there was a girl who looked within, found divine peace in her soul, and also had great legs. I am not this girl.

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.

Ko Lyn Cheang hails from Singapore, but she knew early on that there was more to her future than settling down in her home country.

Pascale Bradley had Yale on her radar long before she was old enough to apply. Her mom graduated from Yale in 1988, and Pascale knew that she was interested in attending a school with a high academic profile.

When I think about a possible future in information technology, I think first about the past, when my parents endured oppression, when I was raised in false freedom.

I learned the definition of cancer at the age of fourteen.

Two hundred and two Hot Wheels cars, each two by five inches long, adorned with flames and spoilers, lined the edges of my room. My mother would urge me to put them away and go play outside, but I never wanted to.

Since childhood, I have wanted to know the why and how of every- thing.

It was five o’clock in the morning, and an intruder was in my home. His vile gurgling sounds had crawled into my room and slinked under my covers, and his deafening beeps had yanked me from sleep.

For the longest time there were two people waking up in my bed each morning, and neither one of them knew who I was.

In class on the first day of freshman year, I discovered chewed wads of gum stuck underneath my desk. I found half-eaten chicken wings in toilets.

I have a fetish for writing. I’m not talking about crafting prose or verses, or even sentences out of words. But simply constructing letters and characters from strokes of ink gives me immense satisfaction.