College Admissions Essay: The Person Who Changed My Life

For a long time, I wasn’t a happy person. Now of course, I wasn’t always depressing to be around, but even in the good times there was a sense that I didn’t belong, that I wasn’t good enough, that I would never truly fit in with the people around me. While you can sometimes convince yourself that you’re some kind of special exile, being the outcast takes a certain sort of psychological toll. I forgot what true, unfettered joy felt like. Then I went to Duke TIP. For three weeks, I took a college level course, and I met people like me, people that understood the stigma that comes with being considered the smartest person in the room. I now count some of those people as my closest friends, and I would chop off a limb to go be in that atmosphere of

So it’s not a stretch to say that doing athletics all through middle school to stay somewhat high on the social ladder was a bit of a strange choice. I never really enjoyed playing sports, but my friend group did, and playing with them seemed like an easy way to get people to like me. I’ve realized that this approach doesn’t apply anymore. While I’ve gotten a lot of valuable things from athletics, such as knowing how to be (somewhat) physically fit, I don’t love it enough to be able to commit my high school experience to it. Trying to fit into a role in order to be a certain type of person never really works out in the end. You’ll get some enjoyment from it, but you’ll never feel fulfilled. Being true to the person you are gets you places. It might be counterintuitive at first, but there are always people willing to accept you, and these are the people you’ll want to spend time with. By taking the classes I want to take instead of taking the ones I feel obligated to take, I’ll make better memories, and at the end, those are all I’ve got. I would prefer that they be good