Writing: College Application Essays #1 (Common App)

For posterity, I'll be posting my college essays one by one– both the successful and unsuccessful ones. If anyone comes across these, feel free to use them for inspiration, but please do not plagiarize them (they're my original work!). The results of my college application season were this:

Accepted - UC Berkeley (Regent's Scholar-$10k, L&S), UCLA (Alumni Scholar-$4k, L&S), UC Davis (Regent's Scholar- $30k, A&ES), UC Santa Barbara (Regent's Scholar-$24k, L&S)
Waitlisted - Amherst, Haverford
Rejected - Brown, Swarthmore, Cornell
Majors varied between each school, but included American Studies, Environmental Science, Biotechnology, etc.

So, I'll be starting off with the unsuccessful ones first– the Common App essays. I have three for the main prompts, plus the supplemental essays for each college (for those, I'll post them in clusters; e.g. all the Amherst prompts together, Brown in another post, etc.).

Prompt: Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.

Somewhere, on a side street of San Francisco’s Chinatown, is a small store that holds the history of the world. Inside, the walls are lined with jars filled with the sweat and toil of farmers from far-off lands. This is a place where a variety of cultures– Chinese, British, Kenyan, and Nepalese, to name a few– intersect and find common ground in one thing: the leaves of Camellia sinensis, or tea.

In this store, I find myself scanning the information cards neatly glued to the front of the jars– here, a 1998 sheng pu’erh from Yunnan, and there, a 2016 green, balled oolong from Sri Lanka. They each tell a different story. One is reputed to be picked off an ancient tea bush from Guanyin, the Bodhisattva of compassion. Another was produced on a tea estate in Assam, a remnant from the British East India Tea Company’s trade monopoly.

On the other hand, my own story with tea has no meetings with gods and is not shaped by European imperialism. Really, it’s rather plain; it all started because I hate drinking coffee, pure and simple. But as a connoisseur of caffeine, I’ve gone on a quest to find the tea that fits me.

That quest has taken me from the Azores Islands of Portugal to Tanegashima in Japan. My notes now cover over 150 different teas– blacks, greens, herbals, oolongs, and more– and my room is littered with teaware from around the world. On my dresser sits a Japanese kyusu, Chinese gaiwan, and English teapot, with cups in every location. I’ve learned how to brew authentic Indian chai, perform the Chinese gongfu tea ceremony, and act during a Japanese tea ceremony or chanoyu.

But since I started that search four or five years ago, I’ve never actually found that fabled “perfect” tea. Some teas have been close, like the Jin Xuan oolong or Kamairi Shincha green, but never fully there. However, in every tea I’ve tried, there has always been something that I enjoyed– whether it be the smell, flavor, mouthfeel, aftertaste, or general sensation it gives.

Nevertheless, I won’t give up. Someday, I will find the ideal tea, but until then, I’m going to continue exploring the world. I’ve loved everything I found already– the culture, the history, the science, all behind tea– and I know I will continue to find new things in tea to enjoy. With a drink that has roots in humanity’s ancient history, there’s just so much to learn, taste, and explore. I’m sure it’ll take more than a lifetime to fully understand tea, but in the end, it will be worth it.