Underdogs - Yale - Common application essay
Hometown: Pittsford, New York City, NY
Year: First-Year
College: Berkeley
Major: English; French
Extracurriculars: Yale Political Union; Yale Francophone Association
Common application essay
Profile
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. She applied to eleven schools during the college application process, including Harvard, Brown, Columbia, and Georgetown, in addition to Yale.
When considering colleges, Pascale looked for schools that could meet both her academic and social expectations. She hoped to find a school with a robust anthropology program, but also a campus that had a diverse student body and a spirit of inclusivity.
“I got the sense that at most other schools, social life was more divisive,” she says. “At Yale, there was a strong sense of an on-campus community.”
Ultimately deciding that Yale checked all of her boxes, she applied for early admission. She was initially deferred, but received and accepted an offer from Yale in the spring.
During her high school career, Pascale was a dedicated three-season runner (cross country in the fall, indoor track in the winter, and outdoor track in the spring). She volunteered with several community service groups, one of which eventually inspired her Common App essay and planted the initial seed for her interest in anthropology.
Eager to continue her community service work at Yale, Pascale immediately joined a service group, First-Years in Service. Although she found the work to be starkly different from the kind she had participated in throughout high school, Pascale had a positive experience with the group. “I expected to be doing more work that involved interacting with people, but I’ve spent more time learning the administrative side of service work,” she explains. Although she initially thought that she would join a running club at Yale, she later realized that she wasn’t interested in the daily commitment of running in addition to her other activities and classes. Another surprise emerged in the form of her major: While Pascale entered Yale thinking she would most likely study either anthropology or Ethnicity, Race, & Migration, she got hooked on English after taking a class on Shakespeare’s comedies and romances and is now double majoring in English and French.
The social life at Yale, however, was what proved to be Pascale’s favorite part of the experience. She raves about her residential college and loves the friends and connections she’s made there. Her favorite memories of her first year are from the small courtyard outside her dorm, where fellow first-years would congregate to chat between and after classes.
“I’ve made so many friends through Berkeley that I might not have met otherwise,” Pascale affirms. “The social life at Yale has exceeded my expectations.”
Pascale’s essays include her Common App personal statement.
ESSAY 1 (COMMON APP):
Personal Statement
I’m standing on a New York City playground on a particularly bright Monday morning in mid-July. The grin on Farrah’s face reminds me that it’s her birthday. Decked out from head to toe in Frozen-themed clothing, she runs over to me to show me her birthday presents. She opens her backpack and pulls out three Frozen dolls, still inside their packaging. Later, as the class is about to head to the pool, it dawns on Sebastian that he does not have his towel. I dig through a heap of clothing, swimsuits, and goggles until I find a white towel embroidered with Sebastian’s name in blue thread. It looks just like the towel several of my friends own. At lunch that day, Khodi, a precocious five-year old, invites me to sit with her. I stare into her lunchbox. A note from her mother is squeezed between a star-shaped sandwich and a reusable container of strawberries. The red ink reads, “Have a great day, Khodi! Love, Mommy.”
Just a month later, I’m sitting in a tiny kitchen across the country. Jamin inhales three helpings of chicken with steamed vegetables even though he’s only two years old and should not have such a large appetite. The teachers exchange worried glances, and I suspect that he did not eat breakfast that morning or dinner the night before. Suzette spills sauce on her sweater, and I grab a napkin to blot the stain. The sauce does not look out of place on her shirt, which she has worn for the past three days. In the afternoon, I play with a two-year-old named Yari. No matter how many books I read to her or how many words I ask her to repeat, she still hasn’t learned to speak.
In July, I volunteered at Summer Steps, a program that prepares low-income, mostly minority, New York City preschoolers for kindergarten. The children receive scholarships for kindergarten at independent schools. The teachers, the other volunteers, and I helped the children with their reading and writing skills. In August, I volunteered at Storyteller Children’s Center in Santa Barbara, California. The center provides daycare and enrichment to homeless families making less than $10,000 a year. For three weeks, I played with the toddlers so their parents could work or look for work. It occurred to me that while the families at both Summer Steps and Storyteller were considered low-income, the children were living extraordinarily different lives.
When Farrah, Sebastian, and Khodi were juxtaposed with Jamin, Suzette, and Yari, I realized that poverty was more intricate than I had imagined. These faces taught me about the nuances of the term “low-income.” There has always been an anthropologist in me, and the children at Summer Steps and Storyteller made me want to use my passion for anthropology as a means of advocacy. When I observed Jamin’s appetite, I realized how much work there is left to do.
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.