50 Successful Ivy League Application Essays

Reflecting on Your Upbringing
“I chose to write about my upbringing in a low-income single parent 
household. When choosing the topic to write about, I thought about what 
shaped and defined me as a person.”
—Jackie Liao, Stanford University
A Love of Languages
“When I began writing my admissions essay, the first thing I asked my-
self was: what makes me different from all of the other thousands of people 
applying to Stanford? Surely, they all had amazing grades and a full load of 
extracurricular activities, so I needed something that was unique, something 
that made me stand out in the crowd.
“From a very young age, while still living in my native country of romania, 
I had developed an exceptional passion for the Spanish language. I thought 
it would be pretty rare to find another applicant who had grown up half-way 
around the world in Eastern Europe speaking one language, fallen in love with 
another language from watching Tv at age four, and immigrated to the U.S. 
where yet another language was spoken, in a matter of less than nine years. 
So I decided to write my essay on my love for Spanish and the different hard-
ships that I had to endure in order to make sure that Spanish would always 
be in my life.”
—Oana Emilia Butnareanu, Stanford University