My Dreadfully Depressing College Application Essay
It was about a dog but not feel-good in any way
I don’t know what I was thinking when writing my first college essay but this is a topic I would never have picked in hindsight.
Sure, it all happened decades ago but I still cringe when I think about it.
I was a happy 17-year-old excited about the chance to go to college in America — a dream for a middle-class Indian kid.
As college applications go, there were the requisite SAT scores, GPA, and extracurricular activities that every student had to provide to qualify for a chance to win a spot in a reputable college or university in the US.
My scores were decent and I was a pretty good student. I was never the best or brightest but I held my own in our small high school class.
I thought for sure that I would nail the college application essay. Still, it was difficult to come up with topics.
I had no clue about what to write. I was a high school student and the internet was still in its nascent stages. We did not have ready access to Google or smartphones which could have given me insight on the best topics to write.
Instead, I relied on figuring it out myself and thought that the college admissions…
