SUNY Stony Brook Undergraduate College Application Essays

Ping! The elevator doors opened on Floor Nine, and I was in another world. Leaving the chaos of panicking patients and bustling doctors in the floors below, I found myself walking down a deserted hallway.

This was my first day volunteering at the...

Thank goodness apartments don’t have emotions. If my one bedroom apartment did, I can guarantee that its paint would be chipping off as rapidly as the layers of my sanity. Every morning, I'd wake up to the sound of my alarm clock simultaneously...

“Would you like fries with that?” Very few, if any, aspire to say that phrase at any age, but I’ve been lucky enough to have been saying it since I turned fourteen. Almost every teenager loathes getting a first job, but for me working at McDonald’...

Wherever the art of medicine is loved, there is also a love of humanity.

--Hippocrates

I am fortunate to have grown up in a medical family: my grandfather and his brothers are traditional Chinese medical doctors. In fact, since my parents took...

Sitting in the auditorium of Cherry Creek High School, I felt a sudden apprehension in the pit of my stomach. After a long and tumultuous journey, I was here at last. I, along with two of my friends and teammates, had spent the better part of the...

I work in one of the most loved, yet most hated industries in the world. Criticism comes from all angles in the fast food business – whether the guests' food is not prepared to their liking, their table isn’t as clean as they would like it to be,...

These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its ongoing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before...

People sit on their couches awaiting the first-ever episode...

When I first heard the lyrics of the Rolling Stones’ “Paint it Black,” it was from this little red contraption that I bought from a garage sale for ten dollars. I was hooked. That small record player eventually became the two Numark turntables and...

Bright, boiling hot days spent in the backyard. Heavenly, refreshing water against sun-kissed skin. All the time in the world to enjoy a lovely summer. When schools release students for the three-month long break, the first plans of the warm...

“Do you want a shaadi ka laddoo?” My aunt would offer me with a smirk, nearly every day I went to her house after her daughter got married. It wasn’t a surprise that she had a bountiful supply of sweets, as everyone who was invited to the wedding...

“Oh, wow! You look like your skin's gotten lighter!” were the first words out of all my relatives’ mouths when I visited Bangladesh. Everyone expected me to say “thank you” as if it were a compliment. I’ve always known that within the South Asian...

Having been surrounded by numerous physicians and surgeons in my family, I have been enamored by the prospect of becoming a doctor since childhood. My father, seeing this, allowed me to spend a couple of my weekends shadowing him at his clinic in...

Salmon Point beach and campground in Bridgton, Maine on that early summer morning was idyllic, with maroon picnic tables staggered along the lake’s edge and sand bridging the distance. A simplistic playground with a swing set and some monkey bars...

It’s half past one in the morning, and I've progressed in an indistinctive direction. My cold fingers guide the soft vine charcoal across the matte, welcoming surface of smooth paper. My lines are gestural, strokes varied and abstract. Your first...

At the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, Japanese runner Shizo Kanakuri dropped out midway through the marathon after feeling like he could no longer keep running. He simply took a boat home without telling anyone, and the race officials assumed he had...

As I raised my arm to smash the birdie, I let out a whoop of excitement at finally being able to play my favorite sport with friends again. When I found out about my school’s badminton club, I signed up right away, but realized that I wouldn’t be...

Saturdays were the days I followed my mom to work. Her boss would pick us up from our home in Brooklyn to the store that was miles away in Long Island. The hour-long ride felt like a trip across the country; forests and wheat fields greeted us as...

The ice breaks beneath my feet: merciless and quiet. The sunlight that had once been a hub of warmth did nothing to ease the pain the ice brought. It all happened so quickly that I wondered whether anyone saw it occur. In the course of falling...

For years, the first thing I would say to my mom everyday is, “Mom, did you wake up yet?”The answer I would receive across the phone has always been a yes. Some days, I called her too early and she would respond with a muffled yes, clearly half...

Tossed into the wild, alone I was to fend for myself against the ravenous beasts. A rustling, no the clanking of Jenga bricks upon the floor, startled me. His imposing 4-foot figure stood before me as a sudden shadow flickered before my eyes. A...

As I sit in psychology class and learn about Social Identity Theory, I reflect on my cultural identity. I moved from California to Karnataka when I was six. My Abba decided we had to go back to our home, hence my parents started filling suitcases...