This is a compilation of San Dieguito Academy students’ college application essays. The process of writing these essays can painful. We find ourselves racked by doubt, distracted by thoughts such as:
What have I done with my life?
Who even am I?
This anecdote… too cheesy?
Is it cliché to use a tree metaphor?
In the end, though, these little pieces become a testament of sorts—like a slightly pompous journal entry for each student in January, 2013. To the future college applicants of San Dieguito Academy, here is proof that it can be done.

Daniel Spiegel
Common App Topic of Choice
Sent to Cornell, Harvard, and University of Chicago

I have always loved fantastical things. In early childhood, my imagination was invariably filled with knights and wizards, journeying to faraway places to make grand discoveries or battle black-hearted fiends. When I composed music, it was never without an accompanying tale of medieval times or imagined worlds. I loved and still love Star Wars, legends of King Arthur, and Tolkien’s novels. As I grew older my fascination with fantasy fused with a talent for math and science, and the result was a deep passion for quantum physics.
In sophomore year, I had my first formal introduction to quantum mechanics in AP Chemistry. We were taught atomic and molecular orbital theory, and our minds were blown with concepts of parallel worlds and quantum tunneling through additional dimensions. I was in awe at the material we were learning. It stretched the imagination; the topics lay so far from perception but so close to reality. My wildest fantasies were put to shame by an even stranger reality. But I was unsatisfied. AP Chemistry taught us so much of how things worked at the atomic and subatomic level, but failed to explain why they worked that way, both conceptually and mathematically.
Eager to satisfy my curiosity, I took a quantum mechanics course with the Education Program for Gifted Youth (EPGY) at Stanford University over the summer of 2012. The course was everything I could have asked for and more. We built our knowledge from the ground up, mathematically and logically (as best we could, for many things in quantum mechanics are not all too logical). We saw how Maxwell’s wave equation for light formed the building block of Schrödinger’s wave equation for a particle, and how so much more was built from there. We worked stimulating problems such as solving for the energy of a quantum mechanical harmonic oscillator, gently guided by our mentors, but fueled by our own burning curiosity.
Aside from a spotless pedagogic structure, EPGY succeeded in building upon the fantastical qualities of the subject. Studying light was like studying a dream; the photon walked a line between real and abstract, leaving only wisps of evidence hinting at its existence. As logic began to fail, quantum mechanics became the junction of western scientific reasoning and eastern mysticism, left brain and right brain, concrete and intangible. Confronting the ineffable, interpreting and deciphering material that felt almost spiritual, I was as happy as I’d ever been.
Studying quantum physics has been the highlight of my academic career. It demands that I exercise my scientific mind with the highest degree of creativity and imagination, and I love the challenge. I am excited for college because I believe EPGY was a glimpse of things to come. I believe that such an excellent education as I encountered that summer awaits me at my future university. I cannot wait to deepen my knowledge in quantum mechanics and other physical sciences, pursuing my fantasies, studying a dream.

Amber Gallant
Stanford
Stanford students possess an intellectual vitality. Reflect on an idea or experience that has been important to your intellectual development.

The heart is an organ of fire. I have leafed through the pages of this book more times than I can number, searching for those ink-and-paper gemstones nestled inside, almost believing them the author’s own love letter to me.
I remember distinctly picking up The English Patient on a sunlit day, the kind that reaches into your mind and warms even your memories. The burned-out silhouette of a man on the cover caught my eye. The white-haired biddy running Temple Soleil’s book sale sold it to me for 50 cents.
A single solitary sheet of paper costs, in monetary terms, $0.06. Less than a tenth of a cent. Multiply this by 302 pages stitched together in a tome, and you have a solid 18 cents, still less than the amount I bought it for. But neither of these figures matter when you consider the wealth of the knowledge inside.
What strikes you first? Possibly the tone, the use of the present tense to describe 1945, a year dead and gone, the delicate interplay of long fluidly descriptive sentences interspersed with the terse statements of fact, “Yes” and “No.” The omission of subject at the writer’s fancy. Place names, El Alamein, Gilf Kebir, a foreign tongue describing a larger world in which once things were lost in order to be found.
The book bound me to it. Forcing me to taste the style of the writing on the tip of my tongue, although I feared I might break it open if I probed too deeply. Inviting me to feel Hana’s despair and her healing, Kip’s search for identity as a son of Asia and a soldier of Europe. Teaching me to view those lost desert sands in my head as something real and alive. Black and white photos, as if seen for the first time in color.
The heart is an organ of fire. The heart is a battleground of whim and logic, the former often winning the battle. I’m still not sure what leads me to bury myself in the innumerable wisdoms sprouting out of the mouths of a tired nurse or a severely burned and broken man. Either, or a mixture of both. Words have power; books often make the most excellent teachers.

