Common App Essay About Polar Bears Eleanor Smeallie

I stood there, nose squished against the thick glass wall unmoved by my eager hands. After a “quick” hour and a half drive to the Baltimore Zoo, a secret trip my dad and I made more often than I would like to admit, I had finally reached the esteemed polar bear exhibit. What started as a primitive second grade research project on “an animal that lives in the cold,” had now turned into a lifelong admiration and curiosity for these white, northern bears. Every birthday now starts off the same way, with a new stuffed animal polar bear added to my “diverse” collection which currently takes up one-third of my room.

My seventh grade birthday present, however, was something new, unusual, and bit unconventional for the time. My father bought me a packet of audio tapes on the lives, history, and Arctic geography of polar bears. From then on, every morning during the car ride to school we shamelessly tuned into the deeply narrated tapes as my brain filled to the brim with facts about these fascinating tundra animals. Polar bears became our point of connection. I began to secretly wish for a tad more traffic to prolong our car rides together. The daily race to greet my dad as he came through the door after work always held promise of at...