Prompt:
We want to learn more about the context in which you have grown up, formed your aspirations, and accomplished your successes.
Please describe how the most influential factors and challenges in your life have shaped you into the person you are today.
I may as well have been locked inside a padded cell. The blank white walls, popcorn ceiling, and suspicious stains from its long history of residents became daunting after a while. The foundations of that tiny apartment were a void of nothing, you could stare for hours and find no sense of aesthetics.
Our living quarters lay at the far edge of Brooklyn, shared with my cousin's family. A group of ten people cramped into an NYC apartment was not a pretty sight to the general eye (it might've even resembled tenements straight from the Gilded Age), but to me, it was a blank canvas that awaited my creative tastes. But alas, circumstance was not the friend of my impatient self-expression. Through coming-of-age movies, I witnessed what you'd imagine to be a child's room, covered in posters, beads, feathers, and other furnishings: vibrant and unique. I wanted nothing more than to transform our apartment into a similar explosion of color and personality. The problem was that I did not have the privilege of my own room or personal space. Our apartment was a community, all utilities were shared, and no bed belonged to any one person. Although my parents kept it hidden using excuses like "you'll damage the walls", I knew they did not have the financial stability to afford aesthetic desires, only necessities, and they also weren't particularly interested in Harry Potter posters staring at them through the night. This may seem trivial, but to me, it was a dramatic robbery of my First Amendment right- the freedom of expression.
Unable to adorn my physical space, I yearned to see beyond the bland walls of my room. I turned to digital platforms. I looked past the boundaries of those white walls and discovered a new world; one tucked inside our "computer room". I became fascinated with Flash games. Forget about being able to hang up the decor- now I could do so much more. I designed beautiful houses, did nail art, and worked at Papa's Pizzeria alongside his many other establishments. I found solace in this new digital world, where I could test the limits of my creativity without the burdens of reality. But soon enough my self-expression became unsatisfied once more. Simply playing these games wasn't enough, my mind began to wonder to how these games worked. At school, I was introduced to Scratch MIT- a basic programming language for children- and the process of telling a program precisely what to do. Immediately I was entranced, creating a plethora of commands for the simple set-up to follow. Coding was boundless and held a world of infinite possibilities.
Before I could truly begin to explore this new branch of the digital world, reality struck again. That summer I had begged my mom to sign me up for a six-week summer camp in Upstate New York which would have a particular focus on introducing kids to coding. She refused, and the thought of those blank walls struck me again. We couldn't afford it. I would not get the chance to decorate my room and I would not get the chance to participate in the paid camps and extracurriculars many of my peers would.
Once more I was locked inside the padded cell.
Except this time the walls felt more lucid. I was not deprived of opportunities when I could create them myself. I turned back to that world tucked inside a corner of the apartment, and I scoured the internet for new ways to expand my creative horizons. I used Harvard's CS50 and Coursera to teach myself the ropes of Python, Javascript, and HTML/CSS. With that knowledge, I returned to the gaming world I had become acquainted with. I created simple tic tac toe and pong games and introduced them to my family.
In high school, I met a community of others interested in programming by joining the Computer Science Club.
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This is about 600/800 words so I still have space for another paragraph or two, how can I improve/fix this essay?
At first it felt like a good topic but now it feels like a whiny overdone "i grew up poor" essay...
Holt Educational Consultant - / 14,864 
4788 You are right about the "I am poor" theme of the paper. That does not fly with the reviewers anymore because it seems to be a common theme among a certain bracket of student applicants. The overall essay is actually too wordy to the point of becoming a fictional presentation rather than a straightforward written interview. So less drama, more facts. I am not sure what you are using the padded celle analogy in this presentation because you are not being driven crazy by the situation. You always learned how to deal with it. So maybe lose the exaggerated analogy instead? The last paragraph feels like a transition paragraph. So add something about who you are today after having overcome a difficult past. You already established the character building section, now it is time to show how that character has helped better prepare you for college life.
