Bard College Undergraduate College Application Essays

Almost every weekday morning, I awoke from a consuming sleep and lethargically stumbled into the bathroom. After managing to grip my toothbrush and pour my revoltingly minty toothpaste onto the painfully sharp bristles, I cleared my mouth of...

“Lower your lids!”

Gilad, my drama instructor, paced back and forth on the stage, arms folded over his belly, Israeli impatience rising in his voice. His eyes narrowed, scanned me through bushy slits, and he barked new commands.

“Let your smile...

It was an ordinary game of floor hockey. My palms were soaked, my skin unbearably itchy. The droplets of sweat were rolling down my back. But I couldn’t pay any attention to that. The offensive player was approaching me with the puck, trying to...

One of the most important books in the world is The Records of the Grand Historian. Written by Sima Qian in the first century B.C., it elucidates more than two thousand years’ worth of Chinese history. The story behind Qian’s masterpiece is...

Behind the camera’s shutter, I am never calm or collected. I am, more often than not, trying to figure out my next shot, my eyes darting from my subject to the light source to a detail of the scene. However, I am perfectly content.

When taking...

There I sat on the piano bench, leather sticky where shorts ended and legs began, and all I could think was, "No, please don't make me learn that." The piece was Burgmüller's Ballade, the time somewhere around my twelfth birthday. The song was...

Chabela sits across from me with a nearly finished cigarette pursed between her wrinkled lips. As she watches me, I pour myself a cup of coffee and butter the one slice of white sandwich bread I’m allowed to consume each morning. My head is foggy...

This is the balcony that extends into infinite dimensions. Inside: paintings and the smell of dusk. Lined against the tiled walls are canvases both void and filled. A soft light overhead. There is something extremely calming about occupying this...

“It’s okay! Just breathe!” I said to myself in an attempt to suppress my unfaltering anxiety. I restlessly skimmed the pictures in a Clifford the Big Red Dog book, typical of me during independent reading. All the while I kept my head down,...

In checkers, players must strategize and plan in order to make their moves and win the game. This is what my dad taught me when we played, almost every day after school. After I learned the basics, it was up to me to figure out how to beat him. He...

When I was seven I had my first crush. I remember the numerous sleepovers where I would be asked to divulge such a secret, with the stereotypical “so who do you like Dana?” I’d have no problem responding “I like Jessy,” which was always met with...

Summer begins with skin made of ants. The months between school years were designed for sitting on the border of the sandpit at the Jewish Community Center with ants crawling over my hands.

“Sugar ants don’t bite people,” my friend assures me...

"You know Yume, you're the only black girl that I like, the rest are so ratchet," he let out.

What... did he just say?

I let the words sink... because, well, I genuinely liked him. He'd helped me study for almost every computer science test and...

Few among us can report an encounter with Bigfoot, or really with any cryptid of equal reputation, but I came pretty close. It was a sweltering day in Atlanta, temperature somewhere in the high eighties. The iced tea in my stomach was nearing...

It’s clear why the Hudson Valley School of Art originated in the area surrounding Bard. Walking amidst the golden-crowned oaks, beneath swirling flocks of birds, one is instantly compelled to create something beautiful, to stop and ponder the...

When I was younger, I treated my bilingualism like a spy gadget. I wore my second language comfortably hidden with a hint of pride. My Spanish proved to be a useful tool for gleaning insight into different cultures. My ears caught a snatch of a...