Ross Cooper
Stanford
What matters to you, and why?

When I was younger, I went through phases. At the age of two, I was completely enamored with dinosaurs. I knew each kind inside and out and could tell you more than you would ever want to know about the nutritional habits of the brontosaurus, triceratops, and velociraptor. But before my parents even had the chance to mention on the annual family Christmas card that their toddler was a rising star in the field of paleontology, I was on to the next thing.
Thomas the Tank Engine and his buddies soon rolled into our living room. Just like with dinosaurs, I knew every detail about every train. And similarly, as quickly as dinosaurs became extinct from my memory, Thomas and his friends sounded their horns for departure and were replaced by Pokemon action figures, state quarters, and baseball cards.
As I’ve gotten older, my interests have become more focused towards music and learning languages, and though I tend to jump between subjects less than I did as a child, I’m still driven to completely immerse myself in my interests.
But as I prepare to explore the different subjects, extracurriculars, and career paths that the next four years will bring, it’s also of the utmost importance to me to retain the inquisitive spirit I had sitting around the train table. In today’s world where the expectation is that college students select a major, finish their degree, and find employment related to what they studied, reserving the right to change between interests is often seen as fickle. I see it as desire to remain able to take full advantage of college’s opportunities to obtain a diverse, continuous learning experience instead of being locked into any one area. This mindset reminds me that as long as I’m fully invested in whatever I decide to pursue, a few alterations along the way are not only acceptable, but can add entirely new dimensions to an educational experience.

Emily Nathan
Common App and UC’s
Tell us about a personal quality, talent, accomplishment, contribution or experience that is important to you. What about this quality or accomplishment makes you proud, and how does it relate to the person you are?

We are taught that when doing anything in a lab, we must always write in pen. We are taught that we must cross out irrelevant data and any mistakes with a single line, so that in review all may see the things written that do not fall into the expected patterns. This is essentially to prevent fraud. Anything falsified or fabricated after analysis can be refuted by the original, inked data.
I’ve taken this principle and applied it beyond the realm of science. I now do my math calculations in pen. In this way, I will be able to look back on my work and see the integration that could have been replaced by geometry, or the dropped negative’s impact on the orientation of my graphs; if I do not erase, I can understand more thoroughly my thought process at the time and pinpoint the issues. In this way, I learn in the most organic manner possible-trial and error.
I’ve applied this technique even further. Many people spend their lives erasing and rewriting events in their life until the structural integrity has wrinkled and torn and only the faint, graphite marks of the original story shine through. When they reflect on their own lives, each story has a new draft, and the old is lost in a mess of eraser shavings. When someone asks me to reflect upon my life, to reflect upon anything, I am honest. Whether the inquirer is a teacher, a friend, or myself, I do not address the prompt meekly. I speak with conviction. I speak in pen. I speak in pen because one can scribble over a mistake in their life until there is an amorphous black mark on the page, but the contextual clues still hint to what is behind. I speak in pen because I face the fear of failure with a smirk and a raised eyebrow. I speak in pen because I am honest with myself, and will not compromise a crisp page full of proud errors for a crumbled page of textbook supplied answers found in the appendix, because I’d rather be assured that I am capable original thought.
So I write in pen. I write in pen so I can count the number of times I spelled intelligent with an “a”; so I cannot forget the time I pointed to the boy who sat next to me in second grade and said “he did it”; so I can be uniquely wrong when all others are blindly correct. I write in pen so I cannot falsify my data, and I cannot falsify myself.

Compiled by Molly Kovacs
If you would like to contribute, email your essay to sdamustang@gmail.com