Below is my Common App, which I wrote during my senior year of high school. I'm not sure it's the final version I submitted to colleges, but it is the most recent version I could dig up. I don't remember the prompt I chose. Read my (very unqualified1) advice on how to write a personal statement here.

I grip metal, fighting against sweat quickly condensing on my fingertips. The hair on the back of my neck stands at attention. Months of preparation vanish as the notes on my sheet music evaporate. I desperately search for the scales, chords, and licks I know I’ve played over and over again, only to find myself without a plan before my solo. My breathing quickens and I desperately glance at my conductor, looking for any sort of guidance. His mouth stays closed, but I hear three words: find the human. With shaky legs, I stand and walk to the microphone.

Three bars left.

When the camera’s shutter opened, I was in a barren auditorium trying to remember Toni Morrison’s name. I racked my brain for a quote to steal—something about knowledge, maybe?—that would open Amplify Gwinnett and set the tone for the day-long conference on the future of education, but nothing meaningful came to mind. As the red light turned on, I caught the eye of a freshman nervously shuffling through his notecards. With a start, I realized that the quote didn’t matter, the person it inspired did. I interrupted myself and began to talk about students—how our perspective is young but mature, nervous but idealistic. I stuttered and I faltered, but as I left the stage, I saw the freshman flash a gleaming smile. I didn’t employ a quote, but did engage who that quote was for. I like to think Toni Morrison would have been proud.

Two bars left.

Low-rank matrix factorization is notoriously difficult. At least, that’s what the YouTube video I watched 10 minutes before diving into yet another data set told me. I was spending one of many late nights poring over code, trying to build a grade prediction algorithm for my school’s counseling department. The hope was that students would eventually be able to use my AI system to predict what they’d earn in next year’s classes, and then get assistance and motivation to push that number higher: “overshooting the curve,” as my counselor called it. It was slow, draining work; I spent three hours the day before trying to find a misplaced semicolon, and two hours before that formatting a graph. But as I stared at the same rows for the thousandth time, that dream seemed to slip farther and farther away. My eyes glazed over before fixating on one series of numbers: 87, 89, 91, 98 - some anonymous student’s numerical average over time. It was an admirable improvement, one only possible because they had the resources to improve. Whether with textbooks or tutors, they overshot the curve. I stretched and reopened my code.

One bar left.

The drum fill comes to an end and the lights narrow on the bronze keys of my saxophone. The conductor’s eyes drill into my back. For a moment, silence. I let go of the scales I practiced over and over again, the chords I outlined one hundred times, and the licks I forced myself to memorize. I allow the hours I’ve spent analyzing the piece’s harmonic structure to escape me. I allow two thousand hours of evenings spent huddled over a music stand to fly away. These next moments will not be about the hard technique or the dry statistics. They will be about people: the freshman, staring at his notecards; the scholar, studying from his textbook; the musician, anxious to begin playing. I take a breath, let out a tentative first note, and smile through the wood of my reed: time to find the human.

  1. I applied to Georgia Tech, University of Georgia (+ honors program), Georgia State University (+ honors program), University of Alabama Tuscaloosa, and MIT, all in early action. I was accepted to UGA’s honors program, GSU’s honors program, UA’s Presidential Elite scholarship, and ended up attending Georgia Tech. I was deferred and then rejected from MIT. ↩