50 Successful Ivy League Application Essays

International Travel
“Penn had an option asking to describe a time when you had a new experi-
ence. I couldn’t deal with the open-endedness so I decided to choose some-
thing. I wrote about going to India my sophomore year and meeting my great 
uncle. His children were wealthy but he still chose to live on a farm. I wrote 
about being able to understand it. It was the first time I had visited the coun-
try in 10 years. India had changed a lot over those 10 years from the early ‘90s 
to early 2000s. In Bangalore the IT industry blossomed and bloomed, and it 
became overpopulated.”
—Ravi Patna, University of Pennsylvania