Undergraduate / "Look, it takes videos!" Common App Essay, How YouTube Changed My Life [3]

Stumbled upon this site while looking for essay critiques. My essay is still very, very rough; I just pumped it out last night and am looking to get opinions on it. This is for the "this application would be incomplete without this" prompt. Thanks so much!

"Look, it takes videos!" a much younger version of myself once said, cradling my first digital camera with a delicate, yet anxious grasp. I bounced through the hallways like an over-wound jack-in-the-box, shoving the lens into the faces of my family members, shouting, "Say something! Say hi!"

Ever since then, I discovered I had a passion for creating. Not necessarily filmmaking or photography, but something much broader, something that gave me such a sense of incomparable accomplishment and reward: using my resources to make something both wonderful and worthwhile. As I grew a bit older, my disjointed but well-meaning excitement became concentrated in the form of puppet shows, wild adventures, and self-written songs captured through video.

Eventually, I stumbled upon the video sharing website YouTube, known seemingly exclusively for the appearance of funny cats, popular music, and viral recordings of people making fools of themselves. However, if one looks beyond this outer layer of the site, they'll find a community within, a community of people who I discovered, to my delight, share my same passion: the passion to create.

At the age of fourteen, I began posting videos to the site under the alias "savanamazing," a name that sounds like it should belong to some egotistical superhero; despite this, I found it fitting, and the title has stuck. My specialty was what the YouTube community refers to as "vlogging," a combination of the words "video" and "blogging," which consists of simply turning the camera on and talking to it. Acting as a sort of obscure comedian, I would talk about my day or just my life in general, with dashes of my own brand of humor thrown in. Upon uploading my first video, I wasn't expecting much in terms of views or conversation. However, to my surprise, people actually watched. I received comments from viewers responding to topics I presented, sharing their lives with me just as I had shared my life with them, being interested in my opinions and the things I had to say.

At first, a hundred people watched. At the time, that number was monumental, incomprehensible, but shortly after, a thousand people watched, then five thousand, then ten thousand. Now, three years later, I have a total of seventeen thousand people subscribed to my YouTube channel, with over one million overall views of my videos.

YouTube has shaped my personality through my most developmental years. I had very low self-confidence when I began to make videos, but interacting with people who thought similarly to me changed that completely. Because of YouTube, I've been allowed to travel all over the world and be able to meet people who are interested in what I create. I've gone to Los Angeles, Orlando, and London to attend various conventions for people who watch and make content; I've even spoken on panels at these conventions to share my experiences with other aspiring creators. I've been told, most notably by individuals older than me, that they look up to me as a role model; nothing has ever humbled me more.

My involvement with YouTube has also instilled a sense of entrepreneurship within me. I receive ad revenue through making videos (which is always a nice thing to tell people that believe this is some "ridiculous hobby" of mine), so from a young age, I was forced to understand how earning money really worked. Essentially, I've been marketing myself as a public figure since I was fourteen, which gave me excellent experience in fields such as advertising and social media.

More than anything, though, I believe YouTube has nurtured my creativity like nothing else has, and has proven to me that passion, when focused correctly, will bring success; I strive to live my life by this notion. I seek out mediums that motivate me, I surround myself with people who inspire me, and everything I do, I do with passion.