SAT & College Essay Writing

Albert Chou

For much of my life, I was the proverbial frog at the bottom of a well who couldn’t even begin to imagine the ocean that lay beyond. In the vast ocean that was post-high-school life, where there was no carrot before my face nor stick behind my back, I was paralyzed by the freedom I suddenly had. I spent my freshman year of college in limbo, still burned out from high school and completely unmotivated to learn more.

Only after several months of decadence and denial did I gradually accept that my path to happiness and fulfillment could not be found on a map; the course needed to be charted, and I was both captain and cartographer. A boy awakened from dreams, I summoned the courage to quit the bioengineering program I had invested so much into, and re-enrolled in those literature and economics classes that really inspired me to think about how people make decisions. Beyond school, I took up more tutoring jobs during the week and avoided picking Friday classes to make long weekend travels possible.

And the more time I spent between cities and between books, the more susceptible I grew to those exact, exquisite moments of importance and poignancy, experiences that might appropriately be described as “epiphanies.” Slowly I developed a suspicion that became a belief that became a blind conviction: any human decision, condition, and emotion is wholly possible. The highs and lows and rights and wrongs, the existence of every decision, including all of yours and mine, are necessary for the human experience to be complete. With this newfound confidence in my newfound path, I felt surely I was en route to happiness.

I began to love the way I saw the world, and yet I wanted to see it even better. The more time I spent deepening my introspection the more I felt liberated as the sculptor who has no gallery or shop, always whittling away at some endless piece of wood for nothing but his own enjoyment, not looking to arrive at any finished form but simply enjoying the human experience with all its imperfections as best I can.

In the many years since graduating from high school I have died and been reborn several times, but the one constant has always been my work as a teacher. The first time I taught SAT to a handful of students was right on the heels of my early admission to Penn when I just wanted some pocket money to pay for dates with my first girlfriend. When I finished my English and economics degrees, the SAT had just undergone a major revamp, and I could now see more clearly the fundamental skills needed to succeed in college.

Now I am a teacher because I think teaching can be done my way. I want to remove the rigidity, loftiness, and distance I always associated with teachers as I grew up. The mental health of students is first and foremost, which means pushing students to evaluate themselves so they can build upon a foundation that isn’t compromised by the academic suffering we’re all too familiar with. Our learning together should stimulate as much reflection as imagination because by calibrating our internal compasses we can better navigate the always uncertain and often turbulent waters ahead to find where our hearts had already landed, patiently awaiting our reunion.