College Collage
BHSEC Class of ’25
The Class of 2025 offers one last parting gift: a selection of sentences from various personal statements and supplements. Enjoy!
I’ve never been normal about anything.
I take Bananagrams very seriously, approaching it with the same fervor that Olympic athletes must feel when the starting gun fires.
I’ve always loved to play the long game.
I’m in my room one day, doing an assignment for my English class, not a care in the world.
Writing became a way for me to calm down, a therapy.
The New Yorker in me lost sleep over a lyric change in the recent revival of “Company,” switching the Seagrams building to the Chrysler (why? WHY?).
The kindest people are those who smile even when their hearts are dripping blood.
My life has been intertwined with hers for as long as I can remember.
She has shown me the true meaning of being strong and resilient.
People can only meet you as deeply as they have met themselves.
Everyone is entitled to feel some sort of stability within their own self, and that’s what I plan on providing.
Me and my father have a garden on our balcony that has been growing and growing these past few years.
Once I addressed the partners and started giving my speech, I finally thought “I belong here.”
My experiences in Ghana taught me that countries, like rocks, are shaped by both invisible and visible forces, and that if we truly want to build connections across nations, we must dig deeper, to look beyond the surface.
Beneath my bare, sooty feet the gravel made me recall the morning’s dying embers on their ashen dais.
For a long time, I couldn’t imagine myself anywhere else.
A few of my perfect bites include: a tuna-salad sandwich with crisp lettuce, ripe tomato, and Vlasic pickles on sourdough; a bacon, egg, and cheese with a hashbrown and avocado from the deli across the street from my school; and a grilled cheese on white bread with American cheese (can you tell I like sandwiches?) best enjoyed at my grandma’s house during the summer.
I fell in love with them early in my rebellious journey to be different.
Finding joy and pride in the little things to celebrate myself, I fell in love with my independence.
A name carries the history of education and the future beyond learning. People say names are just names, but to me, my name changed everything.
I was so fixated on the compliments I received, that I didn’t see that the name only explained my exterior.
The ebony and pearl marble tiles were barren, with little to no troops remaining. Both armies opposed each other, neither willing to concede defeat. Among all the carnage, a single pawn stood strong, refusing to lose composure.
These non-verbal signifiers were precious ammunition, for any misfire would spell the permanent sealing of the small crack I had been etching into the wall blocking me from self-assured adulthood.
By an alternate metric that’s roughly 6.37 times the standard length of the King James Bible.
The stench of chlorine never seemed to fade, and neither did the cold.
I’ll always carry this understanding forward: It’s not the circumstances that define us, but how we respond to them, and I am ready to respond in a meaningful way.
Escapism is a disease and I caught it when I was six....
It was not giving up on the journey before it started, letting that spark run as far as it could until it reached something greater or different.
The dull pain started near my knee down to my shin.
Kayaking became the best day of my whole study abroad trip as it finally hit me: I’ve known since the wonders of Grey’s Anatomy inspired me to start keeping up to medical advancements that I wanted to pursue biomedical engineering, but out on the marshy shore of the river I realized that my passion for biomedical research could be so much more if I connected it to ecology.
Is this some biochemistry right of passage, I wondered?
For me, it was making a friend that was a bit too obsessed with the subway trains. He mouthed every sound, movement, and automated closing of the doors.
Two women gripped her hands, tethering her to the earth, while her mother-in-law, holding a knife…
It was an unfamiliar solitude, yet somehow freeing.
As I was the youngest sibling with the least power and authority at the dinner table, I had to find a way to survive.
In these moments, I felt like I no longer had a support system but I was wrong.
With everything going on in today’s world, we need each other more than ever.
I often became frustrated when my repeated explanations were met with aggression and persistence— persistence in a disillusioned reality.
I’ve always felt that being American means that despite your race and culture if you worked hard and had a good heart you can proudly call yourself an American. Although many people are not originally from here, I’d like to believe we all align ourselves with the dream that we can achieve and goals.
Be open to failing.
Live life to the fullest.