College Admissions Essay: The Person Who Changed My Life

Society had given me a mold to fill at birth, growing up as a skinny African-American southern boy in the clutches of our local baptist church. To a mother and father who were forced to drop out their freshman year of college, the world had all but given me a stigma. “You are something special” my grandmother would say to calm to frustration in my mind. Telling me that there was something different about me at that time I did not know whether to take it as a compliment or a slight but with time I realized that she was right. The things that motivate me are my compassion for others, hope for the future and the will to make things different.
What I know now is in sharp contrast to what I would have said a couple years ago if someone by chance had asked me “what motivated me, to excel both academically and professionally”. I would have attempted to answer their question, of course out of courtesy, but for the most part, I would have been dumbfounded. Dumbfounded, not because I had a lack of ambition but because I had not found myself. My grandmother had indeed told me that “You are something special”, but after all don’t plenty of relatives tell that to kids? At first glance this may seem quite deranged, one might ask how you could live with yourself for over seventeen years

The answer to that question is quite simple, I was ignorant of myself. It is sad and a bit out of the ordinary, nevertheless; there I was, a hormonal teenager on a verge of an existential crisis,